The Atomic BombOn July 16, 1945, the United States of America ushered the world into a new era with the successful detonation of an atomic bomb in New Mexico. This era was the nuclear age. Less than a month later, on August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan; the first use of a nuclear weapon against an enemy nation. Most of us are familiar with these seminal events, but many are unaware of the complex decisions and scientific advances that paved the way for that fateful day in Hiroshima. Every day we come closer to seeing nuclear weapons fall into the hands of someone who wishes to do harm with those weapons. Many wonder why we think the United States is right to have its own atomic collection. This is why it is important to understand how the atomic bomb came to be and why we decided it was necessary to use it. Early reports of the bombs in Japan indicated only that a "new type of bomb" had been used. Most had no idea what an atomic bomb was or why it was so powerful. The story of the atomic bomb begins with a series of new discoveries in physics that began around the turn of the century. The term classical applies to physics that scientists developed before this time (Cohen, 17). Much of this discovery comes from the work of the father of physics, the great 17th-century English scholar Sir Isaac Newton. Newton was a scientific genius. Today, however, a competent student with a good high school physics class probably has a more accurate understanding of the physical universe than Newton. This is especially true when it comes to the most fundamental building blocks of matter, atoms. Newton, like others before him, developed a theory on the structure of atoms. According to Newton's theory, atoms were like marbles. They were strong and hard, but unlike marbles, they could not be further divided. It was only in the second half of the 19th century that scientific experiment began to prove otherwise. Subsequently, knowledge of atomic structure progressed very rapidly (Cohen, 18). By the mid-1930s, the dedicated efforts of British and European scientists had revealed a new world of atomic structure, filled with incredibly tiny systems of interacting subatomic particles containing electrons, protons and neutrons. In 1938, two German physicists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman, were experimenting with uranium.