Speaker 1: Technology, What tex Stop from host Coom. Hey there, and
Speaker 1: welcome to Text Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland. I'm joining me
Speaker 1: in the studio is my good friend and colleague Den
Speaker 1: Boland's Den, welcome back to the show. Hey, thanks for
Speaker 1: having me. Fact. You know, I have to say I
Speaker 1: worked on an opening joke for this but at uh
Speaker 1: but at this point I thought, you know, I don't
Speaker 1: want to disparage the gravity of what we're doing anything
Speaker 1: less than a few tangents or puns in this story,
Speaker 1: because this is a fascinating story. It's a fascinating story,
Speaker 1: and and you can't get around the fact that the
Speaker 1: end of the story is massively tragic, right Like, like
Speaker 1: there's there's a ton of things that we can talk about,
Speaker 1: and what we are talking about is the Manhattan Project.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna go ahead and let you guys know,
Speaker 1: this sucker is going to be a two parter because
Speaker 1: in order to cover the Manhattan Project, you have to
Speaker 1: have an understanding of what was going on in physics
Speaker 1: leading up to the beginning of the project, which will
Speaker 1: be this episode, and then there's another episode that will
Speaker 1: be all about the actual developments of the project itself.
Speaker 1: And this is complicated for multiple reasons. One, nuclear physics
Speaker 1: not straightforward as it turns out. Yeah, actually lots of
Speaker 1: pressure because of the implosion technique. But we'll get into
Speaker 1: that in episode two. Also politics, a lot of politics.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously, the Manhattan Project was formed as a
Speaker 1: result of World War Two. If World War Two had
Speaker 1: not been happening, the Manhattan Project probably would not have
Speaker 1: been formed, and nuclear power may have either been pushed
Speaker 1: back by quite a bit or someone else would have
Speaker 1: ended up developing it ahead of the United States. So, uh,
Speaker 1: both of those things. Science and politics by themselves are complex.
Speaker 1: And when you come buying the two and you try
Speaker 1: to make science work within the realm of a political structure,
Speaker 1: it gets messy. Yeah, and not not in like a
Speaker 1: cool I got my hair cut at a nice salon.
Speaker 1: Look at me. Messy, not like rolled out of bed. Oh,
Speaker 1: this didn't hike me any time at all. Right, messy
Speaker 1: as in, uh, is a massive loss of blood and treasure.
Speaker 1: I think we're looking at the equivalent of when it
Speaker 1: got rolling thirty billion dollars you you know, yeah, today's money.
Speaker 1: It all depends upon the well, it really depends upon
Speaker 1: how you define the scope of the project, because that's
Speaker 1: something else that's kind of confusing because you hear Manhattan
Speaker 1: Project and you think, okay, uh, Manhattan Project, that's the
Speaker 1: one that took place in oak Ridge, Tennessee, Hanford, Washington,
Speaker 1: Los Alamos, New Mexico. Makes sense. We will explain all
Speaker 1: of that as we go through. So in case you
Speaker 1: weren't aware of, the Manhattan Project was the code named
Speaker 1: the United States government gave to the the effort to
Speaker 1: design and build an atomic bomb for use in World
Speaker 1: War two. And in order for us to talk about
Speaker 1: we have to go back way before World War two.
Speaker 1: In fact, we have to go back before World War One. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: we have to go all the way back to the
Speaker 1: I guess the end of the nineteenth century, that is correct,
Speaker 1: late nineteenth century. Uh. There was a fella by the
Speaker 1: name of Henrie beccarell alright who had made an interesting
Speaker 1: observation observing that some material, when placed against some plates,
Speaker 1: would create a negative image. And he had assumed that
Speaker 1: this material was phosphorescent, that it absorbed sunlight and then
Speaker 1: given off some form of ray to create this image,
Speaker 1: but later determined that he was mistaken that there was
Speaker 1: no need for the sunlight. The stuff was giving off
Speaker 1: the ray is by itself. And then you had the
Speaker 1: Curies coming along who who went on to study this themselves.
Speaker 1: Marie Cury coined the term radioactive radioactive with the word
Speaker 1: ray in it. And so at this point there was
Speaker 1: an understanding that certain elements had a type of energy
Speaker 1: they could give off spontaneously, spontaneous radiation. And that is
Speaker 1: the beginning, the nub that the kernel that forms the
Speaker 1: the very center of the Manhattan Project's purpose. So building
Speaker 1: on that we then have there's a guy in Nive.
Speaker 1: He had a little theory. It was a special theory,
Speaker 1: I mean relatively special man. Yes, yes, And that that
Speaker 1: man you may know today through countless Internet memes Albert Einstein. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: Albert Einstein al to friends, was a brilliant physicist, obviously,
Speaker 1: and it was all the way back in when Einstein
Speaker 1: proposed the special theory of relativity, which, among many other things,
Speaker 1: positive that energy and matter are pretty much interchangeable. And
Speaker 1: this is where the the famous equation E equals MC
Speaker 1: squared comes from. The E means energy, the M means mass,
Speaker 1: The C squared C stands for the constant of the
Speaker 1: speed of light through a vacuum. Keeping in mind that
Speaker 1: light actually can travel at different speeds depending upon the
Speaker 1: medium through which it travels. Travels more slowly through water
Speaker 1: than through a vacuum, for example. So you take that
Speaker 1: constant of lights the speed of light in a vacuum,
Speaker 1: and you square it, so a number that's already huge
Speaker 1: gets huger. That huge number, by the way, in case
Speaker 1: you're wondering, is two seven, four hundred fifty eight meters
Speaker 1: per second. Squaring that, you get eight point nine nine
Speaker 1: times ten to the sixteen power. It's a big number.
Speaker 1: So what that tells you if you look at that equation,
Speaker 1: what that tells you is that a very tiny amount
Speaker 1: of mass is equivalent to an enormous amount of energy,
Speaker 1: and vice versa. An enormous amount of energy is equivalent
Speaker 1: to a teeny tiny little bit of mass. So if
Speaker 1: you were to have a physical process in which you
Speaker 1: start with an atom and you split that atom, and
Speaker 1: the two components of that split atom collectively have less
Speaker 1: mass than the original atom, you can't destroy or create
Speaker 1: energy or mass, but you can convert one to the other.
Speaker 1: That mask gets converted into energy, essentially kinetic energy, which
Speaker 1: gets converted into heat and then you get a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of heat from it. Yeah, that's what Einstein had said.
Speaker 1: He says, this is this is the way the universe works.
Speaker 1: Energy and mass ultimately the same thing. And then there
Speaker 1: were if I recall, there were three broad historical reactions.
Speaker 1: Some people said nah, some people said maybe, and a
Speaker 1: lot of people went oh, yeah, exactly, yeah, and and
Speaker 1: so this really uh, you know, we're gonna be telling
Speaker 1: about a lot about two different types of scientists. Theoretical
Speaker 1: scientists not they're not theoretical they work in the realm
Speaker 1: of theory, and experimental scientists who take theory, apply experiments
Speaker 1: to test those theories and then find out if the
Speaker 1: results either bear the theorial or it needs to be
Speaker 1: tweaked or whatever. Right, So, uh. In nineteen eleven we
Speaker 1: get another important development by a discovery by a fellow
Speaker 1: named Ernest Rutherford. Now, Rutherford proposes a model of the
Speaker 1: atom in which you have a nucleus of positive particles
Speaker 1: which are dubbed protons, and they're orbited by negatively charged
Speaker 1: particles dubbed electrons. That's the Rutherford model of the atom.
