Who Invented The Atomic Bomb? Although when mention is made about the invention of the atomic bomb two people are named: Oppenheimer or Einstein, the truth is that behind both of them there are many people who, without their collaboration, would not have been feasible for the atomic bomb to exist at the time. The one that developed. So today we want to talk about all the scientists who have contributed to its creation.

Oppenheimer or Einstein

Who Invented the Atomic.Bomb?

Einstein & Oppenheimer

Long before the 20th century, uranium, an element with a heavier nucleus and with unstable isotopes, was already known.

  • In 1905 Albert Einstein discovered the equivalence between inertia and mass, theoretically deducing that with a very small piece of material if multiplied by the square of the speed of light, enormous amounts of energy were obtained.

A year before this theory J. Roberto Oppenheimer was born in New York, a physicist who carried out numerous works of general relativity and quantum theory, in addition to directing a list of eminent scientists who gave rise to the “atomic age”, building a bomb which cost two billion dollars.

Niels Bohr

In the year World War II broke out, that is, in 1939, Niels Bohr’s mechanism of theoretical nuclear fission was developed.

At the same time, Otto Hans and Lise Meitner were already prepared in a laboratory in Berlin, the conditions to be able to bombard the nucleus of uranium with neutrons, and thus to obtain an element that was heavier than uranium itself.

  • As Meitner, who was Jewish, had to flee Berlin, Hans continued his work with Strassmann, with which he achieved fission of uranium, an achievement that would earn him the Nobel Prize in chemistry. But it was Meitner who, analyzing the results, realized the problem posed by this discovery, thanks to the Einstein equation.
  • This phenomenon would later become known as nuclear fission.

Leo Szilar Leo Szilar noted that during the fission of uranium, in addition to energy, neutrons were released at high speed that divided other nuclei, which in turn released more neutrons to divide new nuclei, and so on in an uncontrollable process.

It was Enrico Fermi who built the first reactor using graphite rods so that the neutrons decelerated rapidly and in this way, achieve the first nuclear reaction in history.

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But the achievement of the atomic bomb does not end with Fermi’s discovery, since there were many other science and engineering works, such as those carried out by Neumann, Feynman and many other scientists who put a huge grain of sand each of them to achieve the success of this project.

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In New Mexico, specifically in the Alamogordo desert, the first test of the atomic bomb was carried out on July 16, 1945.

This test was known as Trinity and the bomb dropped, as Gadget.