• Question: What Is Your Opinion on ATOMIC BOMBS? Do You Think They Should\'ve Been Invented In The First Place?

    Asked by tasniauddin to Sarah, Paul, Mark, Lily, Laura on 21 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Paul Roche

      Paul Roche answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      Unfortunately the invention of atmoic bombs was inevitabl eonce physicists like Einstein had worked out what powered stars – they realised almost immediately that the same power source that keeps the Sun burning (converting Hydrogen into Helium) could also be used to generate enormously powerful weapons. So then it was a race between the Allies (who had the Manhattan Project working in Nevada, building the atom bomb) and the Germans and Japanese, to see who would make the first weapon – it was a terrible thing to do, but the Americans decided that by dropping the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and killing hundreds of thousands of people, they would stop the war almost straight away and that would save more people in the long run.

      Sometimes people discover things that have unintended consequences – the physicists who were working on the theory of the atom, and the power sources of stars, did not mean to discover the way to make an atom bomb. But politicians and military people, once they realised what was possible, would then drive the research away from peaceful ends (e.g. nuclear power) into something they wanted – a “super bomb”…

    • Photo: Lily Asquith

      Lily Asquith answered on 19 Jun 2010:

      Thinking about atomic bombs fills me with dread. I wish they had never been invented. The discoveries that lead to their invention were not meaning to look for ways to kill millions of people. I think the physicists who worked for the Manhattan project in World war 2 felt forced to participate because they were aware that Nazi germany already had a team of physicists working on it. What kind of pressure they were under I do not know, but I hope that if the world were ever thrown into that kind of nightmarish war again, physicists and other scientists will have learned their lesson: politicians are not to be trusted.

    • Photo: Laura Maliszewski

      Laura Maliszewski answered on 20 Jun 2010:

      Wow, that’s a tough one. Scientifically it was a great achievement that’s lead to nuclear power and other good things, but atomic warfare is certainly devastating.

    • Photo: Mark Roberts

      Mark Roberts answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      Atmoic weapons are very powerful and I think quite scary things because of the damage they can produce over generations

      Should they have been invented – erm I don’t think you can say they shouldn’t because I reckon someone would have found them even if the Manhattan project hadn’t as it was kind of a result of the physics that had gone before – so at least now we know them and know how they work we can control their proliferation around the world and try and keep the world a peaceful place.

    • Photo: Sarah Bardsley

      Sarah Bardsley answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      I think many people have suffered because of atomic bombs and I hope they are never used again. Often scientific discoveries can be used against people. But these same discoveries can also do a lot of good.

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