Hiroshima and Nagasaki: American Use of the Atomic Bomb - Part 2

The Manhattan Project was a research program funded by the United States government, and its primary objective was to develop nuclear weapons. They put two billion dollars into this project over a span of three years (from 1942 to 1945) and succeeded in creating two types of atomic bombs, the “Fat Man” and the “Little Boy”. They were named this because of the unique shapes each of the bombs had. The different shapes of the bombs were due to the different methods they used to cause a nuclear reaction. The Fat Man used a Plutonium reaction, while Little Boy used a Uranium-235 in the bomb. Both of these substances were very rare, and they were both extracted from Uranium-238 (McKain 25). Many famous scientists and physicists were recruited for this job under the supervision of Colonel Leslie Groves, who was the head of the Manhattan Project (McKain 20).