The Making Of The Atomic Bomb Pdf Download __EXCLUSIVE_

As the United States began its island-hopping campaign in the Pacific, the Army Corps of Engineers took over the effort to produce atomic weaponry on the Home Front. On August 13, 1942, the Army Corps created the Manhattan Engineer District, named for the location of its offices in New York City. The following month, on September 17, Colonel Leslie R. Groves was appointed to head the project and received a promotion to Brigadier General. Within two days of his appointment, Groves made quick decisions to move the project forward, selecting three primary sites for the manufacture of an atomic bomb.

The plutonium bomb relied upon the implosion of the reactive plutonium rather than on the piercing of the plutonium with a bullet, which was common in gun-method bombs and which worked better with uranium. While the gun-method was a more familiar method conceptually to its creators, the implosion-method was not. Due to the unprecedented nature of such a bomb, Oppenheimer felt a test was necessary. Groves initially hesitated because plutonium was both expensive and rare. However, Groves relented and approved moving forward with a test.

The Making Of The Atomic Bomb Pdf Download

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The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a history book written by the American journalist and historian Richard Rhodes, first published by Simon & Schuster in 1987. The book won multiple awards, including Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The narrative covers people and events from early 20th century discoveries leading to the science of nuclear fission, through the Manhattan Project and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The book was praised both by historians and former Los Alamos weapon engineers and scientists, and is considered to be a general authority on early nuclear weapons history, as well as the development of modern physics in general, during the first half of the 20th century. Nobel Laureate I. I. Rabi, one of the prime participants in the dawn of the atomic age, called it "an epic worthy of Milton. No where else have I seen the whole story put down with such elegance and gusto and in such revealing detail and simple language which carries the reader through wonderful and profound scientific discoveries and their application."[2] As reported by The New York Times, Rabi's wife "read him the whole book, and he was pleased with it".[1]

The historian of science Lawrence Badash writes positively about the book, but notes Rhodes' descriptions of sketchy biographies unconvincing: "'human interest' material of questionable accuracy becomes psycho-babble", though he notes that "the book is accurate and the characters are well drawn". He concludes that "Altogether Rhodes has produced the most readable, exciting and just book to date that covers both the bomb and the preceding four decades".[4]

William J. Broad praised the book in The New York Times review, writing that it "offers not only the best overview of the century's pivotal event, but a probing analysis of what it means for the future." He especially noted the vast bibliography, "the characters speak in their own voices, in long paragraphs of direct quotation".[1] Another reviewer writes that "If it is the bomb which defines the twentieth century as at once dreadful and rewarding ... then the present book captures this range", and also praised the extensive bibliography.[5] Another review calls it "an exceptionally well-written account of the building and use of the first nuclear weapons".[6]

What the book lacks, however, is any sustained attention to the institutional shaping and constraint of events. A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation or a Nobel Prize arrives as a virtual deus ex machina just when a scientist needs to study in Berlin or flee fascism - no hint is given that such awards might be something other than natural phenomena. Even the Manhattan Project often seems more a matter of a physicist's views clashing with a soldier's, or a daring foray into the war zone to learn the status of German nuclear research, than the rapid construction and widespread operations of an enterprise that rivaled in size the prewar American automobile industry. Conducting experiments fills many more pages than building production plants. ... I suspect Rhodes really wanted to write the epic of the atomic bomb, an "Atomiad" if you will. Maybe he has.

Matthew Bunn notes Rhodes descriptions of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, writing that they are "excruciating, densely layered with gruesome but telling first-hand accounts of the horrors the bombs inflicted"; he called the book "a wide-ranging tale of the physics and engineering of the bomb, the personalities involved, and the larger story of how society came to think about war".[13]

In 1992, Rhodes followed it up by compiling, editing, and writing the introduction to an annotated version of The Los Alamos Primer, by Manhattan Project scientist Robert Serber. The Primer was a set of lectures given to new arrivals at the secret Los Alamos Laboratory during wartime to get them up to speed about the prominent questions needing to be solved in bomb design, and had been largely declassified in 1965, but was not widely available.