Speaker 1: And it's the simplest version question yes, just just for
Speaker 1: you and the audience. I'm sure a lot of people
Speaker 1: have wondered this when they were learning this. Why don't
Speaker 1: you go with no trons, no tron's I mean that
Speaker 1: sounds so much cooler because he was pro it's a
Speaker 1: positive thing. Well, you know, like protons, electrons, protons, no trons. Oh,
Speaker 1: I got you. But being being negative, those would be
Speaker 1: the no trons because electrons are the agent through which
Speaker 1: electricity is. You know, it's a matter of priority, and
Speaker 1: that transcends a matter of marketing. But I'm saying, well,
Speaker 1: we could even go back to the fact that Benjamin
Speaker 1: Franklin was convinced that current means that that's the movement
Speaker 1: of positively charged particles from one point to the other,
Speaker 1: which is why current flows in the opposite direction of
Speaker 1: actual electricity, which, by the way, it drives me crazy.
Speaker 1: You know you've talked about it before, and which, by
Speaker 1: the way, I think we could cut to the end
Speaker 1: of the show because this means clearly that nuclear weapons
Speaker 1: are should be the blame for those should be eight
Speaker 1: at the at the field of Benjamin Franklin, like so
Speaker 1: many things, the bad guy. But anyway, yeah, so Ernest Rutherford.
Speaker 1: So he discovers this, He creates this model, and then
Speaker 1: Neil's Bore, another important physicist, He refines that model. He
Speaker 1: starts to concentrate on the quantum behavior of electrons, and
Speaker 1: that's where we get the Bore model of Adams. And
Speaker 1: then I'm going to skip ahead to nineteen nineteen, and
Speaker 1: that's when Rutherford transmutes nitrogen into oxygen. This is something
Speaker 1: that alchemists had been attempting to do for centuries, although
Speaker 1: their form of transportation was more about lead into gold sure, sure,
Speaker 1: or the philosopher's stone or whatever. But this is an
Speaker 1: actual transmutation. This is a point where Rutherford uh crosses.
Speaker 1: I don't want to say it as though he's like
Speaker 1: doing something bad, but where he where he goes from
Speaker 1: just a theory to the application the way we're talking
Speaker 1: about demonstrating it in the real world, and uh this
Speaker 1: triggers even more changes in our right. So, the way
Speaker 1: he does this is he takes some nitrogen atoms and
Speaker 1: he bombards them with something called alpha particles, and alpha
Speaker 1: particles essentially, although he didn't know this yet, an alpha
Speaker 1: particle is essentially two protons and two neutrons, also known
Speaker 1: as a heli helium nucleus. So if you use a
Speaker 1: helium nucleus, if you strip away the electrons, what you're
Speaker 1: left with is essentially an alpha particle, and he but
Speaker 1: bards these nitrogen adoms with that. That's what converts it
Speaker 1: over into oxygen. So then we skip ahead by a
Speaker 1: couple of decades, are well, a little more than a
Speaker 1: decade to ninety two. Yes, this is when James Chadwick,
Speaker 1: who was one of Rutherford's colleagues, discovers the nucleus of
Speaker 1: an adom can, by the way, big year in physics. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so he discovers that the nucleus of an adom can
Speaker 1: also contain particles that have no charge at all, hanging out.
Speaker 1: They're just they're they're they're kind of like that roommate
Speaker 1: I used to have, who you know. I felt like,
Speaker 1: come on, dude, just just pay your part of the
Speaker 1: utilities already, come on. I'm sorry. I wasn't gonna be so. Yeah,
Speaker 1: these are these are neutral. That's that's the neutrons. And
Speaker 1: by this time there was an understanding now that the
Speaker 1: atoms typically consisted of protons and neutrons and the nucleus
Speaker 1: and orbited by a number of electrons that were equal
Speaker 1: to the number of protons, and that's what balances out
Speaker 1: the charge. There's a but oh, let's infomercial it. But wait,
Speaker 1: there's more. There is more. Two things that you can
Speaker 1: you can talk about, one which is really important in
Speaker 1: nuclear physics, and one which is not going to really
Speaker 1: play a part. One is that being that if you
Speaker 1: have an atom that has an excess or of electrons
Speaker 1: or too few electrons, it's an UH. It's an ion
Speaker 1: of that particular atom. But you can also have a
Speaker 1: different number of neutrons from the protons. You can have
Speaker 1: a variety of them, and we call these different varieties
Speaker 1: of these various atoms isotopes. So an isotope of an
Speaker 1: atom is UH is a version of that atom that
Speaker 1: has a specific number of neutrons. So that's important to
Speaker 1: remember now. At the time when Chadwick made this discovery,
Speaker 1: hydrogen was the the the lightest, the least massive of
Speaker 1: all the elements at one, and the heaviest or the
Speaker 1: one with the most mass was uranium at ninety two.
Speaker 1: That number refers to the number of protons in the atom,
Speaker 1: not the number of neutrons. So chemists had discovered that
Speaker 1: the atoms of the of the same elements sometimes had
Speaker 1: different weights. This is what led to the discovery of isotopes.
Speaker 1: So they'd say, oh, well, here's a uranium atom, but
Speaker 1: we've got this other uranium atom, and they they're chemically identical.
Speaker 1: They're exactly the same chemically, but this other one's a
Speaker 1: little heavier than this One's what gives what that doesn't
Speaker 1: make sense, and that's where they discovered isotopes. So uranium
Speaker 1: has three isotopes. All of them have ninety two protons
Speaker 1: and ninety two electrons, because if they didn't, it wouldn't
Speaker 1: be uranium. But it does have a different number of neutrons.
Speaker 1: So you've got uranium two three eight. That's the most
Speaker 1: common form of uranium found in nature. It has a
Speaker 1: hundred forty six neutrons in the nucleus and it's nine
Speaker 1: It makes up all natural uranium. So when you when
Speaker 1: you go uranium hunting, odds are you going to find
Speaker 1: you two thirty eight. Then you have uranium two thirty five,
Speaker 1: which has a hundred forty three neutrons, and uranium two
Speaker 1: thirty four, which has a hundred forty two neutrons, and
Speaker 1: you two thirty five will become incredibly important in its discussion,
Speaker 1: and you two thirty four is one of the decay products, right, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So also in nineteen thirty two going on at the
Speaker 1: same time, you had physicists J. D. Crow Croft and E. T. S.
Speaker 1: Walton split a lithium atom into two helium nuclei. Uh,
Speaker 1: the the protons and neutrons I was talking about by
Speaker 1: bombarding the lithium with protons using a particle accelerator. And
Speaker 1: this is the first example of someone splitting the atom
Speaker 1: the very first time. Yeah, it is. In my opinion,
Speaker 1: this is up there with the first human footfall on
Speaker 1: the move. Yeah. This fundamentally changes everything, and it's strange
Speaker 1: that we don't hear more people talk about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of people will talk about the early work
Speaker 1: in nuclear fission, which we will get to, which happened
Speaker 1: in a place that precipitated the need for ment projects.
Speaker 1: So in California, same time as everything else, you had
Speaker 1: a group with ernest O. Lawrence who will be incredibly
Speaker 1: important in this conversation, Stanley Livingston and Milton White who
Speaker 1: operated the first cyclotron on the Berkeley campus of the
Speaker 1: University of California, and Lawrence would end up playing an
Speaker 1: instrumental role in the Manhattan Project. Yeah. No, uh. For
Speaker 1: everyone is wondering a cyclotron, it is a particle accelerator,
Speaker 1: right right. It was this is the era where we
Speaker 1: start getting the earliest particle accelerators. The Vandergraf would build
Speaker 1: one as well, in a different style. Uh. And Lawrence
Speaker 1: was was working on this early and not with the
Speaker 1: goal of nuclear fission necessarily. It was part of particle
Speaker 1: physics to understand more about the fundamental particles that make
Speaker 1: up all the stuff around us. Uh. And it ultimately
Speaker 1: would end up being used to help create the material
Speaker 1: for nuclear weapons. Um. But at the time no one
Speaker 1: had any concept of doing that. Ninety three there were
Speaker 1: some early attempts to find a reliable way to split atoms,
Speaker 1: but they're largely unsuc sccessful or very inefficient. They require
Speaker 1: huge amounts of power. And I'll tell you why. Most
Speaker 1: of them used protons fired at an atomic nucleus. So
Speaker 1: here's the thing. Protons have a positive charge. Correct. Atomic
Speaker 1: nucleus also has a positive charge because it's only made
Speaker 1: up of protons and neutrons, So we are positive and positive.
