When was the nuke invented?

Answer 1

Ernest Rutherford, in 1919, was the first to split an atom, though it was nitrogen, and thus there was no power generation or explosion. In 1932 Sir John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton were the first to cause a nuclear reaction by the fission of an atom. Enrico Fermi, however was the first to fission uranium, in 1932, though at the time he did not fully appreciate the consequences of this discovery. Otto Robery Frisch and Lise Meitner were the first to realize the potential energy produced by the fission of uranium, however, and in a latter experiment, Frisch proved the theory.

The first person to ever realize its potential as a weapon, though, was the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, who realized, after experimentation, that the amount of neutrons released by the fission of uranium (two on average) could produce a nuclear chain reaction, which could lead to a massive explosion. Fearing the use of this reaction as a weapon by a facist government, however, Szilard kept his discovery secret, and convinced others to do the same, but the Joliot Curie group published the exact same results, coming to the same conlusion as Szilard.

However, the man who is generaly regarded as the "father of the A-bomb" is J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project in the United States, which produced the first ever nuclear weapon.

However, H.G. Wells was the first to envision a nuclear weapon driven by nuclear fission, when he wrote of "air dropped 'atomic bombs'" in his 1914 novel, The World Set Free. At the time, Wells did not know of the destructive power the such weapons would one day harness. Leo Szilard latter said that this novel had been the inspiration for his research on nuclear fission.

And he has tested the bomb offensivly in Japan