#72 - The Manhattan Project

What this episode covers

* President Roosevelt responded to Einstein’s letter by setting up the Advisory Committee on Uranium under Lyman J. Briggs, director of the National Bureau of Standards. * Side note: his daughter Isabel would eventually marry Clarence Myers and go on to generate the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator with her mother. * Which is complete bullshit BTW. * The committee met for the first time on 21 October 1939. * It’s function was to look into the current state of research on uranium to recommend an appropriate role for the federal government. * On 1 November 1939, the Uranium Committee recommended that the government should immediately obtain 4 tons of graphite, which was used to slow down the neutrons coming from the fission reaction, and 50 tons of uranium oxide. * But there was still no proof that the whole thing would work. * Even if you could create a chain reaction, how would you fit everything you needed into something of a size that could be used as a bomb? * Fermi himself thought that there was ‘little likelihood of an atomic bomb, little proof that we were not pursuing a chimera’. * Keep in mind that this was before Pearl Harbour, before the U.S. was officially even at war. * One guy who believed that America was going to end up at war was Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Foundation. * Bush was a legendary engineer and inventor. * Among other things, he founded the company now known as Raytheon, which developed better vacuum tubes, he developed the work that lead to the digital circuits, came up with the idea of hypertext, and was vice president of MIT and dean of the MIT School of Engineering. * in June 1940 Roosevelt established the National Defense Research Committee with Bush at its head. * Its priorities were the development of radar, proximity fuses and anti-submarine devices. * The Uranium Committee fell under its remit. * It was reconstituted as a scientific body and purged of its military membership. * In the interest of security, foreign-born scientists were barred from the committee and further publication of articles on uranium research was banned. * * In 1941, Plutonium was discovered. * They found that plutonium-239 was 1.7 times as likely as U-235 to fission. * And they could produce large amounts of fissionable plutonium from the plentiful U-238. * So now there were two options - U-235 and plutonium. * Meanwhile, Bush had been appointed director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. * This had been established by an executive order on 28 June 1941 – six days after German troops invaded the Soviet Union – giving Bush direct access to the White House. * The National Defense Research Committee, now headed by James Conant, president of Harvard University, was downgraded to an advisory body while the Uranium Committee became a section of the OSRD, codenamed S-1 – Section One of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. * It was S-1 that Truman discovered was sucking up a ton of money in 1943 and they told him he wasn’t allowed to know anything about it. * Meanwhile, over in England, the Military Application of Uranium Detonation Committee, or MAUD, which was set up in 1940 to research atomic weapons, issued a report that said fission of U-235 could happen even with fast neutrons. * They estimated that a critical mass of 22 pounds would be large enough to produce an enormous explosion. * A bomb that size could be loaded on existing aircraft and be ready in around two years. * The Americans read the report. * It reminded them that fission had been discovered in Nazi Germany nearly three years earlier, and since spring 1940 a large part of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin had been set aside for uranium research. * Meanwhile * In September 1941, Werner Heisenberg, one of the key pion Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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