The Pros And Cons Of The First Atomic Bomb

On August 6th, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. The United States dropped the bomb as their last resort to defeat Japan and end the war, but what they did not expect was the horrors of the aftermath and the ongoing 71 year long debate about the ethics of nuclear weapons. We started out as the only country that had a few nuclear weapons, although it is unknown how many the United States actually had in 1945, which quickly escalated to nine countries owning over 15,000 nuclear weapons combined. The United States is right behind Russia, who has about 7,300, with 6,970. With that many nukes, just in this country alone, there is a strong possibility of the end of the world occurring, not in the form of alien invasions or catastrophic natural disasters as …show more content…
The most destructive bomb ever tested was the Tsar Bomba in 1961, created by the Soviet Union. Little Boy released 15 kilotons of energy while the Tsar Bomba released approximately 50,000 kilotons and had a mushroom cloud that was four and half times the height of Mount Everest. To put that into perspective, if they dropped Little Boy on West Chester University, people as far as Farrell Stadium would suffer from 3rd degree burns, but if the Tsar Bomba were dropped on West Chester University, people in Hershey, Pennsylvania would suffer from 3rd degree burns and windows would shatter as far as Indianapolis, Indiana.
J. Robert Oppenheimer is often considered to be the “father of the atomic bomb” (Hirtle, 42) because of his work as the director of the Manhattan project, which was a project to produce the first nuclear weapons. He was awarded a Certificate of Appreciation and “On 16 October, his last day on the “Hill,” Los Alamos held a farewell ceremony in Oppenheimer’s honor” (Ham, 2015). At the ceremony, he gave a speech about about the danger of atom