The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

the bomb program had advanced from research into development.) On December 18, Conant notes in the secret history of the project he wrote in 1943, “the atmosphere was charged with excitement—the country had been at war nine days, an expansion of the S-l program was now an accomplished matter. Enthusiasm and optimism reigned.”1545 Compton offered his program to Bush, Conant and Briggs the next day and followed up on December 20 with a memorandum.1546 The projects that had come under his authority were scattered across the country at Columbia, Princeton, Chicago and Berkeley. For the time being he proposed leaving them there. With the arrival of war, not to breathe a word of the mysteries they were exploring, the project leaders had adopted an informal code: plutonium was “copper,” U235 “magnesium,” uranium generically in the nonsensical British coinage “tube alloy.”