Speaker 1: So what happens if you put two ends, like two
Speaker 1: northern ends of two different magnets together against each other. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they do. It's uh, you know a lot like me
Speaker 1: and Josh Clark, we just despite the fact we sit
Speaker 1: right next to each other, there's just this repulsion. It's
Speaker 1: the other one. It's kind of amazing, like, you know,
Speaker 1: like if I start walking towards Josh's chair just rolls
Speaker 1: the other way. Now, Josh and I get along just fine.
Speaker 1: Obviously he was just recently on the episode tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: so um. But yeah, it was really hard to get
Speaker 1: a direct hit on a nucleus because of this these
Speaker 1: light charges repelling one another. In fact, there were some
Speaker 1: estimates that said that it only happened one every one
Speaker 1: million tries non efficient way to split at him. So
Speaker 1: while people were starting to think there might be a
Speaker 1: way of getting some energy from this, like to use
Speaker 1: this as a means of generating power or perhaps even
Speaker 1: creating a weapon down the line, the efficiency was so
Speaker 1: low that it didn't seem like it was going to
Speaker 1: be uh a viable exactly, Like it's a good proof
Speaker 1: of concept. Yeah, So Albert Einstein, Niels Bore, and Rutherford
Speaker 1: all felt that the process would be great for getting
Speaker 1: a better understanding of nuclear physics, but would remain impractical
Speaker 1: for pretty much anything else. Now, Rutherford actually described the
Speaker 1: idea of harnessing nuclear energy as moonshine. That was what
Speaker 1: he called it. Einstein His version was saying, it's like
Speaker 1: the ability to get a proton to to collide with
Speaker 1: the nucleus would be akin to walking into an enormous
Speaker 1: room that's pitch black and shooting at a couple of
Speaker 1: birds flying around randomly through the right. Yeah, that was
Speaker 1: his his comparison. Is no way to make it not
Speaker 1: an accident, right and heels Boor said, it's pretty much
Speaker 1: a long shot unless we figure out something else. And
Speaker 1: then you had another fellow, a Hungarian physicist who was
Speaker 1: living in the United States, Leo sciss Lard, and sciss
Speaker 1: Lard hypothesized that if you use something else, not protons,
Speaker 1: what have you used a beam of neutrons aimed at
Speaker 1: an atom because neutrons have no charge, so it doesn't matter,
Speaker 1: there's no repulsion there. Yeah, The only thing is that
Speaker 1: how do you shoot a non charged particle? Because if
Speaker 1: you're using protons, then all you can do all you
Speaker 1: have to do is created a positive charge to repel
Speaker 1: it or a negative charge to attract it and move
Speaker 1: it that way, but a neutral one is a little trickier. Um.
Speaker 1: But he thought, if you could do this, and if
Speaker 1: the atom was large enough, it had its own neutrons,
Speaker 1: sometimes when the atom splits up, it might give off
Speaker 1: neutrons too. And if it gives off neutrons with enough
Speaker 1: energy and you have enough atoms there, those neutrons could
Speaker 1: collide with other atoms, which could cause them to break apart,
Speaker 1: and those neutrons could go out and hit other atoms,
Speaker 1: and each time you would be multiplying this effect. As
Speaker 1: long as you had more than one neutron being given
Speaker 1: off and as long as those were colliding with some
Speaker 1: other atoms, this trend would continue until you were out
Speaker 1: of stuff or the neutrons, or there just weren't enough
Speaker 1: atoms for the neutrons to make contact, and you would
Speaker 1: get a nuclear chain reaction which you could use to
Speaker 1: either power or a city or blow one up. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: at that point they you know, the next question becomes like, well, yes,
Speaker 1: at that point, the next question becomes a matter of control,
Speaker 1: because you know it's all well and good from an
Speaker 1: academic for suspective to say, oh, guys, look at this
Speaker 1: neat thing that we think we can do. And then,
Speaker 1: you know, for someone to say, okay, well let's let's
Speaker 1: try it. Let's get the rubber on the road, and
Speaker 1: then what do you think is going to happen? And
Speaker 1: they say, well, one or two things. It's either going
Speaker 1: to power the city or blow it up, right, but
Speaker 1: we're pretty confident it's going to be one of those two.
Speaker 1: So the next question is like, how do you make
Speaker 1: this useful? Right? And for Leo, I'm gonna call Leo
Speaker 1: because I'm just gonna Putcher his last name over otherwise, uh,
Speaker 1: the Hungarian physicist. Uh. For Leo, the problem was that
Speaker 1: when he was first trying this out, he was using
Speaker 1: lighter atoms and he couldn't get these sustained reactions, so
Speaker 1: he kind of he kind of thought, well, I guess
Speaker 1: that's a bust. It seemed like a good idea, but
Speaker 1: it's not working. So so so there it became an
Speaker 1: academic question for a while because there was they weren't
Speaker 1: He wasn't using the heavier atoms which would have created
Speaker 1: a sustainable reaction. They would have been dense enough to
Speaker 1: have that impact. Right, they don't decay in the same
Speaker 1: way that other other ones might just take on the neutron,
Speaker 1: and they wouldn't split apart in other words, So moving
Speaker 1: on with four, we get another fellow who becomes very
Speaker 1: important in Manhattan Project, Enrico Fermi, an Italian physicist. He
Speaker 1: begins to use neutrons to bobard atoms, and he figured
Speaker 1: the uncharged particles wouldn't meet that same resistance as protons,
Speaker 1: just as Leo had. He was right. He bombarded sixty
Speaker 1: three different stable elements with neutrons and created thirty seven
Speaker 1: new radioactive atoms. And he also found out that if
Speaker 1: he used carbon and hydrogen, he could actually slow the
Speaker 1: movement of the neutrons a little bit, and that would
Speaker 1: actually increase the chances of a nucleus accepting a new neutron.
Speaker 1: So you wanted to fire the neutrons fast, but not
Speaker 1: too fast. You had to you had to control that.
Speaker 1: Uh So he then bombarded uranium with neutrons. Had created something,
Speaker 1: but he had no idea what it was. In fact,
Speaker 1: no one was really sure at the time. There was
Speaker 1: a lot of disagreement in the scientific community about whatever
Speaker 1: Fermi had made, they were like, because it was new,
Speaker 1: and because it was new, they didn't know, right. So yeah,
Speaker 1: so they were wondering if it was transuranic, as in
Speaker 1: a man made element that would not be found in nature,
Speaker 1: or if Fermi had somehow managed to split up uranium
Speaker 1: so that behave like lighter elements, because some of the
Speaker 1: stuff that was left over it seemed really similar to
Speaker 1: lighter elements on the elemental table. But how could that be?
Speaker 1: It's certainly not magic. Yeah, And it's funny because he
Speaker 1: had actually achieved nuclear fission but did not know it.
