The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

No one doubted that Little Boy would work if any design would. Otto Frisch’s Dragon experiments had proven the efficacy of the fast-neutron chain reaction in uranium. The gun mechanism was wasteful and inefficient but U235 was forgiving. It remained to test implosion. While doing so the physicists could also compare their theory of the progress of such an exotic release of energy with the huge blinding fact. Trinity would be the largest physics experiment ever attempted up to that time.2369 The hard work of finding a proving ground sufficiently barren and remote and organizing it fell to a compact, close-cropped Harvard experimental physicist named Kenneth T. Bainbridge. His task, the Los Alamos technical history notes, “was one of establishing under conditions of extreme secrecy and great pressure a complex scientific laboratory in a barren desert.”