what are nuclesr weapons essays

what are nuclesr weapons essays What exactly are nuclear weapons? How do they work? Who thought up the concept of nuclear weapons? When have they been used? Why have they been used? Most people don ¡t know the answers to all these questions, but would really like to understand the reasons behind nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are small reliable ways to cause mass destruction. Being that the explosion of the weapons is in a large part due to very small elements such as uranium and plutonium the weapons can be very small and still cause damage on a large scale. When a bomb explodes part of the mass that the elements contains is converted into energy and if this happens quickly enough there will be a nuclear explosion (Campbell 10). Nuclear weapons have been used to end wars and have since then caused a large amount of mistrust between countries. The idea for using nuclear weapons came about in the August of 1940. The potential of these weapons was discovered by several scientists in a laboratory called the  ¡Virus House ¡ located in Berlin, Germany (Campbell 36). Nuclear weapons were starting to be developed in 1943 by Americans and Europeans. These studies were done under the supervision of Robert Oppenheimer. By the summer of 1944 Oppenheimer ¡s team had developed a device 10 feet long and weighing 9,000 pounds that could be dropped from a plane. In this  ¡9,000 pound destruction device ¡, only a few pounds of either uranium or plutonium could cause a blast that had never been seen before. This weapon had the force of 20,000 tons of TNT and could cause major damage over thousands of square miles (Macksey 174). The testing of nuclear weapons has taken place at numerous locations. Sometimes bombs have been dropped that had little or no explosion and others have exploded with great force. The first successful explosion of an atomic bomb was on July16, 1945 in Alamogordo, New Mexico. In the 1950 ¡s nuclear weapons called H - Bombs were beginning to...