To What Extent Was Usa Alone in Developing Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Ww2 Period?
To What Extent Was Usa Alone in Developing Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Ww2 Period?
To what extent was USA alone in developing weapons of mass destruction in the WW2 period? The World War II period brought new technologies and weapons of mass destruction that created tensions between countries and competition for a nuclear arms race well into the 20th century. While many countries, notably Germany, the Soviet Union, and USA attempted to develop technology leading to weapons of mass destruction in the World War II period, the US was the only country that successfully built an atomic bomb before the end of the war. There was significant research conducted by scientists in a number of countries leading up to and throughout the war, but the Americans success at creating nuclear bombs, as well as the German and Soviet failures, were due to funding, organization, and counter-intelligence. In the period leading up to and including World War II, there were a number of nations that were working on cutting edge research in nuclear physics in an attempt to develop weapons of mass destruction. In 1934, the Admiralty, a patent organization of the British Royal Navy, granted the first patent on the idea of chain reaction based on neutron bombardment to Leo Szilard, an Austro-Hungarian physicist who worked in the US (Sublette). Later that same year, French physicists Irene and Frederic Joilot-Curie and Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, also working in the US, independently confirmed that radioactivity could be produced in elements when they are bombarded by neutrons and alpha particles (Sublette). In 1938, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, two German physicists, found the same results, and in 1939, Austrian/ British physicist Otto Robert Frisch confirmed these findings. A few short weeks later, on January 25, 1939, a team of American and European scientists, including Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr, began experimenting with nuclear fission at Columbia University (Sublette). Within a few months of the American experiments, the Germans assembled their own small team of scientists, Georg Joos, Wilhelm Hanle, and Reinhold Mannkopff, to begin research into the applicability of nuclear fusion technology to create a bomb for military purposes (Sublette). These scientists, who formed the Uranverein (Uranium Club), began work at Georg-August University of Gottingen in May 1939 (Sublette). The Soviets also had scientists, such as Yakov Frenkel, Georgii Flerov, and Lev Rusinov, who were conducting theoretical research on fission at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, but they were not organized into research teams to explore the applicability of this theory (Sublette). While the scientists working on fission/ fusion research during this period consisted of a mix of Americans and Europeans, the US had a team composed of scientists of various nationalities, including Canadian, British, French, Italian, Austro-Hungarian, and even German (who fled before the war began), the Germans had only a small group of their own people. The Soviets were not as active in research in this period.
By the time World War II began, the American team of international scientists was becoming organized into a powerful research group that eventually became known as the “Manhattan Project”. Robert Oppeneheimer, a physicist from UC Berkeley, was appointed to lead the research development of an atomic bomb. The research and production of these weapons were conducted at dozens of sites across the US, Canada and the UK, and two kinds of bombs were developed: uranium and plutonium, later named Little Boy and Fat Man. These bombs were dropped in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 to end World War II (Richard). The Americans were alone in their success of developing the first nuclear bombs, which can be attributed to a number of factors. First, the Manhattan project was a centralized research initiative conducted by an abundance of scientists from many countries who were devoted to the work. Secondly, the project was allocated large sums of money, along with unlimited manpower and resources, and unconditional government support. While the project began in 1939 with limited resources, by the time it was in full production in the early 1940s, it employed over 130,000 people and cost over $2 billion USD (approximately $25.8 billion USD today) (Richard). Finally, the US ran a parallel military operation called the “Alsos Mission”, in which American military personnel were charged with collecting intelligence relating to enemy nuclear activity. This meant that the Americans had inside information on the German nuclear research, seized their records on the front lines, and even brought German scientists who worked for the Nazis back to the US to work on the Manhattan Project after they were captured (Vincent).