Nuclear Weapons

The first 'splitting of an atom' was by Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson,At The University of Manchester,Manchester,England in 1917,This discovery proceeded into the development of a Nuclear weapon. The Manhattan Project,in Los Alamos,USA On the 16th July 1945 detonated the first atomic bomb.Those involved in the making of the bomb were:

Robert Oppenheimer, David Bohm, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, Otto Frisch, Rudolf Peierls, Felix Bloch, Niels Bohr, Emilio Segre, James Franck, Enrico Fermi, Klaus Fuchs and Edward Teller.

Three, one that was tested in the US, one was deployed at Hiroshima and the third at Nagasaki. Bombs were under construction, but no further weapons were ready for use by the surrender date. A fourth bomb was made by Los Alamos before Japan agreed to surrender, but did not arrive in San Francisco to be flown across the Pacific until August 18, four days after the Japanese agreed to surrender (but before the formal signing of the agreement which happened in September). This is confirmed by declassified documents obtained by Chuck Hansen via FOIA requests and summarized in his work Swords of Armageddon.

As 3 more bombs were scheduled for production and delivery in September (ibid.) it is almost certain that Los Alamos completed the first of these 3 within a few days before or after the formal signing. However documents on the completion date of this bomb have not been released. If they did complete this bomb prior to the signing, this would make five in total were built during WW2.

The next definite data in Swords of Armageddon gives bomb production up to the end of the 1946 Operation Crossroads: total bombs built 9, total bombs detonated 5, bombs remaining in stockpile 4.

Note: bombs of this era when built were not assembled. for example a MK-III Fatman came in two crates of parts and took 3 days of final assembly in the field before use.

The a-bomb was built in Oak Ridge, Tennessee - just outside Knoxville.

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All atomic bombs built in 1945-1947 were built in Los Alamos, NM. Oak Ridge, TN only supplied the oralloy (Oak Ridge "alloy": weapons grade 80% enriched uranium) while Hanford, WA supplied the plutonium and polonium. The Navy supplied cordite and high explosives. Sandia in Albuquerque, NM supplied the custom bomb casings and electronics. Later factories (e.g. PANTEX in TX, Rocky Flats in CO) were built to do the assembly.

from the Federation of American Scientists

CountryStrategicNon-StrategicOperationalTotal InventoryRussia2,6002,050a4,65012,000bUnited States2,126500c

2,626d9,400eFrance300n.a.~300300fChina180?~180

240gUnited Kingdom160n.a.<160185hIsrael80n.a.n.a.80iPakistan70-90n.a.n.a.70-90iIndia60-80n.a.n.a.60-80iNorth Korea<10n.a.n.a.<10jTotal:~5,600k~2,550k~7,900k~23,300k

http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/nuclearweapons/nukestatus.html

Leo Szilard invented the atomic fission bomb in 1933 in London while crossing a street. He applied for a patent on it in 1934 and was granted that patent (GB630726) in 1936, at which time the British Admiralty classified the patent to prevent Nazi Germany from seeing it, the patent remained classified until 1949. Szilard worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos helping develop the atomic fission bomb.

It is unclear exactly who invented the hydrogen fusion bomb as it came up in many group discussions early in the Manhattan Project. Edward Teller liked to have people believe he was the inventor, but that is unlikely. However Teller became fixated on it (calling it the Super Bomb) to the point that he began to hinder other people's work on the atomic fission bomb and finally Oppenheimer had to limit Teller's access to others on the project (which Teller never forgave him for). Before the war ended Teller had completed a hydrogen fusion bomb design that he called the Classical Super but was not allowed to try building it. However in December 1945 and January 1946 a simulation of Teller's Classical Super design was run on the ENIAC, but it showed the design was an unworkable failure and serious work on hydrogen fusion bombs effectively died at that time (although Teller persisted at working alone on them in his spare time).

In 1949 a team working on atomic fission bomb improvements at Los Alamos developed an idea to improve the core compression of an atomic fission bomb (and thus its efficiency and yield) using a concept called "staging", where a small atomic fission bomb would be used to compress a second larger atomic fission bomb thus giving a much higher yield. However the team ran into problems developing the equations for a computational model of this design. They sent their mathematician Stanislaw Ulam to consult with Edward Teller on these equations. Teller immediately saw that this "staging" concept was the feature needed to get the high compression and temperature needed to finally make his hydrogen fusion bomb design workable. By 1950 working together Stanislaw Ulam & Edward Teller had invented the modern staged hydrogen fusion bomb design (usually called the Teller-Ulam configuration, although Teller kept trying to denigrate and diminish Ulam's contributions).

Note: H. G. Wells created the name "atomic bomb" for his 1914 science fiction novel The World Set Free, but did not have anything to do with their invention.