The Atomic Bomb by Michael Blow

Author:Michael Blow [Michael Blow]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History/Military/World War II
ISBN: 9781612308722
Publisher: New Word City, Inc.
Published: 2015-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

As at Oak Ridge, everything in Hanford was large, even the eight-lane highways leading in and out of the complex. Groves’s engineers argued that in case of a disaster, a superhighway would be the best way to evacuate the city.

Between 1943 and 1945, 554 buildings were constructed at the Hanford site, including three reactors and three plants to separate plutonium from U-238. By autumn 1944, the majority of the reactor issues had been resolved. The most difficult had been to put a jacket around the uranium to ensure that the water would not corrode the metal.

On September 13, Fermi arrived in Hanford to push the first uranium rod into the “B” pile. Afterward, he supervised the loading of the reactor, a process that took nearly two weeks. On September 27, the reactor went critical.

The next morning, however, the power level began to drop. Although Fermi had the control rods pulled out, the chain reaction continued to subside. It looked as if the reactor design - and perhaps the entire $350 million Hanford project - was a bust.

Fermi and John Wheeler, an expert on reactor “poisons,” discovered that the reactor was producing more xenon gas than expected, and this was removing neutrons from the chain reaction. Once the reaction reached a specific power level, the xenon gas shut the reactor down.

There was a solution to the problem: Add more uranium. If the pile had been constructed according to the design of the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory, this would not have been an option. Fortunately, one of Du Pont’s engineers, George Graves, had built extra uranium capacity into the pile as a safeguard. Hanford was back in business.

By early 1945, the Hanford reactor was fully operational, and production of enriched uranium had started at Oak Ridge. There was no doubt there would be enough fissionable material. But at Los Alamos, scientists were still having difficulties with the bomb.

Everyone was sure the “good old gun,” as one researcher called it, would be a success. Six-foot-long barrels had been made, and prototype bombs had been dropped on the New Mexico desert.

But because the implosion technique had not been tested, none of the scientists was confident that a subcritical mass of plutonium or uranium could be pushed to the point where it would become supercritical. At one point, the team had almost decided to abandon implosion, concentrating on designing the gun instead, but when they found out that Pu-239 would not work in a gun, they continued to work on both bomb designs.

On April 12, 1945, Vice President Harry Truman was summoned from the Capitol to the White House, where First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt told him the president had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage and died at Warm Springs, Georgia. Two hours later, Truman was sworn in as the thirty-third president of the United States.

As Truman’s first Cabinet meeting ended later that day, Secretary of War Stimson informed the new chief executive about an “immense project” regarding the “development of a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power.

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