Speaker 1: He didn't he didn't understand it enough to know that
Speaker 1: that's what had happened at the time. And that takes
Speaker 1: us to eight. And this is the event that really
Speaker 1: creates the need for the Manhattan Project because it takes
Speaker 1: place in Berlin. Now eight in Berlin, it was already
Speaker 1: a very tumultuous time in up right. World War two
Speaker 1: had not yet begun, but Germany had started to really
Speaker 1: cause huge problems, including uh, cracking down on the Jewish
Speaker 1: population already. Uh, and it was you know, the whole
Speaker 1: Germany Austrian alliance was was an issue. And then there
Speaker 1: were rumblings about Germany possibly invading other countries and then
Speaker 1: also spreading to you know, Italy as well. Yes, Italy
Speaker 1: was also invading African nations at the time, so this
Speaker 1: was really a tumultuous period. So in Berlin, UH, Germany
Speaker 1: was a place where there where particle physics, theoretical physics
Speaker 1: had really blossomed at the end of the nineteenth century
Speaker 1: beginning of the twentieth century, and you had a collection
Speaker 1: of scientists who all were just interested in furthering our
Speaker 1: understanding of the universe. They just happened to be in
Speaker 1: a place where that understanding was going to be uh
Speaker 1: tilted toward the ends of the German government. So radiochemists
Speaker 1: Auto Han and Fritz Strassman, we're using Ferms method of
Speaker 1: bombarding atoms with neutrons, and they found that uranium nuclei,
Speaker 1: unlike other nuclei, didn't just absorb the neutrons. They broke
Speaker 1: apart into two more or less equal pieces. They became
Speaker 1: fragments of uranium and radioactive barrium isotopes, which explained why
Speaker 1: some of the substances from firm's experiments resembled lighter elements
Speaker 1: because they were they were barium. So that was the
Speaker 1: the scientific explanation of what was going on with Fermi
Speaker 1: and Firm. He's like, huh, that's interesting. Um. What's also
Speaker 1: interesting is that this information because you know, it also
Speaker 1: released some energy. Uh. This information was examined by Lease
Speaker 1: Mightner and her nephew Otto Frish. Uh. Mightner was a
Speaker 1: Jewish exile. She had fled Austria and was living in
Speaker 1: Sweden and was working with Han and Strassmann through correspondence
Speaker 1: UM and she and Fresh looked at the results of
Speaker 1: the experiments and concluded that they released an enormous amount
Speaker 1: of energy and that this marked a new type of
Speaker 1: process which was explained by the equals MC squared equation.
Speaker 1: So again we see a physical proof of a theoretical proposition. Right.
Speaker 1: And this also started bringing to light, Hey, maybe we
Speaker 1: should really take that Einstein equation thing really seriously. Um.
Speaker 1: So Fresh was the one who called the process fission.
Speaker 1: That's where we get nuclear fission was from Otto Frish's
Speaker 1: description of the of of this. He was taking um
Speaker 1: inspiration from biological processes and cell division, so that's where
Speaker 1: he came up with fission. And just to just to
Speaker 1: interject not too much of the political endscape. But I
Speaker 1: do think it's important to note a big thing happened
Speaker 1: happened to for me in thirty eight as well. Why
Speaker 1: don't you tell me about that? Well, in ninety eight
Speaker 1: he left Italy to uh receive his Nobel Prize in physics,
Speaker 1: which is, uh, you know, it's a pretty good deal.
Speaker 1: It's like when you get that tenth stamp on your
Speaker 1: subway card. Oh, I was thinking, like, you finally get
Speaker 1: that star on the on the Walk of Fame. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you finally get the star of which I think I
Speaker 1: don't remember which subway stamp that is. No, it's it's
Speaker 1: like I think you gotta go like at least twelve times. Oh, man,
Speaker 1: come on, that's a commitment. Anyway. Well, somehow I'm going
Speaker 1: to go out on a limb and say it's because
Speaker 1: he was a genius, uh, and the based on his
Speaker 1: discoveries for me, leaves Italy to receive the Nobel Prize,
Speaker 1: and he never returns because you know, at the time,
Speaker 1: as you know to your earlier point, the situation in
Speaker 1: Europe is at a slow boil, and especially if you
Speaker 1: are Jewish, as for me, is this is uh, this
Speaker 1: is a time where you can, like legoists smell a
Speaker 1: fell wind. Yeah, there's actually there's a I mean, if
Speaker 1: you and I'm sure I know I've talked about this
Speaker 1: in a previous episode. I can't remember what the subject was,
Speaker 1: but I remember specifically talking about um uh German scientists,
Speaker 1: German and Austrian scientists who fled Europe in advance of
Speaker 1: the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. UH and
Speaker 1: then some who stuck around believing that things would get better,
Speaker 1: only to find out that in fact was not the case.
Speaker 1: And how despite their brilliance and their contributions to science,
Speaker 1: because of their their heritage, they were treated they were
Speaker 1: you know, they were pulled away from their work, some
Speaker 1: of them, of them were imprisoned. Um. And of course
Speaker 1: there's a whole other story we could talk about with
Speaker 1: the United States liberating certain scientists to work for them
Speaker 1: instead of for the Nazis. That might be, it might
Speaker 1: be a little bit. That is definitely a different, too
Speaker 1: far different. That's actually more in rocketry than it is
Speaker 1: with the Manse. But at any rate, so nine our
Speaker 1: buddy Leo, he realizes the work by Han and Strassmann
Speaker 1: could be the answer to his failures to produce a
Speaker 1: nuclear chain reaction, and that uranium would be heavy enough
Speaker 1: and couldmit neutrons at an energy great enough to cause
Speaker 1: a split in another atom. So if you had enough uranium,
Speaker 1: you could presumably create a nuclear chain reaction that way.
Speaker 1: Uh So this is this renews his interest in the
Speaker 1: possibility of creating one of these. Um He actually asked
Speaker 1: that for me and Frederick Jolie Currie refrain from publishing
Speaker 1: their findings. He asks them not to publish them because
Speaker 1: since he's made this realization that a nuclear chain reaction
Speaker 1: could be possible, his fear is that if they publish
Speaker 1: their findings, the Nazis will hear about it, and because
Speaker 1: the initial study was done in Berlin, they could end
Speaker 1: up putting this on the fast track to developing a
Speaker 1: weapons program, which would change the course of the war. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which keep in mind, this is when the war officially begins,
Speaker 1: right when you know when the World War two start, Well,
Speaker 1: people would say that's when Germany invaded Poland, and that's
Speaker 1: that happens in the ninety nine. So he asks them
Speaker 1: not to publish their findings. Now. Fermi says okay and
Speaker 1: holds off, but Curie goes ahead and publishes his work
Speaker 1: in April nineteen thirty nine. So it turns out those
Speaker 1: concerns were warranted. To Leo turns to the the rock
Speaker 1: star of rock stars, because keep in mind, this is
Speaker 1: an era when scientists had a certain prestige among the public.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is the era of people like Tesla
Speaker 1: making headlines and Edison, and meanwhile you've got other scientists
Speaker 1: and engineers who are capturing the imagination of hundreds of
Speaker 1: thousands of people. He turns to the most influential of
Speaker 1: them all, good old Einstein, and Leo says, to al
Speaker 1: listen here about Bubby. Uh that equation you made awesome.
Speaker 1: Turns out you're right. Problem now we know how to
Speaker 1: make a practical application of that. Potentially it's gonna take
Speaker 1: some years. But the Germans are already aware of this,
Speaker 1: and you know how bad the Germans can be. We're
Speaker 1: having this conversation not in Germany. And when I say Germans,
Speaker 1: obviously I'm talking about the Nazi Party. I have nothing
Speaker 1: against Germans at any rate. So he says, we need
Speaker 1: to convince the United States government that we have to
Speaker 1: get on this right now, because if we don't, they
Speaker 1: will and then that's just gonna be domination for Germany.
