Esemplastic thermoplastic

If reading my other pages on science, you thought it only makes people happy, think again. Ever since their creation in the 1940s, the world’s politics, wars, and often the everyday lives of the people are affected by the mere existence of nuclear weapons.

Althrough natural radioactive elements were being actively researched since 1896, neutron-induced nuclear fission of uranium was only discoverd in 1938, by Hahn and Strassmann in Germany. This research coincided with the beginning of World War II, and the small research program of Enriko Fermi in 1939 quickly mushroomed into the unprecedented in funding and scale Manhattan Project of 1942 when the first self sustaining chain reaction was performed in the first experimental nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile 1, by Enrico Fermi. The first nuclear explosion, a plutonium imposion bomb, was set off in 1945, only weeks before two nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan: a uranium-235 gun-type bomb on Hiroshima and an implosion plutonium bomb on Nagasaki. The bombs killed as many as 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki by the end of 1945, and thousands more died later due to radiation poisoning.

It took the Soviet Union all the way until 1949 to develop and test its first nuclear weapon, largely duplicating the american design of the implosion plutonium bomb, setting off the greatest arms race in history, prompting the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles and the rest of the Space Race, tests of the nuclear fusion bombs, development of civil defense measures, and stockpiling of thousands of warheads by both USA and USSR, quickly reaching the stalemate of Mutually Assured Destruction. Finally, in the 1970′s, both superpowers were able to cut down on nuclear spending (and ended the Space Race, turning to cooperation) but the threat of the nuclear wearpons did not go away. In 1998 India and Pakistan were exploding their test bombs and threatening each other, and in 2006 North Korea performed its first fission bomb test. The threat of radiological dispersal devices (“dirty bombs”), portable nuclear fission bombs (“suitcase nukes”) and other weapons of nuclear terrorism is still alive and causing fear around the world, driving international and domestic policies, and further distancing the public opinion from approval of safe nuclear power.