Sam: I'm Sam.
Rob: And I'm Rob.
Sam: On August the sixth 1945,
the US aircraft, Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima,
instantly killing 70,000 people.
When Japan refused to surrender,
a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later.
Many believe the bombings quickened the end of the Second World War.
But it came at a terrible human cost,
which some have called a crime against humanity.
Rob: The invention of the atomic bomb,
which resulted from the cooperation
between the US military and some of the world's leading scientific minds,
was known as The Manhattan Project.
In this programme we'll take a look into the science and the politics of The Manhattan Project,
and as usual, we'll learn some new vocabulary as well.
Sam: Even before World War Two,
scientists had known about the potential energy inside uranium,
the heaviest metal in the periodic table -
a diagram which groups the chemical elements into rows and columns