This is where I will take notes on what I am reading. May be a daily thing, or just haphazard thoughts and summaries. Spoilers will be in here.
Further information on the books themselves can be found at the Book List.
January 16th, 2025 |
The Making of the Atomic Bomb | The big story of this section is the British-Norwegian continued attack on the heavy water supply. The Germans got it back up and running pretty quickly, so the British bombed it during lunch to avoid casualties. The book does not report if there was any loss of life. The Germans then planned to move the factory and water to Germany, as informed by a Norwegian engineer. The only agent in the field organized a bomb to go off when everything was travelling by ferry. 26 people drowned. A senseless loss of life, no different than terrorism. The Germans then had no heavy water and were out of reactor development for the war. Then there was a description of the war in Pacific. Not known to the general public was the different fighting methods of the Japanese. While all eyes were on Europe, the Japanese were fighting to the death. Americans thought them little jungle monkeys, but they were a serious adversary and needed the government’s serious attention. Next chapter and a bunch of scientists come from England to work with the Americans. FDR commits to unconditional surrender, a big mistake. |
January 15th, 2025 |
The Making of the Atomic Bomb | There’s a brief description of the Russian nuclear plans. They sniffed out that other countries had a weapons program when there was radio silence in all the physics journals from those countries. There was a brief investigation until Barbarossa changed priorities. By 1943 it was given some serious attention again. Meanwhile there’s a big drama between Szilard and Groves. Szildard hated the compartmentalization which disrupted the open discussions and ideas between scientists. Groves failed to appreciate that the program essentially existed to due to the insistence of this man and a few other immigrant scientists. In response, Szilard started to seek his patent rights and the man was certainly a fighter. A disgusting story then takes place in which Fermi suggests to Oppenheimer a use for spent nuclear material from the piles: poisoning the food supply. Oppenheimer loves the idea and wants enough strontium to kill half a million people. These are civilians were are talking about. And these scientists are civilians. I have lost all respect for Fermi and what amount I may have had for Oppenheimer. Bloodthirsty animals. |
January 14th, 2025 |
The Making of the Atomic Bomb | The next chapter goes into production of U235 and plutonium. First is the cyclotron method, in which the lighter U235 turns with a tighter arc than U238. The separated U235 is then collected. The Oak Ridge plant in Tennessee is built for hundreds of these machines in Alpha and Beta stages, with problems aplenty. The problem I remember is the magnets. First, there is not enough copper available. The Treasury offers to loan 10,000 tons of silver bullion. This is melted down for wire. The transformers are wound with this uninsulated silver wire and submerged in oil. However the spacing is wrong and the oil is full of metallic FOD so the transformers short. Every one has to be dismantled and sent back for repair. Then there is gaseous diffusion, but it was kind of boring and I didn’t follow it too well. To get plutonium, a uranium reactor would be built in unpopulated Washington desert. The Du Pont engineers were going to helium cool it, but Wigner said, as they knew over a year ago, with better graphite and pure uranium it could be water cooled. A big graphite cylinder with aluminum tubes full of aluminum cans of uranium would be in another uranium tube for water flow, 75k gallons per day. This would fission for weeks and then new uranium cans would be popped in, popping out the old into a pool to continue radiating to safe levels. Then they’d be sent for separation. Something like that. |
January 13th, 2025 |
The Making of the Atomic Bomb | It’s good that the author puts American and British actions against civilians in the atrocities category. Many people ignore these things because they are the “good guys”. But whether it is Germans killing Poles or Brits killing Germans or Russians killing Poles and Germans, it’s all evil. Back at Los Alamos, there is some work with plutonium after the cyclotron is running. They measure a significant amount of secondary neutrons from fission, more than U235. Next there’s talk about implosion and Von Neuman (a visiting adviser) and Teller start to discuss how it can be done seriously, and with less radioactive material. Last, we revisit Bohr in Copenhagen. Interesting to me is that the Nazis let the Danes keep their government because the Germans were incredibly dependent on Danish agricultural exports. A part of this deal was that Danish Jews were off-limits to the Nazis. As the Germans started losing the war, strikes and sabotage increased. This gave the Nazis a reason to take over the government and deal with radical elements. Bohr was on their list. He had an open invitation to England, but first he and his wife escaped across the water to Sweden. He personally tried to get the Swedes to openly declare against the Nazi’s (secret) plan to deport the Jews and take them as refugees. The bureaucracy failed and Bohr went around it directly to the king. His plan worked and the Swedish radio broadcast that it will take Danish Jewish refugees, with some 7000 people escaping to the Swedish coast guard. Fearing assassination, Bohr soon left for England in the belly of a Mosquito bomber over dangerous Norway. He soon learned about the reality of atomic weapons. |