Speaker 1: And so Einstein, convinced by Leo, decides to write a
Speaker 1: letter to President Roosevelt Fdr not not Teddy. So he
Speaker 1: writes a letter to Roosevelt and expresses their concerns about
Speaker 1: the possibility of a nuclear weapon program starting in Germany
Speaker 1: and arguing that, uh, the United States really has to
Speaker 1: take that into consideration. Uh. The letter is sent in
Speaker 1: August ninety nine, and on September one, ninety nine, Germany
Speaker 1: invades Poland. World War two begins officially because that's when
Speaker 1: you get other nations in Europe declaring war against Germany.
Speaker 1: So Roosevelt has a meeting with his close friend and
Speaker 1: unofficial advisor, Alexander Sachs, who's not a politician, he's a
Speaker 1: financial advisor type. Saxon Roosevelt sit down and on October eleventh,
Speaker 1: ninety nine, they talk about Einstein's letter. On October nineteenth,
Speaker 1: Roosevelt writes back to Einstein and says he has formed
Speaker 1: a committee made up of representatives from the Army and
Speaker 1: the Navy plus Sacks to research uranium. Yeah. The Advisory
Speaker 1: Committee on Uranium, headed by Lyman J. Briggs. Yeah, Briggs
Speaker 1: would become another important figure in this in this story
Speaker 1: that is formed officially on October twenty one, nineteen thirty nine.
Speaker 1: So this happens fast, right, They talk about on the eleventh.
Speaker 1: On the nineteenth he writes back to Einstein. On the
Speaker 1: twenty one, this new committee meets for the first time. Uh. Briggs,
Speaker 1: by the way, was the former director of the National
Speaker 1: Bureau of Standards. Now you get Feremi and Leo concentrating
Speaker 1: on using carbon in the form of graphite to slow
Speaker 1: down neutrons in a pile of you two thirty eight,
Speaker 1: and by slowing down the neutrons, they hope to increase
Speaker 1: the chances of a chain reaction. But they discovered that
Speaker 1: that method would really only be suitable for probably generating
Speaker 1: power because it would require too large a form factor
Speaker 1: to make an effective bomb out of it. The uranium
Speaker 1: didn't react at a level fast enough for it to
Speaker 1: be an explosive release of power. So for me thought,
Speaker 1: the chances of this being useful in a weapon are
Speaker 1: pretty slim, but it could be a really useful way
Speaker 1: of generating electricity. Now, meanwhile, Uh, if we moved to
Speaker 1: nineteen forty physicists were starting to run into a problem.
Speaker 1: Uranium two thirty eight was not prone to creating these
Speaker 1: nuclear chain reactions. They were, they were having issues with this,
Speaker 1: and that's the most common when that's the one that
Speaker 1: is of the world's uranium. Right, So here's your stuff,
Speaker 1: but it don't work. It would be like imagine that
Speaker 1: you you have, you know, a big battery drawer, and
Speaker 1: those batteries have just a little juice in them. They're
Speaker 1: not enough for you to like, you know, you put
Speaker 1: them in your RC car and your car just goes
Speaker 1: you know, I hate that. But there still out there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and some of that is uranium two thirty five, but
Speaker 1: it's it's usually wrapped up in you two thirty eight.
Speaker 1: It's not you know, it's not like you just find
Speaker 1: little veins of YouTube five out there. So John Are
Speaker 1: Dunning observed that uranium two thirty five appeared to be
Speaker 1: a lot more promising, but only if you could separate
Speaker 1: it from you two thirty eight. So now they're they're thinking, well,
Speaker 1: if there's some way for us to separate these isotopes
Speaker 1: from two thirty five from two thirty eight and concentrate
Speaker 1: enough to thirty five and one spot, we might be
Speaker 1: able to create a nuclear reaction chain reaction that is
Speaker 1: sustainable until a significant amount of that fuel is converted
Speaker 1: into energy, in which case you would have either a
Speaker 1: big boom or a sustained power source. So we're going
Speaker 1: for the boom. Yes, so without enriching you, two thirty
Speaker 1: five is pretty much impossible to experience. Meant further, they
Speaker 1: didn't have a way of doing this like they figure
Speaker 1: well to thirty five according to the math is better.
Speaker 1: Here's the problem. I don't know how to get the
Speaker 1: two thirty five out from the two yet right in
Speaker 1: a way that would come across come up with more
Speaker 1: than just microscopic amounts of and we're talking about the
Speaker 1: need for kims of the stuff. So it's a problem.
Speaker 1: It was also in ninety that the Advisory Committee on
Speaker 1: Uranium recommended that the government fund research into isotope separation
Speaker 1: and nuclear chain reactions, which the committee did. So separating
Speaker 1: two from two thirty five was hard. They're chemically identical,
Speaker 1: so you can't use chemistry to do it because they're
Speaker 1: going to react exactly the same way they're coming. Masses
Speaker 1: differ by less than one per cent, so finding a
Speaker 1: way of separating them by mass is also a little tricky.
Speaker 1: But one of the more promising methods was the electro
Speaker 1: magnetic method. Now, this meant that you would create a
Speaker 1: magnetic field generated by a mass spectrometer to separate particles,
Speaker 1: and essentially you create a magnetic field, and yeah, I
Speaker 1: had the particles come into contact with that magnetic field.
Speaker 1: The magnetic field would deflect particles. Particles that had greater
Speaker 1: mass would be deflected a shorter distance. Yeah, because I
Speaker 1: can't push those as far right. So you could do
Speaker 1: this and deflect those particles. But it wasn't exactly fast.
Speaker 1: In nineteen forty they estimated that to create a gram
Speaker 1: of you two thirty five using a mass spectrometer in
Speaker 1: this way, if you took you two thirty eight and
Speaker 1: two thirty five together and tried to just get one
Speaker 1: gram of you two thirty five, it would take you
Speaker 1: approximately twenty seven thousand years. Not not like not the
Speaker 1: ideal time frame. Not if you wanted to respond to
Speaker 1: escalating aggression in Europe, not not so much seven years.
Speaker 1: Probably some multiple conflicts would have had happened and resolved
Speaker 1: during that time. I mean, I think Hitler, who was
Speaker 1: admittedly an ambitious dude was only planning on the ranch
Speaker 1: itself to be like a thousand years. Yeah, so it
Speaker 1: would have been a pretty it would have been a
Speaker 1: pretty long long bet on the boy. We would have
Speaker 1: been embarrassingly late to the party. Yes, So there were
Speaker 1: other ones too that they were looking into. One of
Speaker 1: them was Gassiest diffusion, which I have suffered from myself
Speaker 1: an occasion to say thank you. Gassiest diffusion was that's
Speaker 1: where you would use a porous barrier and you would
Speaker 1: use gas that has you two thirty eight and YouTube
Speaker 1: thirty five atoms in it to pass through this porous barrier. Now,
Speaker 1: the Youto thirty five, being of less mass, would pass
Speaker 1: more readily through the barrier. So you would do this
Speaker 1: once and then the mixture you would have would have
Speaker 1: a higher concentration of You two thirty five than the
Speaker 1: previous one did because fewer of the Youto thirty eight
Speaker 1: would have gone through. But then you have to repeat
Speaker 1: the process, and you repeat the process over and over
Speaker 1: and over again. It's kind of like passing a solution
Speaker 1: through a filter, and each pass the filter catches more
Speaker 1: and more of the stuff you don't want and allows
Speaker 1: the stuff you do want to go through, but it's
Speaker 1: not fool proof. That's why you have to keep on
Speaker 1: doing it the process, so again not terribly efficient. John
Speaker 1: Dunning focused on that particular method. Then you also had
Speaker 1: the possibility of using centrifuges and a centrifuge, you know
Speaker 1: it essentially it spins a round and a round and
Speaker 1: around us a centrifugal force or tripital force if you prefer,
Speaker 1: but centrifical force to to separate out materials. The heavier
Speaker 1: materials sink to one end, the lighter materials are pushed
Speaker 1: to the top. So in this case you two thirty
Speaker 1: five would be kind of at the top and center
Speaker 1: of the centrifuge, and the U two three it would
Speaker 1: be would it sinkle down lower and you would skim
Speaker 1: it off the top. Centrifuges however, at the time not
Speaker 1: terribly reliable. That was headed off by a guy named
Speaker 1: Jesse W. Beams at the University of Virginia. We're gonna
Speaker 1: get into the politics, and there's a guy I have
Speaker 1: a feeling that he's come up and stuff they don't
Speaker 1: want you to know. Maybe once or twice have you
Speaker 1: guys ever talked about Vanavar Bush. We have talked about
Speaker 1: Vanavar Bush. He is a He was an American engineer
Speaker 1: and inventor. He headed the U S Office of Scientific
Speaker 1: Research and Development. Uh and he was one of the
Speaker 1: early uh now, well, okay, he was the go to
Speaker 1: guy from military R and D at the time in
Speaker 1: the US. He was also kind of like the liaison
Speaker 1: between the politicians and the scientists. That's a great way
Speaker 1: to put it, because he had the analytical scientific mind.
