Topic > Essay on the Manhattan Project - 699

This study will explore the shape and scope of the political movement of the Manhattan Project scientists between 1942 and 1945. It will examine the messages they brought into the political sphere and investigate how they approached to politics. requests. It will further examine why scientists were unable to influence wartime policy regarding the use of nuclear weapons. Fearing that Nazi Germany was developing an atomic bomb, on December 6, 1941, scientists, engineers and the military raced to build the first man-made atomic bomb. atomic bomb. These combined efforts provide the United States with a wartime military advantage that has been nicknamed "The Manhattan Project." However, when concrete information confirmed in late 1944 that Germany's work on atomic weapons had essentially stalled in 1942, many scientists had reason to pause and reevaluate their commitment to the project. Joseph Rotblat, for example, abandoned the project arguing that "the fact that the German effort was stillborn undermined the reasons for continuing." In fact, it was an exception. However, scientists' apprehensions reached a high level when Germany surrendered in May 1945. These events, among others, suggested that the bomb would be used, if at all, against Japan (a reversal, in some ways meaning, racism and genocide, internal issues within Germany). Many scientists, therefore, began to argue among themselves about the moral and ethical implications of using the atomic bomb in war and the fate of humanity in the coming atomic age. Thus, scientists with a stronger sense of responsibility decided that because they had created the bomb, they possessed both the legitimacy and the intellect to make proposals regarding its use. On their political mission, scientists have become fixated ... middle of paper ... in American history", there is much evidence to suggest otherwise. However, Strickland's study offers a valuable guide to the development of ideas, organizations and the associations formed by atomic scientists in the immediate postwar period. However, it does not include an in-depth analysis of the wartime messages of the Manhattan Project scientists, nor does it investigate the principles behind them covers extensively the role of scientists in atomic energy policymaking in the postwar decades While his study is useful for assessing how scientists can be more successfully integrated into nuclear weapons policy issues, it fails to consider the different. forms of the wartime movement of atomic scientists and its relevance for considering their successes and failures in influencing postwar nuclear power. armaments policy.