January 10th, 2025 |
The Making of the Atomic Bomb | Los Alamos opens and Oppenheimer’s crew are briefed and discuss what needs to be done. There’s not enough material to test anything, so a lot of this relies on theory. They definitely need help with the ordinance part; they’re not bomb builders and yet they need to be. The plan is to use a gun to combine two separate subcritical materials (with more in parallel) to initiate the reaction. A man named Neddermeyer has the idea to use a crushing implosion to bring the material together, but is mostly shot down. A parallel topic is the switch from precision bombing of German targets to area bombing and targeting civilians. The British wished to lower losses and switch to night-bombing. Dropping bombs half-blindly leads to the official adoption of area bombing using explosives and incendiary. The area bombings of Luebeck and Cologne proved successful. To be explicit, the target was no longer factories but the residential areas. Project Gomorrah was designed to destroy Hamburg. Several night bombings by the British and day bombings by the Americans destroyed some parts of the city in July 1943. On the 27th, the air conditions and the mixture of explosives and incendiaries were just right. A firestorm was created; a hurricane of fire, one massive fire over the city, was hot enough to melt the roads. Humans burst from the heat. 37k to 45k civilians, mostly women, children and elderly, were killed. This is horrific and shows the idea the using inhuman methods to “shorten the war” and to “save lives” do not work at best, and are lies to cover intentional war crimes at worst. |
January 9th, 2025 |
The Making of the Atomic Bomb | The project brings on a new leader: General Leslie Groves. He is overall commander and seems to be good at organization and getting things done. He built the Pentagon, after all. He wanted to go overseas and leave Washington, but was not given much choice. Oppenheimer, despite his Communist ties, was chosen to lead the bomb project. Just watch the movie for that. The Japanese have weirdly decided that the bomb was not possible given their resources and also to spend millions of dollars on a cyclotron for bomb development. The Norwegians and British performed some covert operations against the heavy water facility in Norway held by the Germans. The first attempt ended in disaster, with two planes crashing and the survivors executed. The second attempt succeeded and set the Germans back well over a year in heavy water production. The most interesting part has been the Chicago pile work. I’d like a movie on that. The 57 layers of graphite and uranium, something like at 12’ sphere, took several full-time weeks to build. Cadmium control rods were inserted in several locations to absorb neutrons. Then the day came when they started to remove rods and take measurements. Everything matched Fermi’s calculations. Once the last rod was removed, the readings went up and up and up. It would not be stopped. While nerves were high, Fermi took data for 4 minutes and gave the order for the control rods to be returned. A controlled nuclear reactor had been made with natural uranium. |
January 7th, 2025 |
The Making of the Atomic Bomb | Not much of interest has happened after Pearl Harbor. It’s mostly a lot of drama about bureaucracy and organization in the different projects. The New Yorkers are forced to move to Chicago, while Berkley remains in place. Oppenheimer is brought in to run Berkley. Lots of things happen until General Leslie Groves is given overall command, and he seems to be the only one who gets things done, though he didn’t want the job. Fermi and the now Chicago group build various experimental “piles” to get slow-neutron fission out of natural uranium. It’s a lot of engineering. They need big blocks of pure graphite, good uranium, spherical shapes, low absorbing containers, etc. Previous experiments showed a k factor between .8 and .9, meaning less than 1 neutron released on average. The goal is obviously to have more than 1 for a chain reaction. Things seem fine for the plutonium guys; I don’t remember the details. Also I think the Germans gave up on a bomb. There was also a long bit about the hydrogen, or “super”, bomb, in which a fission bomb creates enough heat to fuse hydrogen (deuterium) to helium. It is seriously considered. |
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Updated 1/16/25