On August 6, 1945, six months after Japan attacked a U.S. navel fleet in Pearl Harbor, the United States dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The city was 90 percent wiped out and 80,000 people were immediately killed , tens of thousands more died after the bomb due to its radiation. The bomb was named Little Boy.
The Manhattan Project
In 1940, before the outbreak of war, the U.S. government began funding its own atomic weapons development program. The U.S. Army portion of engineers was tasked with the construction of the vast facilities necessary for the top-secret program, code named “The Manhattan Project ” On July 16, 1945, the Manhattan Project held its first successful test of an atomic device, a plutonium bomb, at the test site at Alamogordo, New Mexico.
Nagasaki
Hiroshima’s devastation failed for Japan to take an immediate surrender, however, on August 9 three days after the Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Killing an estimated 40,000 people. Japan’s Emperor Hirohito announced his country’s surrender in World War II on a radio address at noon on August 15, citing the devastating power of “a new and most cruel bomb.” The bombs name was Fat Man and was dropped at 11:02 that morning.
Los Alamos
Los Alamos was known as Project Y held in New Mexico. The United States wanted to build an atomic explosive to counter the threat posed by the German nuclear development program. The U.S. sent a team to Los Alamos to work on materials that would turn them into a workable atom bombs.