Like we all who built it first and all, but how did the humans know that such a weapon could be possible to build with so much capability? Was there research from older scientists and physicists that led to the idea that such a thing was possible and only needed to be built?
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If you’re really interested in this, Richard Rhodes’ “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” is a great read (Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award).
And, fun fact – the Hiroshima bomb was never even fully tested – it was an absurdly simple (and inefficient) design, where only a tablespoon or so of matter was converted to energy. It was so basic “it had to work”. The Trinity test (and the Nagasaki bomb) was a much more complicated design – almost impossibly complex, using shaped high explosives with precision-timed detonators to compress a perfect sphere about the size of a basketball down to a perfect sphere the size of a marble. Nobody had “assembled” anything with explosives before.
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