Uranium: Nuclear Friend or Nuclear Foe On Monday August 6, 1945 the U.S. Bomber Enola Gay flew over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Seconds later a metallic projectile fell towards its target. In a blinding flash the world felt the power of a new age, the nuclear age. The study of radiation that would eventually lead to these uranium weapons began in 1798. It was in this year that the german chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth identified the element uranium. Uranium was not isolated in a metallic state until 1841. The radioactive properties of uranium were first discovered in 1896 when a French physicist Antoine Henti Becquerel studied the properties of uranyl sulfate. Althoug