Speaker 1: He had the chops that would be required for a scientist.
Speaker 1: Again like rock Star to respect you. He's incredibly ambitious
Speaker 1: as well as effective at maneuvering through different power structures.
Speaker 1: Like this guy was like he could get stuff done
Speaker 1: and no offense to the a various stereotypes of scientists.
Speaker 1: But he probably was better at playing the game of diplomacy. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: because he was he knew he understood how that particular
Speaker 1: science worked. So he was the president of the Carnegie
Speaker 1: Foundation and then was appointed the head of the National
Speaker 1: Defense Research Committee, which was a voice within the executive
Speaker 1: branch of government. And under that the Uranium Committee was reorganized.
Speaker 1: So the Uranium Committee gets uh kind of a new version,
Speaker 1: a new yeah kind of mission statement. Um and and
Speaker 1: also meant that it was no longer organized under the
Speaker 1: military department, so it didn't have to Yeah, I meant
Speaker 1: they could get their funding outside of the military. So
Speaker 1: instead of the Army or the Navy deciding all right,
Speaker 1: we're going to allocate this much of our budget towards
Speaker 1: uranium research, it was an independent organization underneath this new
Speaker 1: committee um So Bush allocated funds to continuing research in
Speaker 1: nuclear power and weapons. But he made some decisions that
Speaker 1: ended up um really shaping the direction that the Manhattan
Speaker 1: Project would move in. The first decision he made was
Speaker 1: that no one on the committee would be allowed to
Speaker 1: be foreign born. No foreign born scientists would be allowed
Speaker 1: on the committee. That ment Einstein was not part of
Speaker 1: this part. He also barred the publication of scientific findings
Speaker 1: on uranium research for an indetermined amount of time because again,
Speaker 1: like like the the Leo's previous concerns, he didn't want
Speaker 1: this any other discoveries to make their way across into
Speaker 1: enemy hands. So now we're getting up to nineteen forty one,
Speaker 1: World War two is in full swing in Europe. Uh
Speaker 1: Glen T. S Borg, another important person identifies element ninety
Speaker 1: four a trans uranium or man made element that was
Speaker 1: produced from radioactive decay of an isotope of neptunium. Neptunium
Speaker 1: is also a trans uranium element, that's ninety three, so
Speaker 1: ninety four he gets to name it. I call it plutonium. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And he discovers that one of the features of plutonium
Speaker 1: is that's one point seven times more likely to undergo
Speaker 1: fission as uranium two thirty five. It loves fission, yeah,
Speaker 1: to thirty five, loves fission more than two thirty eight.
Speaker 1: Plutonium loves fission more than uranium two thirty five. So
Speaker 1: the experiments took place at Ernest Lawrence's radiation laboratory at Berkeley.
Speaker 1: So Lawrence again very important here. Lawrence personally felt that
Speaker 1: the uranium Committee was a little slow, that it was
Speaker 1: not responding fast enough, it wasn't funding the research. Uh,
Speaker 1: And so he met with Vanavar Bush and then Bush
Speaker 1: saw Lawrence as being really persuasive and and influential, So
Speaker 1: he makes Lawrence an adviser to Briggs. You know, Briggs
Speaker 1: was the head of that uranium committee. And so once
Speaker 1: that happens, suddenly the coffers opened up a little bit
Speaker 1: more and more research gets funded. Uh. Vanavar Bush also
Speaker 1: created a committee to report on the Uranian program in
Speaker 1: the US, and he put Arthur Compton, who was a
Speaker 1: physicist who specialized in radiation studies, in charge of it.
Speaker 1: So Compton makes a report in May nineteen forty one
Speaker 1: and confirmed that either you two thirty five or plutonium
Speaker 1: were the most likely candidates for some sort of atomic weapon. Yes. Uh.
Speaker 1: And on June forty one, the United States establishes the
Speaker 1: Office of Scientific Research and Development. This is the one
Speaker 1: you referred to as Bush being of the head of it.
Speaker 1: This is when it was officially made a thing was
Speaker 1: officially Yeah, we we had talked to I think and
Speaker 1: stuff that I want you to know about about that time,
Speaker 1: just a few days before this is actually was a
Speaker 1: few days after the twenty two when Germany invaded the
Speaker 1: Soviet un. Yes. So various things are hitting various fans right,
Speaker 1: the big one being that there is a lot of
Speaker 1: incentive to push this research through. Uh. Meanwhile, James B. Conant,
Speaker 1: who was president of Harvard, became the new head of
Speaker 1: the National Defense Research Committee, which was now an advisory
Speaker 1: board that would offer guidance on research and development funding
Speaker 1: and guys, we know how didn't I not to interject
Speaker 1: too much, becauys, we know how confusing it can be
Speaker 1: to hear these very long, dry names of committees. But
Speaker 1: part of this, part of all this restructuring, to hear
Speaker 1: about and all these names, comes because they were desperately
Speaker 1: trying to find the best way to approach this problem. Uh,
Speaker 1: simply because can you imagine. Of course, there were, of
Speaker 1: course there were agents from what would become the Allies
Speaker 1: in Germany at the time time. However, the level of
Speaker 1: access they had was no guarantee. The only way to
Speaker 1: be there was, the only way to know that you
Speaker 1: would not be the victim of a nuclear bomb or
Speaker 1: an atomic weapon was to be first passed the post.
Speaker 1: So this stuff is I mean, Jonathan, there were probably
Speaker 1: some egos involved. Oh no, there are tons of ego.
Speaker 1: But I think I think the I think the main
Speaker 1: thing to remember is that although we hear all these
Speaker 1: dry names, what they're really doing is desperately and it
Speaker 1: dues that were correctly desperately trying to find the way
Speaker 1: to get massive amounts of funding because they already know
Speaker 1: it's going to be an expensive surchace. Well that and
Speaker 1: and at this stage in we're still talking theory, we're
Speaker 1: still we're still saying that they're saying, if such a
Speaker 1: thing as possible, you too, and plutonium are our best bets.
Speaker 1: That's a great point. We can't guarantee it's possible. If yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's the thing is that you gut that's why
Speaker 1: you have all this research and development going in And
Speaker 1: they're going through multiple lines of inquiry, right because they
Speaker 1: don't want to say, well, let's just look at one
Speaker 1: and hope that that is going to work out. There's
Speaker 1: no let's look at all of them and find out
Speaker 1: which ones are the most promising and concentrate on those.
Speaker 1: So uh so Coma is head of this board that's
Speaker 1: going to look at these different um proposals and decide
Speaker 1: which ones are the ones most the most warrant additional funding.