In 1993, Rhodes published Nuclear Renewal: Common Sense about Energy detailing the history of the nuclear power industry in the United States, and future promises of nuclear power. In 1995 he published a sequel to The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, which told the story of the atomic espionage during World War II, the debates over whether the hydrogen bomb ought to be produced, and the eventual creation of the bomb and its consequences for the arms race. In 2007, Rhodes published Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race, a chronicle of the arms buildups during the Cold War, especially focusing on Mikhail Gorbachev and the Reagan administration. The Twilight of the Bombs, the fourth and final volume in his series on nuclear history, was published in 2010. The book documents, among other topics, the post-Cold War nuclear history of the world, nuclear proliferation, and nuclear terrorism.

In September 1942, Groves was appointed director of the ultra-secret Manhattan Project, the code name for the vast effort to produce the bomb. Groves had extensive experience supervising big projects as an engineer, including construction of the Pentagon, and he was widely recognized as a leader who got jobs done on time no matter what.

Groves and Oppenheimer Army Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves, left, and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer work on creation of the atomic bomb during World War II. Share: Share Copy Link Email Facebook X LinkedIn WhatsApp Download: Full Size (286.72 KB) Photo By: Army VIRIN: 450704-O-D0439-003

Groves approved a number of critically important research and engineering endeavors; he also approved production sites for work on the bomb, including Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Los Alamos, New Mexico; and Hanford, Washington.

As leader of the project, Groves directed construction at those sites; made key decisions in the bomb's manufacture process; directed intelligence on German efforts to produce a bomb; and, once the bombs were ready for delivery in 1945, selected targets in an effort to shorten the war.

Nuclear Bomb The first nuclear bomb is detonated in 1945 at the Trinity test site in New Mexico. Share: Share Copy Link Email Facebook X LinkedIn WhatsApp Download: Full Size (471.04 KB) Photo By: Department of Energy VIRIN: 450704-O-D0439-001C

After the end of World War II, the Manhattan Project continued to support atomic weapons testing until the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 split the program into two parts: the Atomic Energy Commission, known today as the Department of Energy, and the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project.

The isotopes uranium-235 and plutonium-239 were selected by the atomic scientists because they readily undergo fission. Fission occurs when a neutron strikes the nucleus of either isotope, splitting the nucleus into fragments and releasing a tremendous amount of energy. The fission process becomes self-sustaining as neutrons produced by the splitting of atom strike nearby nuclei and produce more fission. This is known as a chain reaction and is what causes an atomic explosion.

In order to detonate an atomic weapon, you need a critical mass of fissionable material. This means you need enough U-235 or Pu-239 to ensure that neutrons released by fission will strike another nucleus, thus producing a chain reaction. The more fissionable material you have, the greater the odds that such an event will occur. Critical mass is defined as the amount of material at which a neutron produced by a fission process will, on average, create another fission event.

Once enough U-235 was obtained to power the bomb, Little Boy was constructed using a gun-type design that fired one amount of U-235 at another to combine the two masses. This combination created a critical mass that set off a fission chain reaction to eventually detonate the bomb. The two masses of U-235 had to combine with one another quickly enough to avoid the spontaneous fission of the atoms, which would cause the bomb to fizzle, and thus fail to explode.

Thus, a new design was required. Physicist Seth Neddermeyer at Los Alamos constructed a design for the plutonium bomb that used conventional explosives around a central plutonium mass to quickly squeeze and consolidate the plutonium, increasing the pressure and density of the substance. An increased density allowed the plutonium to reach its critical mass, firing neutrons and allowing the fission chain reaction to proceed. To detonate the bomb, the explosives were ignited, releasing a shock wave that compressed the inner plutonium and led to its explosion.

How close were the Nazis to developing an atomic bomb? The truth is that National Socialist Germany could not possibly have built a weapon like the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. This was not because the country lacked the scientists, resources, or will, but rather because its leaders did not really try. e24fc04721