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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There’s a lot of history to this but.
In the early 1930s we discovered the neutron. At this point we had only thought of atoms made up of protons and electrons, the discovery of the neutron filled some holes in physics that were previously very confusing.
A pretty famous physicist named Enrico Fermi ended up trying to run experiments using neutrons to try to create new elements, the idea was that if we threw neutrons at uranium atoms we could get elements beyond uranium as a product of the reaction. So he got to work, and did it. He ton a chunk of uranium, threw neutrons at it, and did the thing that for centuries was thought impossible, transmutation. In that chunk of what was pure uranium they found something that didn’t match the properties of any element they had known so far. This meant they had made a new element. For this Fermi won a Nobel prize in the late 1930s.
Except he was wrong. Fermi only checked for elements up to lead, he didn’t expect there to be any atom smaller than lead. What he had actually done is split the uranium atom into tow smaller atoms. Not just that, based on the elements it created, what we found out was it had also released a few neutrons into the wild when splitting these atoms, a few neutrons ended up missing from the byproducts. Fermi’s mistake was discovered by two German scientists, Hahn and Meitner, at the cusp of World War II.
The fact that this process both cost a neutron and released a neutron lead to the idea that what if there could be a chain reaction, the released neutron could again fuel this reaction in another atom, and with more neutrons released per reaction it would suddenly burn through all the uranium. We had know there was some energy holding these atoms together from the radioactivity they emitted, physicists put two and two together and figured there’s a good chance this could be used to make energy. And a lot of energy, all at the same time, in the same place. In other words, a bomb.
A few scientists were alarmed at this, especially that it was Nazi Germany that had made this discovery. Einstein famously sent a letter to President Roosevelt that this could be possible and that they needed to build it before Germany could. Roosevelt started the Manhattan Project to try to build it, but first they needed to run a proof of concepts.
To test this, Fermi, now in the US because he got run out of Fascist Italy as a Jew, built the worlds first nuclear reactor under the stadium at the University of Chicago, promising that his calculations said it wouldn’t blow up, just heat up a little bit. Essentially this was a larger scale version of fermi’s previous experiment, they got a massive amount of uranium, piled it up, and shot neutrons at it. And low and behold, it warmed up just slightly, just enough to show that energy was in fact being released by this reaction.
This led the green light to start testing different materials for their fission possibilities and start actually working on getting a bomb.
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