When was the atomic bomb first built?
The programs involved in building the bomb ultimately included 14 separate locations in the US. In December, 1942, a fission reaction was successfully initiated at the University of Chicago by Enrico Fermi and others. Work on the actual bomb(s) was conducted at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico under the direction of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was test detonated at Alamagordo, NM. Twenty-one days later, the city of Hiroshima, Japan, was destroyed by a nuclear explosive (August 6). On August 9, 1945, the city of Nagasaki was destroyed by a second bomb of a different type.