Speaker 1: So if you are the head of a research department
Speaker 1: it's a Columbia university, you're more likely to receive funding
Speaker 1: than if you're some Yahoo in your backyard saying if
Speaker 1: I smack these two rocks together, sparks fly. So that's
Speaker 1: the important part that this is all about. Like the
Speaker 1: goal here is pushing forward this research so under this
Speaker 1: new organization, the Uranium Committee becomes the Office of Scientific
Speaker 1: Research and Development Section on Uranium. And that's a really
Speaker 1: long name, and they iognized it, so they code named
Speaker 1: it S one. So as one becomes this specific committee
Speaker 1: that's looking at uranium research, can it be used as
Speaker 1: a way of making a weapon? July one, a group
Speaker 1: in Britain's National Defense Research Committee, which was codenamed MAUD
Speaker 1: in a U d uh. They they their whole purpose
Speaker 1: was again to look and see if a nuclear weapon
Speaker 1: could be practical. They submitted a report that, based upon
Speaker 1: their calculations, you could use ten ms of you two
Speaker 1: thirty five to create an enormously destructive bomb and that
Speaker 1: could be dropped by existing aircraft of the time, and
Speaker 1: it would probably be two years out in development, like
Speaker 1: within two years of concentrate development, such a bomb could
Speaker 1: be built. So by ninety three Britain shares this report
Speaker 1: with America, and because Britain recognizes that America has an
Speaker 1: enormous resource in scientific expertise, so that report specifically recommended
Speaker 1: using gaseous diffusion to separate you two thirty five from
Speaker 1: you two thirty eight and outright dismisses the idea of
Speaker 1: using plutonium. So the Brits say, you should use two
Speaker 1: thirty five, You should use gaseous diffusion to get your
Speaker 1: two thirty five from two thirty eight, and forget about plutonium.
Speaker 1: It's a dead end. That was their recommendation. So meanwhile
Speaker 1: you got fair Me who becomes the head of theoretical
Speaker 1: studies at the Uranium Committee. And keep in mind fair
Speaker 1: Me is the plutonium guy. Yeah. So there when you
Speaker 1: say there are probably egos involved, yes there were, and
Speaker 1: there were people who were absolutely convinced that their approach
Speaker 1: was the one that was going to be the most economical,
Speaker 1: the most efficient, the most scientifically sound. So in these arguments,
Speaker 1: do you think there are a lot of those you
Speaker 1: fools moments? Just you fuse all be uh in dramatic
Speaker 1: like nineteen thirties style dialects, Well, not nineteen forty one.
Speaker 1: In October, Bush meets with Roosevelt to discuss the state
Speaker 1: of research. He receives instruction from Roosevelt to continue research
Speaker 1: and development, but it was expressly told don't build a
Speaker 1: bomb until I tell you to, which was fine because
Speaker 1: they were at least a few years away from being
Speaker 1: able to build one in the first place, even under
Speaker 1: ideal situation. November sixty one, Arthur Compton reports that, based
Speaker 1: on his calculations, a critical mass of YouTube you two
Speaker 1: thirty five between two and one rams would produce a
Speaker 1: powerful fission bomb uh and could be created with an
Speaker 1: investment of around fifty million to a hundred million dollars
Speaker 1: in isotopes separation technologies, which turned out to be crazy optimistic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so uh. Obviously the Brits come up with ten kilograms,
Speaker 1: and Arthur Compton says it's probably gonna be somewhere between
Speaker 1: two and a hundred. It's a slightly larger range. H
Speaker 1: December seven, ninety one very important day in World War two.
Speaker 1: That was the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It's when the
Speaker 1: Japanese attack Pearl Harbor that brings the United States into
Speaker 1: World War Two and sets this all on an even
Speaker 1: faster track than it was before. So January nineteenth, nineteen
Speaker 1: forty two, Roosevelt gives Vanavar Bush to go ahead to
Speaker 1: pursue the development of an atomic bomb. So we've gone
Speaker 1: from keep on researching this to see if it's possible
Speaker 1: to build one of these, keeping in mind that we're
Speaker 1: still working in the realm of theory. Yeah, and the
Speaker 1: but the funding flight gates were open. They said, no
Speaker 1: more um figuring out how to do it now, that
Speaker 1: just becomes a step in my mandate to you to
Speaker 1: give me a working atomic bomb. And they form what
Speaker 1: is called the Top Policy Committee, which was led by
Speaker 1: Vanavar Bush. They also had a vice president, Henry A. Wallace.
Speaker 1: James Knitt was part of it. Henry L. Stimpson, who
Speaker 1: was the Secretary of War, was part of it, and
Speaker 1: General George C. Marshall, who was Chief of Staff of
Speaker 1: the Army, was part of it. And the Top Policy
Speaker 1: Group decided to pursue five strategies, four different isotope isolation
Speaker 1: methods and the use of plutonium as the five different
Speaker 1: methods of potentially creating an atomic bomb. The reason they
Speaker 1: decided to look at five again was because none of
Speaker 1: the five had so far emerged as the clear superior method.
Speaker 1: So because they didn't know, they said, well, we would
Speaker 1: rather go ahead and have all these different groups, all
Speaker 1: of which have brilliant engineers and physicists attached to them,
Speaker 1: to independently work on this stuff. They're motivated by one
Speaker 1: many of them come from Europe, and they see what's
Speaker 1: going on in World War two too. Many of them
Speaker 1: have egos, and they want to prove that their method
Speaker 1: is the right one and three they're they're genuinely interested
Speaker 1: in the science. So March of nineteen forty two, UH, Lawrence,
Speaker 1: the fellow who ran the cyclotron and Berkeley, pursues the
Speaker 1: electromagnetic isotope separation method using a cyclotron as a mass spectrometer,
Speaker 1: and he's so successful that vanavar Bush sends another message
Speaker 1: to Roosevelt saying, Hey, if this pans out, we might
Speaker 1: be able to have an atomic bomb as early as
Speaker 1: nineteen forty four. That would turn out to be optimistic. Uh.
Speaker 1: In April nineteen forty two, Arthur Compton, who was guiding
Speaker 1: research into plutonium. So we got Lawrence with electromagnetic isotope isolation.
Speaker 1: Now we've got Compton who's looking into plutonium. He's funding
Speaker 1: the work of J. Robert Oppenheimer at Berkeley, who may
Speaker 1: be familiar to some of you, especially if you've ever
Speaker 1: checked out Yeah, up and high, here comes up a lot.
Speaker 1: I mean, every single person that I'm mentioning here could
Speaker 1: warrant an entire episode and stuff you missed in history class.
Speaker 1: I'm sure has covered many of them in the past.
Speaker 1: So Oppenheimer and Fermi also gets funding from Arthur Compton.
Speaker 1: He says, all right for me, he's got a pile,
Speaker 1: a nuclear pile that he's working with at Columbia University.
