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= //__NUCLEAR FISSION__// = = =

__Nuclear Fission__ - A nuclear reaction in which a heavy nucleus splits into two lighter nuclei with a neutron. " The neutron causing the explosion"
==== The discovery of nuclear fission is credited to an italian physicist Enrico Fermi. He was said to discover it in the 1930's. After Fermi's doscovery german scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman bonded uranium with neutrons and produced a radioactive isotope. ====

__First Bomb to kill__
==== The first nuclear bomb that was dropped and meant to kill was the bomb that the United States dropped over Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945. The first bomb was code named, "little boy". Three days later they dropped another over Nagasaki. This bomb was code named, "fat man". The estimated deaths were about 100,000 people. ====

Nagasaki explosion^
====__ The Manhattan Project- __ With the discovery of nuclear fission and nuclear fusion scientists began to experiment. The United States began developing a nuclear bomb that they code named, " The Manhattan Project". The "project" began with a letter to president Franklin Deleanor Roosevelt. "The Einstein Letter". proposed by Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard. They informed Roosevelt about nuclear weapons, and ten days later the first meeting of the Advisory Committee of Uranium was held in Washington D.C. The Manhattan project actually began on September 17, 1942. Colonel Leslie Richard Groves was the man in charge of the mission. Throughout the Manhattan Project two nuclear bombs were developed, as named in the paragraph above " little boy", and "fat man" and as you know both of these bombs were dropped on the Japanese. The project costed the U.S. nearly 2 billion dollars after the bombings. Specifically a problem they ran into was determining the men the wanted to head the project. It was among common belief that the men should consists of at least a Nobel Prize, considering this was such a large project. In cooperation with the United Kingdom, Ernest Lawrence, Harold Urey, Arthur Compton and Robert Oppenheimer teamed together to begin the project. One important breakthrough was the Electromagnetic isotope separation, developed by Lawrence at the University of California Radiation Laboratory. This process involves a magnetic field which deflects charged particles according to their mass. While the process proved to be a bit difficult due to construction and the maintenance it also proved effective. Ultimately, the process helped enrich the content of uranium from 13% to 15%. ====

[] **(Video about the manhatttan project)**

[] **(here is a link to a nuclear explosion)**

An Atomic Bomb (fission) creates a chain reaction. It creates enough fission fuel to trigger a chain reaction
=== A free neutron collides with an uranium nucleus, releasing energy and more neutrons. As this process continues,in the blink of an eye you have the kind of fission weapon that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ===



__Nuclear Bomb Delivery __
===Due to advancements in technology, today bombs can be delivered in a number of ways. Today, there are Ballistic missiles which travel over the horizon, exit Earth's atmosphere and re enter it as it approaches its target. These missiles can travel up to hundreds, or thousands of kilometers. There is also a Cruise Missile, which much like an airplane or jet, is powered by an engine and flies at a low altitude with automated guidance. These missiles are usually equipped with GPS navigation systems yet their shortcoming is the distance of travel. Historically, the two methods used to drop the only nuclear bombs to date, have been Gravity Bombs dropped by a bomber. Dropped out of planes, these bombs must be able to endure the many vibrations and changes in temperature and pressure. Tactics such as toss bombing and parachute retarded bombing were devised to give the aircraft time to escape before the explosion, so gravity bombs dropped relatively slow as gravity was the only force propelling them downward. ===

[] **(re-creation of Bomb dropped on Hiroshima)**