And when?
(warning: layperson ignorance to follow)
I’ve been reading up on it a bit and I kind of get the gist of the progression leading up to it (in a layman kind of way) but who first thought, ‘I could use this to blow stuff up’.
Wiki says, In a 1924 article, Winston Churchill speculated about the possible military implications: "Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings—nay to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke?
That’s pretty early on but surely he got the notion from someone. And was splitting the atom and an attempt to unleash the subsequent power or were they splitting the atom for ‘science’ and discovered the immense power?
It appears Churchill was not being prescient specifically about atomic bombs but just speculating about science coming up with a far greater explosive.
a topic on which there is in The World Crisis an entire chapter entitled “The Unfought Campaign”—Churchill then speculates about the future of explosives: Have we reached the end? Has Science turned its last page on them? May there not be methods of using explosive energy incomparably more intense than anything heretofore discovered? Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings—nay to concentrate the force of a thousand tons of cordite and blast a township at a stroke? Could not explosives even of the existing type be guided automatically in flying machines by wireless or other rays, without a human pilot, in ceaseless procession on a hostile city, arsenal, camp, or dockyard? (8-9).
However, H.G. Wells did write of a uranium-based hand grenade that “would continue to explode indefinitely” in his 1914 novel The World Set Free. So that could well have inspired Winston who was a reader of Wells. Apparently they were friendly and met up at various times to talk.
I have a chapter on Atomic Power in our forthcoming book, so I researched this. While Wells seems to be the first predicting some kind of bomb, the comparison between the energy released by a single fission event and chemical combustion makes the possibility of a bomb pretty obvious.
According to this article, the idea of an atomic chain reaction started in 1933 with Physicist Leo Szilard. You couldn’t have an atomic bomb without a chain reaction, so I don’t think it could have been earlier than that. He then patented it with the British admiralty in secret which suggests that he had figured out the fairly obvious military applications. So that would be my guess.
Leo Szilard is credited with first putting the pieces together for the concept of a neutron-mediated nuclear chain reaction (1933). I would speculate that he already saw that that could maybe go boom even if he didn’t write about it immediately. It wasn’t known yet whether suitable isotopes actually existed, but once that was known, things were put into motion very quickly, leading to the Einstein–Szilard letter.
Richard Rhodes amazing book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” goes deep into the history of what made it possible. He talks about Leo Szilard and the numerous discoveries before and after that all built upon each other.
Apart from the concept, I think the most crucial discrete step was James Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron. That’s what really allowed penetration of the atomic nucleus, and the actual bomb followed relatively soon thereafter.
Given earlier comments that the chain reaction wasn’t recognized until 1933, I wonder what made Wells think of uranium as powerful in general, and specifically as having some special explosive behavior. What would Wells have known about uranium in 1914?
Becquerel, in 1896, discovered that certain materials (including uranium) released energy continually, without any apparent depletion. That suggests that there’s some way in which uranium is storing immense amounts of energy, and from there it’s a short step to concluding that, if all of that energy could be released at once, it could be incredibly destructive. You don’t need to know how the energy is stored, or how to trigger it to release suddenly, to at least see the potential.
I decided to take a look at the actual H.G. Wells text from 1914. I would take the stance that he didn’t quite predict the atomic bomb, but he did write about a fictional atomic weapon. From my brief skimming of the story, the characters…
…discuss how there is so much energy waiting to be released (from uranium and others)
…lament that nature has allowed that energy to only be released very slowly
…speculate about what could be if we could hasten the release
…and then form “Carolinum” weapons that don’t explode but rather just exude lots of energy over extended periods. To wit:
Those that were thrown from aeroplanes fell in this state, they reached the ground still mainly solid, and, melting soil and rock in their progress, bored into the earth. There, as more and more of the Carolinum became active, the bomb spread itself out into a monstrous cavern of fiery energy at the base of what became very speedily a miniature active volcano. The Carolinum, unable to disperse, freely drove into and mixed up with a boiling confusion of molten soil and superheated steam, and so remained spinning furiously and maintaining an eruption that lasted for years or months or weeks according to the size of the bomb employed and the chances of its dispersal.
So, basically mega-radioactive hot balls rather than bombs, and not from uranium per se but from a new substance.
I do see that Szilard, in his memoire, acknowledged influence from Wells’ take on the implications of a super-weapon.
Interesting. So in the intervening 5 or 6 years somehow the Germans got ahold of the technology, or did a German scientist come up with it independently?
Just wanted to second the recommendation of Richard Rhodes’ book. He manages to explain the science such that even I could at least get the gist of it. He also covers the Manhattan Project, development of the B-29, and Curtis LeMay and the fire-bombing of Tokyo.
His book on Reagin and Gorbachev at Rykyavik is also excellent. What an opportunity lost.
“Nuclear fission was discovered on 19 December 1938 in Berlin by German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann. Physicists Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch explained it theoretically in January 1939. Frisch named the process “fission” by analogy with biological fission of living cells. In their second publication on nuclear fission in February 1939, Hahn and Strassmann predicted the existence and liberation of additional neutrons during the fission process, opening up the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction.”
From Hahn’s page:
In 1938, Hahn, Meitner and Fritz Strassmann discovered nuclear fission, for which Hahn alone, was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. "
Many suspect that if Strassmann was included then Meitner would have to have been as well which the Nobel people were loathe to do.
All were either German or Austrian working in the 1930s mainly in German institutes and publishing in German journals. The Jewish ones fled German in the late 30s but continued to work with their colleagues in Germany.
It was soon after this that a voluntary hiatus on publishing research in this came about. But keep in mind that the earliest publications were not only not hidden from the Germans, they were done by Germans/Austrians.
Frisch coined the term “nuclear fission” and came up with first design of an atomic bomb pre- Manhattan Project (which he later became a member of).
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Delving deep into the online Science Fiction Encyclopedia, I tracked links until I came across the entry for Robert Cromie. His third proto-sf novel, The Crack of Doom intuited that a weapon could be formed from that energy.
Cromie is best known for his third sf novel, The Crack of Doom (1895), which is set in the year 2000; the protagonist runs across a politically radical villain (the secret society he controls is vitiated by Feminism and other unacceptable beliefs) who dominates his attractive sister through Telepathy and has also developed a device to unlock the Nuclear Energy contained in matter. He plans to use his formula to destroy the world through a Manichaean conviction that matter is an occlusive evil whose effect on primal reality is to torture it. There is no doubt of Cromie’s intention: as he explains, the first use of atomic energy had, thousands of years earlier, destroyed the fifth planet and created the Asteroids; though hazily described; his use here of a nuclear device to end civilization marks the first occurrence of a theme which would dominate the next century (see End of the World). In a heavily plotted denouement, the protagonist alters the formula, so that only a South Pacific Island is evaporated, and all is saved.
The SFE is not infallible, especially when they say something was a “first” because obscure earlier works keep popping up, but this appears to be a solid example of the first expression of weaponized nuclear energy (which has its own entry).
OK, now that is weird, given that “the nuclear energy contained in matter” wasn’t even discovered until 1896. Either Cromie was a time traveler, or he was extremely lucky in his guesses, or the novel is mis-dated. I’m guessing the third: Perhaps the novel was published serially over the course of many years, and 1895 was only when it started, but the nature of the weapon wasn’t revealed until later?
I believe the quoted text is the author of the SFE talking about the novel, not text from the novel itself. The actual writer probably talked about “n-rays” or some other made-up term that was all the rage for sci-fi writers around the turn of the century.