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President gives the go ahead to the Manhattan Engineering District to work on creating an atomic bomb.
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Link Italian scientist Enrico Fermi discovered neutron induced radioactivity and successfully tested 22 elements. He later won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938 for his continued work.
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Link Scientist Albert Einstein wrote a letter explaining the possibility of construction of nuclear weapons to President Franklin Delano Roosevent.
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Link Lyman Briggs of the National Bureau of Standards, under recommendation by President Roosevelt, was named head of the new Advisory Comittee on Uranium. He held a meeting to address what was presented in Einstein's letter, at which top physicists were present. They reported to Roosevelt in November that uranium "would provide a possible source of bombs with a destructiveness vastly greater than anything now known."
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Link President Roosevelt approves the atomic program under the army's jurisdiction and the control of a Top Policy Group (which he was in and did not attend any meetings).
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Physicists Hans Bethe, John Van Vleck, Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, Robert Serber, Stan Frankel, Eldred C. Nelson, Felix Bloch, Emilio Segrè, John Manley, and Edwin McMillan said that after meetings for a month at University of Chicago and University of California Berkeley that a uranium-235 bomb was possible.
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Link Fermi succeeded in creating and controlling a fission chain reaction in the uranium- 238 reactor pile at the University of Chicago.
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Link The first atomic bomb was tested at Trinity Site in Alamorgordo, NM. The result was more than any scientist had expected, marking the entry into the nuclear age.
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Link The United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in Japan just a month after the bomb was tested.
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Link 3 days after bombing Hiroshima, the US bombed another city in Japan called Nagasaki. The total death count between the two cities was around 200,000 by the end of 1945.
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The formation of the USAEC was the end of the Manhattan Project, when the project was taken over by the Commision. before the USAEC the Manhattan Project maintained control over atomic weapons research and production in America.
