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Категория: Английский язык
In 1939 physicists in the United States had learned of experiments in Germany demonstrating the possibility of nuclear fusion and had understood that the potential energy might be released in an explosive weapon of unprecedented power. On August 2, 1939, Albert
Einstein had warned Roosevelt of the danger of Nazi Germany's forestalling other states in the development of an atomic bomb. Eventually, the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development was created in June 1941 and given joint responsibility with the war department in the Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear bomb. After four years of intensive research, an atomic device was set off on July 16, 1945, in a desert area at Alamogordo, N.M., generating an explosive power equivalent to that of more than 15,000 tons of TNT. Thus the atomic bomb was born. Truman, the new U.S. president, calculated that this monstrous weapon might be used to defeat Japan in a way less costly of U.S. lives than a conventional invasion of the Japanese homeland. Japan's unsatisfactory response to the Allies' Potsdam Declaration decided the matter. On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb carried in a specially equipped B-29 was dropped on Hiroshima, The explosions generated spontaneous fires that burned almost 4.4 square miles completely out, and killed between 70,000 and 80,000 people, besides injuring more than 70,000 others. A second bomb, dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, killed between 35,000 and 40,000 people, injured alike number, and devastated 1.8 square miles.
