History 181B - Class 36

History 181B: Modern Physics

Class 36 (4/21/03)
Fission as a weapon

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Outline

The physics of the fission bomb
    The chain reaction
    Isotope separation
    The plutonium option

Historical consequences: What sort of project is neeeded?
Industrial-scale production
Design details

The Manhattan Project
    Self-mobilization
    Berkeley's contributions (1)
        Cyclotrons into calutrons
        Artificial radioactivity and radiochemistry
    Decisions of oversight, administration, and structure
        Sites and tasks
        Berkeley's contributions (2)
    Why did it work?

Names and terms

Primary	Secondary
critical mass nuclear reactor fast neutrons, slow neutrons fizzle gun-type bomb (U, Hiroshima) implosion bomb (Pu, Nagasaki) Ernest Lawrence (1901-1958), NP 1939 J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) General Leslie Groves (1896-1970) Manhattan Engineer District (Army Corps of Engineers) Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab), University of Chicago Hanford (WA) Oak Ridge (TN) Los Alamos (NM)	Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) James Conant (1893-1978)

Assignment

Victor Weisskopf, "Working on the Bomb," in The Joy of Insight: Passions of a Physicist (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 122-155; Andrei Sakharov, "The Tamm Group," in Memoirs , trans. Richard Lourie (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 90-105.

How did Weisskopf and Sakharov describe the atmosphere? Their own motivations?
How did the Anglo-American and Soviet projects differ?