Scientists and the atomic bomb?!

did the scientist making little boy know that the bomb will be dropped on Hiroshima, or did they think it was only a threat? did the citizens know? was truman and other leaders the only onse to know that it would end badly?

Actually the head head of the department and some high officials knew it. But they haven't told the workers or the junior rank scientists. As they feared that they will stop working on it.

It was also wrong. The fear was that the more who knew about it the more likely it was that the information would spread to their enemies (which actually ended up happening).

Report Abuse

Oh they fully intended to use it (at least the ones who knew what they were working on, basically all the scientists knew as otherwise they wouldn't have been able to do their jobs, as did many of the engineers who developed the facilities used to make them (though many of them weren't told the whole story but there's a limit to how much you can withhold from an engineer and still have them do their job), the labourers who built all the places didn't necessarily know what they were making).

As for the exact target, that wasn't something the scientists would know but would have been decided upon by the military (and Hiroshima only got it because most of the other Japanese cities had already been bombed nearly out of existence by conventional bombs, Kyoto the US were sparing because of its cultural significance). It's also worth noting that a large proportion of the scientists on the Manhattan project were Jews who escaped the Nazis who would have had no problem with the bomb being dropped on Germany (but Germany surrendered before they had a bomb ready).

The citizens of the US didn't know anything about the Manhattan project (it was top secret) until after the US had dropped one, Truman (who was vice president until Roosevelt died and so kept in the dark until he became president) actually found out about the US nuclear bomb project after Stalin (through his spies) did.