Elements Used in the Manhattan Project (Uranium and Plutonium)
Factoids
The US government secretly began working on atomic weapons under the name "The Manhattan Project.
There were already American scientists working on such things, but the process was rushed by FDR after he was informed that the Germans were inventing ways to use atomic energy to create bombs
There were fears that the first nuclear bomb, "Gadget", would not detonate during the Trinity Test
After the two Fat Man nukes were dropped on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan dropped out of WWII, which was both a large victory for the US, and a huge tragedy for the entire world
The Use of Uranium and Plutonium
Scientists began working with Uranium because they knew it had a high fission probability
However, natural Uranium is nowhere near high enough for what their purposes were, so they needed Uranium isotope 235
Uranium 235 was far more useful than natural Uranium, but was only found in about .7% of Uranium, so the scientists needed obtuse amounts of Uranium
Later on, they discovered that Plutonium 239 had a very high fission probability, so they began using that
However, since Plutonium is not a natural element, they were forced to produce a lot of Plutonium in labs