The Atom Bombs of USA and the Uranium of Congo

The United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, compelling the Japanese to unconditional surrender. The atom bomb was developed after two German chemists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strauss, made an astonishing discovery in Berlin on December 19, 1938. While bombarding uranium nucleus with neutrons they discovered barium in the reaction products. Now barium nucleus is a little over half the uranium nucleus in mass - its mass in six tenths of the mass of uranium. The inescapable and thrilling conclusion that could be drawn from this was that the neutrons had split the uranium nucleus in two comparable halves. This splitting of the uranium nucleus into two comparable halves by neutrons is called fission, a term that is now part of common vocabulary.