Speaker 1: Also funds Eugene Wigners theoretical work at Princeton. Now over
Speaker 1: at the University of Chicago, Compton secured some space to
Speaker 1: create his own uranium and graphite nuclear pile. By securing
Speaker 1: some space, I mean he converted a racketball court underneath
Speaker 1: the grandstand at stag Field at the University of Chicago
Speaker 1: into a nuclear pile. This, by the way, would scare
Speaker 1: the heck out of everybody later on, because he didn't
Speaker 1: bother to tell anyone that that's what he was doing. Well, well, well,
Speaker 1: let us remember this was a top secret project. And
Speaker 1: also if we're talking, I don't know why my voice
Speaker 1: was And also if we're if we're talking about public safety,
Speaker 1: then you know, the dangerous rationalization people can always make
Speaker 1: is what is the safety of the people above in
Speaker 1: a grandstand or even the University of Chicago compared to
Speaker 1: the safety of the world what I'm telling you that
Speaker 1: he was a maverick. Well, I tell you know, uh
Speaker 1: he uh. Well, in his defense, this approach that he
Speaker 1: was using, which was very similar to Faremi's approach, was
Speaker 1: low energy. It was not something that was perceived to
Speaker 1: have risk of it becoming a runaway reaction. It was
Speaker 1: it was more again to study the actual physics involved
Speaker 1: to better understand it, and posed very little threat to
Speaker 1: the people of Chicago. Using the design that he used,
Speaker 1: he wasn't using it. He was using a design that
Speaker 1: didn't require a cooling system or a shield because he
Speaker 1: was it wasn't this super high energy type of of
Speaker 1: reactions that he was he was looking into. May two, Compton,
Speaker 1: Arthur Compton asks j. Robert Oppenheimer to take over research
Speaker 1: into fast neutron interactions to determine the necessary conditions for
Speaker 1: a critical mass to explode. So Oppenheimer takes on that work.
Speaker 1: Then of our Bush asks James Conant, the guy from Harvard,
Speaker 1: for recommendations on how to proceed, and the S one
Speaker 1: Leadership Committee decides that instead of focusing on one area
Speaker 1: of research, all of them still have to be funded
Speaker 1: and accelerated. They still weren't certain which of these were
Speaker 1: going to end up being successful is still too early,
Speaker 1: So they say, well, we can't, We can't pull the
Speaker 1: trigger on one of these. Yet we still have to
Speaker 1: keep on going. And in June two, the Army's involvement
Speaker 1: in the project, uh really picks up. You have a
Speaker 1: guy named Colonel James C. Marshall come into the picture.
Speaker 1: So James C. Marshall, he's in charge of the Army
Speaker 1: Corps of Engineers involvement in this project, and the Army
Speaker 1: Corps of Engineers their main job was to secure sites
Speaker 1: that they could then use to build facilities on to
Speaker 1: test out the theory that was being generated in these
Speaker 1: various camps. So in your normal operations, if there's not
Speaker 1: a war going on, what you would typically do is
Speaker 1: you have the research and development work that is starting
Speaker 1: to be promising. You would build a pilot plant that
Speaker 1: would test these things out, and it would be designed
Speaker 1: in such a way that you can make rapid changes
Speaker 1: to the plants design in order to best fit whatever
Speaker 1: the process. Yeah, exactly. So you might say, oh, it
Speaker 1: turns out that this design we came up with isn't
Speaker 1: the best one. We should change it to this a
Speaker 1: pilot plant is the kind where you would be able
Speaker 1: to do that. Then once you figured out what was
Speaker 1: the best approach, you could build a full production facility, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And at at this time I believe the US Army
Speaker 1: Corps of Engineers was based in New York. Yeah, the headquarters,
Speaker 1: it was supposed to be a temporary headquarters, was on
Speaker 1: Broadway in Manhattan. Because you want to keep it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So they called it the Manhattan Engineering District, or sometimes
Speaker 1: just the Manhattan District and sometimes just Manhattan. And that,
Speaker 1: in fact, is where the Manhattan Project gets its name.
Speaker 1: It gets his name from James C. Marshall's headquarters in Manhattan.
Speaker 1: And he was really he was on the phone calling
Speaker 1: up potential land, you know, landowners who could potentially sell
Speaker 1: him the land necessary from the build these facilities. And
Speaker 1: the crazy thing here is the Army Corps of Engineers
Speaker 1: and and these scientists are essentially skipping the pilot stage.
Speaker 1: They're going straight from well, we're pretty sure this is
Speaker 1: the way it's gonna work, to let's build this facility
Speaker 1: to do it. And by skipping the pilot stage it
Speaker 1: causes huge headaches down the line. But at the same
Speaker 1: time they said well, we don't have the luxury of
Speaker 1: time to go the scientifically responsible routes, so we have
Speaker 1: to do it this way. So, uh we get the
Speaker 1: Manhattan Project. Technically, the project has a different name. The
Speaker 1: the official code name for the project, because it's super secret, y'all,
Speaker 1: is the development of Substitute Metals or sometimes the development
Speaker 1: of Substitute materials depending upon which citation you're reading, or
Speaker 1: d s M. That's the official code name, but everyone
Speaker 1: calls it the Manhattan Project. Uh So we are now
Speaker 1: at the point where the Manhattan Project comes into being,
Speaker 1: James C. Marshall being in charge of it, kind of
Speaker 1: being an administrator to make sure that the scientists are
Speaker 1: getting the resources they need. And this leads us to
Speaker 1: the conclusion of this episode so that in our next
Speaker 1: episode we can focus specifically on what happens with the
Speaker 1: Manhattan Project. You're going to have a whole list of
Speaker 1: new names. This is really just to prepare you in
Speaker 1: case you ever decide to read the Game of Thrones series,
Speaker 1: so that way you know how to handle all these
Speaker 1: different characters, because it's kind of similar in that respect.
Speaker 1: Um So, Ben, we're gonna be talking about like super
Speaker 1: top secret stuff in the next episode. Keeping in mind,
Speaker 1: the Manhattan Project was a secret from almost everybody from
Speaker 1: two when it came into existence to mid nineteen after
Speaker 1: the bomb has dropped on Hiroshima. So this is the
Speaker 1: when it comes to stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 1: This is it. You talk about massive government conspiracy. It
Speaker 1: doesn't get much bigger than this. We're talking a hundred
Speaker 1: thirty thousand people or thereabouts employed in somewhere or another,
Speaker 1: most of whom had no idea what they were contributing to. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is uh, this is bigger than you know. This
Speaker 1: is something that we talked about our previous one podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm excited. Yeah, so let's see. I guess this
Speaker 1: will be a little bit of a cliffhanger for the listeners.
Speaker 1: So you guys will have to tune in next week,
Speaker 1: same bad time, same bad channel. U Ben. If they
Speaker 1: want to find you, where can they look? Where does
Speaker 1: your stuff live? Oh? Yeah you can. You can find
Speaker 1: us on YouTube your podcast streaming place of choice. Uh.
Speaker 1: My co host producer Matt and uh Nolan I do
Speaker 1: do the show stuff they don't want you to know. Uh,
Speaker 1: We're all over the place. We have a website, but
Speaker 1: it's really long stuff they don't want you to know
Speaker 1: dot com. We didn't choose the name, but check us out.
Speaker 1: You can also find Jonathan and I on brain Stuff.
Speaker 1: You can find us on what this Stuff. You can
Speaker 1: find us cameoing and various different things. Usually we're in
Speaker 1: the background of someone else's someone who's who's better at
Speaker 1: us than what we do. What are you talking about, like,
Speaker 1: after this talk about egos, Technically we are the best
Speaker 1: in this in this entire office. I mean, I don't
Speaker 1: like to brag, but Ben and I are clearly the
Speaker 1: most camera ready of every here. So for me, it's
Speaker 1: just letting go and not not being uh, not being good. Said,
Speaker 1: I like to rub a little garbage on myself just beforehand,
Speaker 1: just to kind of bring you down a little bit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's nice to at least fake humility and humility with Alright,
Speaker 1: So guys, you can check out this stuff stuff they
Speaker 1: don't want you to know. Remember, if you want to
Speaker 1: send me a message, you have a suggestion for a
Speaker 1: future topic, or a guest or someone you want me
Speaker 1: to interview, anything like that, send it to tech stuff
Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com or drop me a
Speaker 1: line on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumbler. The handle at all
Speaker 1: three is tech Stuff hs W, and we will conclude
Speaker 1: this discussion on the Manhattan Project. Really send for more
Speaker 1: on this and basands of other topics works dot com