The Rooskies knew about our secret program, and had the gall to name their secret program of kidnapping German scientests after ours?
Godless commies!
Thanks bonzer for reframing the question and laying out the information as you did.
Alsos was actually a pun. It’s the Greek word for Grove.
Trinity was a test for the second A-bomb “Fat Man” dropped on Nagasaki. The first A-bomb “Little Boy” dropped on Hiroshima was never tested. The design was so simple that the scientists were confident that it would work the first time out.
Isn’t just plain ordinary water (not even deuterated) a better moderator than graphite? I mean, I know that the Soviets used graphite, but it’s never been clear to me why.
I think it’s neutron-capture cross-section is too large - .332 barns vs 5.2 x 10^-4 barns for D2O.
Are you sure? I admit that this isn’t Schrodinger and his Confuse a Cat enterprise, but still…
Kinda amazing … Otto Hahn first demonstrated nuclear fission in late 1938 … less than seven years later we were vaporizing cities …
Debatable. The big raid on Tokyo that opened the serial destruction of Japan’s cities occurred tge night of March 9/10, 1944. Most sources say that raid (Operation Meetinghouse) killed more people than either atomic bomb. I’d say that counts as the main wave starting.
Cough March, 1945.
The point was that until the actual explosions, the full implications were not 100% known. This can be seen in the actions of both Truman and Stalin, and even the reactions of the Japanese government.
Although, to be fair - whatever they ended up with, there was no doubt it involved large quantities of the more active 238 isotope. So… they started with building the necessary infrastructure to pump that out in volume.
Apparently, one of the biggest secrets of the last month of the war was not that they had the bomb, but once those three had gone off, there was a month or two wait for the next one, due to the uranium isotope shortage. They wanted the Japanese to think there would be one or two bombings a week until they surrendered.
The concept is right, but the details are wrong.
U238 is useless for an A-bomb (although very useful for a “boosted fission” weapon).
U-235 is what you need, and that is the rub - it’s hard and slow to separate.
So, you can make PU-239 from U-238 in a reactor. That’s a simpler process, once you get the engineering worked out, but until all your reactors are running at full capacity, it still might take some time to get enough Plutonium for a bomb.
That’s where the US was after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This is a myth.
As I’ve pointed out on the Dope on multiple occasions over the years, the US authorities did really think that the rate they were going to be delivering nuclear weapons was about roughly one a week, rather than one every month or two. And these would be primarily plutonium weapons, rather than uranium ones.
The internal estimate for the next bombing, for which the components were being readied, was eight to nine days after Nagasaki. Subject to the weather.
See this recentish post by me for the details.
I think there was a third one in the basement of the Pentagon.
Just In Case.
Oh, sure, in this universe. But in an alternate one…