Was war or was science to be blamed?? (Fermi, p.10), in the past fifty years this question has been asked about a numerous amount of times. The invention of the atomic bomb was one of the most defining moments of the human civilization. It ended the second world war, lead to the creation of the cold war and changed humanity forever. The purpose, creation, decision, detention, and aftermath are all subjects that go into the history of the atomic bomb.
The Germans were so far ahead of the United States that if the U.S. waited as much as three months to start the Manhattan project, any attempt to create an atomic bomb would be useless. The Germans were about sixty days from completing the handmade nuclear bomb, and that's when they lost the ground war against their enemy countries in 1945. When that happened all research work was stopped and the German threat was non-existent. This was not when the United States started their own nuclear weapon, they had started four years ago in 1941. There were three main purposes of creating a nuclear bomb, but a lot of underlaying purposes. The most important purpose of building an atomic bomb was that the U.S. had to catch up and beat the Germans in the completion of the explosive weapon. The only way the U.S. could keep their world supremecy was by having the first atomic bomb. To catch up to the Germans the U.S. obtained some of the most honorable scienitics and engineers.
The second reason why the U.S. decided to fund the Manhattan project was to force the Japanese to surrender. With the power to destroy cities, the U.S. could force any opposition to surrender, especially the Japanese. The Japanese did not have any type of project that related to the making of an atomic bomb. So without any defenses against the U.S.'s extraordinary weapon, the Japanese would have no choice but to surrender to the U.S. The purposes to build the atomic bomb were equally significant and all were weighed int...