The atomic bomb, 68 years after Hiroshima

By João Pinheiro + sources

Exactly 68 years ago that the atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, causing 140,000 deaths. Three days from now, on Friday, will be 68 years that Nagasaki, another Japanese city, was hit by another bomb.

In 1939, more precisely on August 2, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to then U.S. president, Frankin Delano Roosevelt, about the possibility of creating a pump configured from a chain reaction in a large mass of uranium (atomic bomb).

Einstein said in his letter that “the last four months has become probable — through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America — that it is possible to trigger, a large mass of uranium, a nuclear reaction in chain, which would generate vast amounts of power and large portions of new elements with properties similar to those of radium. “

Also said that this reaction would allow the construction of bombs, while “a single specimen of this type, carried by a ship or detonated in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with a large area around him.”

Asked Einstein to Roosevelt that the nuclear program was initiated as soon as possible. The president, in turn, brought together scientists, engineers, military and government officials together to create the Manhattan Project, whose ultimate goal was to produce an atomic bomb.

This project cost the public purse more than $ 2 billion for the construction of 37 special laboratories for research in 19 states and Canada. It is curious to note that, despite the amount of resources and the number of people involved in the project, the secret was so well kept that virtually no one outside a small coterie knew what was happening.

Years later, Einstein regretted the part he played in the development of this destructive weapon: “I made ​​the biggest mistake of my life, when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be built.”