On this Date

On October 11, 1939, the world would be forever changed when prominent theoretical physicist Albert   Einstein, in his famous letter to then President Franklin D. Roosevelt, informed the president of the potentials of nuclear warfare and alerted him to the possibility that Nazi scientists were already in the process of developing such a nuclear that would render all previous forms of weaponry obsolete: the atomic bomb. Einstein, however, did not enthusiastically undertake the initiative to warn FDR of possible nuclear threats and recommend that the United States take the necessary precautions to develop the atomic bomb before Germany. On the contrary, throughout his life, Einstein regarded himself as an devoted pacifist. Einstein was in fact persuaded by a group of Hungarian scientists, which included eminent physicist  Leó Szilárd, along with other such German scientists and refugees as Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner--who had all attempted to contact Washington in an effort to warn of ongoing Nazi atomic bomb research--to lend his credibility to the pressing matter by writing the aforementioned letter to FDR. Roosevelt took this proposal into consideration and, during a meeting with Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee Vannevar Bush and Vice President Henry A. Wallace on October 9, 1941, the President approved of the development of the atomic bomb; the Manhattan Project was born. For the ambitious task, Roosevelt chose the Army to head the project, as opposed to the Navy, under the able leadership of  Major General Leslie Groves of the US Army Corps of Engineers. Groves in turn selected Robert J. Oppenheimer to head the project's secret weapons laboratory who was impressed by Oppenheimer's grasp of theoretical nuclear physics and by his overwhelming ambition. A remote location near Albuquerque, New Mexico was then chosen as a headquarters for the newly established project, a site which project managers would later call Los Alamos. Despite its modest beginnings in 1941, the Manhattan Project would eventually grow to employ more than 130,000 people and cost nearly US$2 billion (roughly equivalent to $25.8 billion as of 2012) by the end of World War II. Success came on July 16, 1945 with the "Trinity" testing--the first ever testing of a nuclear weapon which many hold as the beginning of the Atomic Age--in which Manhattan project managers, including Oppenheimer and Groves, decided to test their creation of mass destruction. The Trinity test proved the destructive capabilities of the atomic bomb, producing the characteristic mushroom cloud with reports of the explosion heard as far away as Texas. Immediately following the Trinity test, President Harry Truman ordered that the atomic bomb be used against Japan. On August 6, 1945, the first of the two atomic bombs that would be used in the war, Little Boy, was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan by the crew of the Enola Gay. Three days later, on August 7, 1945, the second of these atomic bombs, Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan from the Bockscar. In total, approximately 110,000 to 120,000 people were initially killed by the two blasts, although many more (the figure is still unknown) would die from radiation poisoning in the following years. Japan wisely surrendered on September 2, 1945, ending the devastating world war that had been brutally fought for six years. After the war, the discovery of the enormous power of the atom, which all began with the Manhattan Project, would usher in an entirely new and important era in human history: the Cold War. The Cold War is indisputably one of the most important historical aspects of the latter half of the 20th century, leading to countless historical and world events that developed after the end of World War II. The Cold War shaped foreign policy in profound ways; it was characterized mostly by the rivalry between the capitalistic United States and its communist Soviet foes. The rivalry between the United States and the U.S.S.R. manifested itself in several ways, primarily by the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the Space Race, and the Vietnam War. Thus, the Manhattan Project was an extremely significant development in human history and led to many important worldly affairs in later decades.