bomb.
Initially work on nuclear power outside of Germany was slow, but the science community knew that one of the greatest physicists of the 1930s, Werner Heisenberg, was working on the German nuclear project. Under pressure from the United Kingdom, where the threat of invasion was becoming more and more tangible as other European countries fell to the German army, the United States began a colossal program to beat the Germans in the race to produce nuclear weapons.
In the summer of 1941, an unparalleled, industrial-scale scientific venture began. Called the Manhattan Project after the location on Broadway of the Army Corps of Engineers’ headquarters, it was an uneasy collaboration between the military and university scientists. Different subprojects included building the world’s first nuclear reactor in order to produce plutonium; attempting to separate uranium 235 using different techniques like gaseous diffusion, electromagnetism, and high-speed centrifuges (picking out the very slight difference in mass); and working out the practicalities of assembling an atomic bomb—not a trivial task even if you have the materials.
The Manhattan Project’s reactor was not the original birthplace of plutonium. The initial discovery of the element was the work of U.S. scientist Glenn Seaborg, a tireless producer of new elements, who made the first tiny sample of the material in February 1941 at the University of California, Berkeley. (Seaborg’s and Berkeley’s roles in adding to the list of elements would later be commemorated with the elements americium, californium, berkelium, and even seaborgium.)
It wasn’t until August of the next year that Seaborg, by now transferred to Chicago for the Manhattan Project, would produce enough plutonium for anyone to be able to see it. According to Seaborg, such was the demand to take a look at this wonder element that, bearing in mind its rarity and the danger it posed, he instead showed people a test tube with diluted green ink in it. There is an echo here of the miracle of the liquefaction of the blood of Saint Januarius which is said to take place in Naples, Italy, every year. Many suspect that the glass vial supposedly containing the saint’s blood in fact holds a suspension of an iron salt that gives the right effect. But to the believers it’s the real thing, just as those who saw Seaborg’s tube of ink believed they had been in the presence of a new, world-changing element.
On December 2, 1942, the first great breakthrough of the Manhattan Project occurred—at the drab location of a converted squash court in Chicago. The most modern piece of technology in the world was tucked away under the bleachers of a dusty, disused football stadium. Three years previously, the University of Chicago football team had been closed down by a college president who believed that the game was a distraction for those who should be concentrating on academic matters. Now the nineteenth-century structure of the stadium, all too like a mad scientist’s retreat with its Gothic arches and grotesque statues, would house the ultimate mad scientist’s dream.
Here, in a claustrophobic space under the stand, Fermi’s team had assembled the world’s first nuclear reactor—not built with any vision of producing cheap electricity, or for pure research. This was a structure intended only to produce plutonium for a bomb. It was referred to, almost sarcastically, as an “atomic pile” as it was constructed from a twenty-foot-high pile of carbon bricks, used as moderators to slow down the neutrons so that the six tons of uranium 238 scattered through those graphite blocks could interact with the particles. These slugs of uranium oxide were interlaced with so-called control rods made of cadmium, a material that absorbed neutrons much faster than uranium, so when the rods were in place, the reactor was damped down, preventing a runaway reaction from occurring.
Perched on a platform above this makeshift
Initially work on nuclear power outside of Germany was slow, but the science community knew that one of the greatest physicists of the 1930s, Werner Heisenberg, was working on the German nuclear project. Under pressure from the United Kingdom, where the threat of invasion was becoming more and more tangible as other European countries fell to the German army, the United States began a colossal program to beat the Germans in the race to produce nuclear weapons.
In the summer of 1941, an unparalleled, industrial-scale scientific venture began. Called the Manhattan Project after the location on Broadway of the Army Corps of Engineers’ headquarters, it was an uneasy collaboration between the military and university scientists. Different subprojects included building the world’s first nuclear reactor in order to produce plutonium; attempting to separate uranium 235 using different techniques like gaseous diffusion, electromagnetism, and high-speed centrifuges (picking out the very slight difference in mass); and working out the practicalities of assembling an atomic bomb—not a trivial task even if you have the materials.
The Manhattan Project’s reactor was not the original birthplace of plutonium. The initial discovery of the element was the work of U.S. scientist Glenn Seaborg, a tireless producer of new elements, who made the first tiny sample of the material in February 1941 at the University of California, Berkeley. (Seaborg’s and Berkeley’s roles in adding to the list of elements would later be commemorated with the elements americium, californium, berkelium, and even seaborgium.)
It wasn’t until August of the next year that Seaborg, by now transferred to Chicago for the Manhattan Project, would produce enough plutonium for anyone to be able to see it. According to Seaborg, such was the demand to take a look at this wonder element that, bearing in mind its rarity and the danger it posed, he instead showed people a test tube with diluted green ink in it. There is an echo here of the miracle of the liquefaction of the blood of Saint Januarius which is said to take place in Naples, Italy, every year. Many suspect that the glass vial supposedly containing the saint’s blood in fact holds a suspension of an iron salt that gives the right effect. But to the believers it’s the real thing, just as those who saw Seaborg’s tube of ink believed they had been in the presence of a new, world-changing element.
On December 2, 1942, the first great breakthrough of the Manhattan Project occurred—at the drab location of a converted squash court in Chicago. The most modern piece of technology in the world was tucked away under the bleachers of a dusty, disused football stadium. Three years previously, the University of Chicago football team had been closed down by a college president who believed that the game was a distraction for those who should be concentrating on academic matters. Now the nineteenth-century structure of the stadium, all too like a mad scientist’s retreat with its Gothic arches and grotesque statues, would house the ultimate mad scientist’s dream.
Here, in a claustrophobic space under the stand, Fermi’s team had assembled the world’s first nuclear reactor—not built with any vision of producing cheap electricity, or for pure research. This was a structure intended only to produce plutonium for a bomb. It was referred to, almost sarcastically, as an “atomic pile” as it was constructed from a twenty-foot-high pile of carbon bricks, used as moderators to slow down the neutrons so that the six tons of uranium 238 scattered through those graphite blocks could interact with the particles. These slugs of uranium oxide were interlaced with so-called control rods made of cadmium, a material that absorbed neutrons much faster than uranium, so when the rods were in place, the reactor was damped down, preventing a runaway reaction from occurring.
Perched on a platform above this makeshift
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