The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

Besides photographic studies three kinds of experiments concerned Bainbridge and his team. One set, by far the most extensive, would measure blast, optical and nuclear effects with seismographs, geophones, ionization chambers, spectrographs, films and a variety of gauges. A second would study the implosion in detail and check the operation of the new exploding-wire detonators Luis Alvarez had invented. Experiments planned by Herbert Anderson to reveal the explosive yield radiochemically made up the third category. Harvard physicist David Anderson (no relation) arranged to acquire two Army tanks for that work and to pressurize them and line them with lead; Herbert Anderson and Fermi meant to ride them close to the crater at Zero immediately after the shot, scoop up some of the radioactive debris with a tethered cup hitched to a rocket fired into the crater and retrieve the material for laboratory measurement. Its ratio of fission products to unfissioned plutonium would reveal the yield.