Atomic power unleashed it full might on August 6th 1945 when the
"Enola Gay" flew to its target Hiroshima. On board was one bomb
- "Little Boy". It had enormous explosive power, more than
anybody on board the ‘plane could ever have imagined. Hiroshima
was flattened. On the 9th August, the same destruction happened
to Nagasaki. This time, the bomb was known as "Fat Man". Why did
both bombs have such colossal explosive power? Scientists -
especially in Germany - had been working on the potential of
atomic power for some while. In 1938, a major advance was made
by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute
for Chemistry in Berlin. These men experimented by bombarding
uranium with neutrons. What they had found was that the uranium
divided into two roughly equal parts. They called this process
"fission". Atomic fission had the ability to unleash vast
amounts of energy. The first man to realise this was Leo Szilard
- a Hungarian physicist. Szilard believed that if you could
control atomic fission