Worlds Within Worlds: The Story of Nuclear Energy, Volume 3

on August 6, 1945, and the other over Nagasaki 2 days later. The Japanese government surrendered and World War II came to an end. It was with the blast over Hiroshima that the world came to know it was in the nuclear age and that the ferocious weapon of the nuclear bomb existed. (The popular name for it at the time was “atomic bomb” or “A-bomb”.) During the war, German scientists may have been trying to develop a nuclear bomb, but, if so, they had not yet succeeded at the time Germany met its final defeat. Soviet physicists, under Igor Vasilievich Kurchatov (1903-1960), were also working on the problem. The dislocation of the war, which inflicted much more damage on the Soviet Union than on the United States, kept the Soviet effort from succeeding while it was on. However, since the Soviets were among the victors, they were able to continue after the war. In 1949 the Soviets exploded their first nuclear bomb. In 1952 the British did the same; in 1960, the French; and in 1964, the Chinese. Although many nuclear bombs have been exploded for test purposes, the two over Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been the only ones used in time of war. Nor need nuclear bombs be considered as having destructive potential only. There is the possibility that, with proper precautions, they might be used to make excavations, blast out harbors or canals, break up underground rock formations 141 to recover oil or other resources, and in other ways do the work of chemical explosives with far greater speed and economy. It has even been suggested that a series of nuclear bomb explosions might be used to hurl space vehicles forward in voyages away from earth.