The Beginning or the End

The Beginning or the End
  • Release date: 19 Feb 1947
  • Release year: 1947
  • Runtime: 112 minutes
  • Country: United States
  • Keywords: manhattan project, hiroshima japan, world war two, nuclear weapons, desert, bomber plane, enola gay, plutonium, laboratory, count down
Plot:
The American led development of the atomic bomb under the project with the code name Manhattan District is dramatized. Many scientists worldwide are working on the issue of nuclear fission in the late 1930s. While some refuse to embark on such endeavors knowing the possible globally catastrophic uses such as in a bomb, others continue to work on it in the quest for pure scientific knowledge, with some dropping out along the way in that possibility of military use especially in unstable global times. Upon learning how to split atoms, American scientists know that they have to inform President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in turn makes the difficult decision to form a military led team to develop the bomb in knowing that German scientists are also working on the technology and that Adolf Hitler would not hesitate to use such a bomb in war. The Manhattan District, its project team led by Major General Leslie Groves and Colonel Jeff Nixon, necessarily convenes Canadian and British forces, but also scientists from around the world who gladly work on the project under these circumstances as opposed to being forced to often in their home country. It ends up being a logistically complex project in many factions working on it without knowing on what they are working. It is also a dangerous project in the volatility of the radioactive materials, and in devising a way to deploy a bomb without it being a suicide mission for those involved. And with the new administration in the mid-1940s upon Roosevelt's passing, then new President Harry S. Truman takes the alternate direction of using the bomb against the Japanese in light of the incident that brought the Americans into the war.
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