Many have worked there for two and a half years. Employment during peak construction numbered 125,000 and over 65,000 individuals are even now engaged in operating the plants. We now have two great plants and many lesser works devoted to the production of atomic power. For these reasons Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt agreed that it was wise to carry on the project here. In the United States the laboratory work and the production plants, on which a substantial start had already been made, would be out of reach of enemy bombing, while at that time Britain was exposed to constant air attack and was still threatened with the possibility of invasion. It had the tremendous industrial and financial resources necessary for the project and they could be devoted to it without undue impairment of other vital war work. The United States had available the large number of scientists of distinction in the many needed areas of knowledge. With American and British scientists working together we entered the race of discovery against the Germans. Under that general policy the research on the atomic bomb was begun. The battle of the laboratories held fateful risks for us as well as the battles of the air, land and sea, and we have now won the battle of the laboratories as we have won the other battles.īeginning in 1940, before Pearl Harbor, scientific knowledge useful in war was pooled between the United States and Great Britain, and many priceless helps to our victories have come from that arrangement. We may be grateful to Providence that the Germans go the V-1's and V-2's late and in limited quantities and even more grateful that they did not get the atomic bomb at all. By 1942, however, we knew that the Germans were working feverishly to find a way to add atomic energy to the other engines of war with which they hoped to enslave the world. But no one knew any practical method for doing it. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.īefore 1939, it was the accepted belief of scientists that it was theoretically possible to release atomic energy. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.

In their present form these bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development. With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces.

The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor.

It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British 'Grand Slam' which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T. Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy.

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