Truman, Oppenheimer, and Einstein

            When President Harry Truman took office he was not informed on a lot of the issues about the war. President Truman didn’t even know about the Manhattan Project, which was the atomic bomb. If President Truman and President Roosevelt would have communicated more than they did, maybe President Truman would have know about type of destruction the atomic bomb could do. Without knowing the power of the atomic bomb, President Truman and other allied leaders issued the Potsdam Declaration which says that if Japan didn’t surrender that they would be attacked. The attack would result in the complete destruction of Japan. By rejecting the declaration, the United States and the allied forces had no choice so they used the atomic bomb. When President Truman took office he also had FDR’s cabinet to stay, but he was going to make the decisions and they should support him. With the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan will forever be linked to his presidency and name.

            Before the atomic bomb was the atomic bomb certain people had to discover things that were never thought about before. Albert Einstein says that a great deal of energy can be released from a small amount of matter, . Before Einstein there was Michael Faraday who discovered electromagnetism and electromagnetic rotation and Antoine Laurent Lavoisier who is the father of chemistry and discovered oxygen and hydrogen and the conversation of mass. Emilie du Chatelet figured out that the energy of a moving object is actually square its velocity. With Lise Meitner discovering nuclear fusion, the atomic bomb was made possible with the past help from the brains of the other scientists. When you think about it Albert Einstein didn’t have anything to do with the actual construction of the atomic bomb, he just figured that mass is made up of energy and energy is mass moving very fast at the speed of light.

            Between both Albert Einstein and President Harry Truman, the only person that had physical contact and knowledge of the atomic bomb, besides FDR, was J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was the head scientist on the Manhattan Project, which was the construction of the atomic bomb. He is sometimes known as the father of the atomic bomb along with fellow scientist Enrico Fermi. When the first test of the atomic bomb was done Oppenheimer said that he is the destroyer of worlds, which the whole world would later come to find out is true. I believe that with his part in the construction of the atomic bomb he had gone mad with power.

            The use of the atomic bomb could have been prevented if President Truman was informed, if Albert Einstein had not figured out that equation, or Lise Meitner didn’t discover nuclear fusion. There are many of things that could have prevented the construction of the atomic bomb, but with great power comes great responsibility. I feel as our government failed to communicate with one another on a very important topic, but they succeed in getting the enemy to surrender saving who knows how many American lives. Whichever way you look at it the discovery of the atomic bomb didn’t just cause destruction, but it also provided the use of nuclear power plants that will provide heat and electricity. So there’s good and bad from the construction and use of the atomic bomb, depending on how you view things.