re was a host of chemical, metallurgical, and technical problems that had hardly been touched. For administrative purposes in the spring of 1945, the scientific staff at Los Alamos was arranged in several divisions, which reported to Director J. R. Oppenheimer and included: Theoretical Physics Division under H. Bethe; Experimental Nuclear Physics Division under R. R. Wilson; Chemistry and Metallurgy Division under J. W. Kennedy and C. S. Smith; Ordnance Division under Captain W. S. Parsons (USN); Explosives Division under G. B. Kistialowsky; and a Bomb Physics Division under E. Fermi. By the end of June 1945, many were expecting from day to day to hear of the explosion of the first atomic bomb devised by man. Its potential destructive force, many believed, would be awesome: "A weapon has been developed that is potentially destructive beyond the wildest nightmares of the imagination; a weapon so ideally suited to sudden unannounced attack that a country's major cities might be destroyed overnight by an ostensibly friendly power."3 Only the scientists, h
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