STM+Week+09+or+10

 **-Response ** After finishing reading this document, I was amazed at how little I originally knew about the workings and effects of the atomic bomb. Originally, I only knew the bare minimum of facts, that it exploded, caused a lot of damage, and left some radiation behind. Although these previous thoughts hold true after my reading, they have been shown to be hugely lacking in detail and in some areas of the bomb's operation. Just looking at the amount of science, both experimental and theoretical, that went into making this idea a possibility I can’t help but wonder how many scientists actually knew where their research was going. Seeing how the author references the work of many other named and unnamed scientists, including Bohr, we can see that even the theoretical stages of the bomb were an immense undertaking, spanning generations of knowledge and researchers and most likely huge investments and manpower and funds. Although I can’t go into detail here, the document also contained a detailed description of how the bomb would operate if constructed according to these plans. The author goes as far as to describe the movement of the particles and how that created the cascade of forces that eventually creates the massive blast of heat and pressure we know today as an atomic bomb. At the end of the document, my ideas of the dangerous nature of atomic weapons were reinforced when the author described the radiation hazard that these weapons could pose. He talked about the radius that the radiation would spread, somewhere around a few miles, and how it could linger for days before beginning to dissipate. Worst of all, was that no effects of the radioactive fallout would be felt until it was too late to save those affected. In the end, this document showed how much work and “science” was put forward from so many sources to create a weapon of such frightening power that it would be unrivaled by anything that came before it.
 * Frisch-Peierls Memorandum, March 1940  **
 * On the Construction of a "Super-bomb" based on a Nuclear Chain Reaction in Uranium **