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We were very busy. We had a purpose. We were living in constant excitement, usually, if we examined the true position, of an unpromising kind. In one’s realistic moments, it was difficult to see what chance we had. But I doubt if most of us had many realistic moments, or thought much at all. We were all working like mad.
when a nation becomes a belligerent, one can talk sensibly only in terms of the violation of agreements about the way war is conducted, or the consequences of a certain tactic or weapon.
His private endorsement of 94, to be transmuted by chain reaction from natural uranium, probably contributed to the neglect of isotope separation in Germany.
Teller liked to break new ground. When he understood something theoretically he usually moved on without waiting for experimental confirmation.
Roosevelt had instinctively reserved nuclear weapons policy to himself. Thus at the outset of the U.S. atomic energy program scientists were summarily denied a voice in deciding the political and military uses of the weapons they were proposing to build.
And deeper even than fear was fatalism. The bomb was latent in nature as a genome is latent in flesh. Any nation might learn to command its expression.
The Germans knew that atomic bombs could be built. He was deeply shaken by this, and his consternation was so great that he lost track of all else.”
Like its predecessors the report stressed not the German challenge but the long-term prospect:
called out “Tora! Tora! Tora!” at 0753 hours as his pilot banked around Barber’s Point southwest of Pearl: “Tiger!” three times invoked to announce to the listening Japanese Navy that his first wave of 183 planes had achieved complete surprise.
Arizona lifted out of the water; West Virginia washed by a huge waterspout; Oklahoma hit by three torpedoes one after another and immediately listing steeply to port; the bottom blown out of Arizona; three torpedoes into California; two more into West Virginia’, a fourth into Oklahoma that bounced the big ship and rolled it over bottom up; Arizona taking a bomb that detonated its forward explosive stores, ripped the ship apart, killed at least a thousand men and blew high into the air a grisly rain of bodies, hands, legs and heads; a torpedo tearing out Nevada’s port bow.
We were reasonably strong, but I mean we were, after all, thinkers. So Dean Pegram again looked around and said that seems to be a job a little bit beyond your feeble strength, but there is a football squad
“Fermi tried to do his share of the work,” Anderson adds; “he donned a lab coat and pitched in to do his stint with the football men, but it was clear that he was out of his class. The rest of us found a lot to keep us busy with measurements and calibrations that suddenly seemed to require exceptional care and precision.”
Not to be outdone in the matter of informal codes, the Columbia team had named that culmination “the egg-boiling experiment.”
German physicists “were spared the decision as to whether or not they should aim at producing atomic bombs.1576
most of them came to believe it transcendently important:
. The impossibility of igniting the atmosphere was thus assured by science and common sense.
The hydrogen bomb was thus under development in the United States onward from July 1942.
The word meltdown had not yet entered the reactor engineer’s vocabulary—Fermi was only then inventing that specialty—but that is what Compton was risking, a small Chernobyl in the midst of a crowded city. Except that Fermi, as he knew, was a formidably competent engineer.
He had controlled it day by day for the seventeen days of its building as its k approached 1.0, matching its responses with his estimates, and he was confident he could control it when its chain reaction finally diverged. What would he do if he was wrong? one of his young colleagues asked him. He thought of the damping effect of delayed neutrons. “I will walk away—leisurely,” he answered.
The chain reaction was moonshine no more.
For some time we had known that we were about to unlock a giant; still, we could not escape an eerie feeling when we knew we had actually done it. We felt as, I presume, everyone feels who has done something that he knows will have very far-reaching consequences which he cannot foresee.1702
He could always see how far any particular experiment would go. When you couldn’t carry it any farther, you could count on him to understand and to be thinking about the next thing you might want to try.”
notion of disappearing into the New Mexico desert for an indeterminate period and under quasi-military auspices disturbed a good many scientists, and the families of many more. But there was another side to it. Almost everyone realized that this was a great undertaking.
Almost everyone knew that this job, if it were achieved, would be a part of history. This sense of excitement, of devotion and of patriotism in the end prevailed.
During the Berkeley summer study the two men had begun what another participant judged a “mental love affair.”1763, 1764 Teller “liked and respected Oppie enormously.
wrong for the fifteen minutes it took him to think past the stubbornness with which he rejected any possibility he had not himself foreseen.
The Danes in turn had extracted an extraordinary price for agreeing to cooperate under foreign occupation: the security of Danish Jews. To the Danes the eight thousand Jews in Denmark, 95 percent of them in Copenhagen, were Danish citizens first of all; their security was therefore a test of German good faith.
“Nichols . . . said that they would need between five and ten thousand tons of silver. This led to the icy reply: ‘Colonel, in the Treasury we do not speak of tons of silver; our unit is the Troy ounce.’ ”
The silver was worth more than $300 million. Groves accounted for it ounce by ounce, almost as carefully as he accounted for the fissionable isotope it helped separate.
but would almost certainly not contribute significantly to shortening the war meant that nuclear weapons were thenceforth to be counted a permanent addition to the U.S. arsenal.
The mighty scale of the works at Clinton and Hanford is a measure of the desperation of the United States to protect itself from the most serious potential threat to its sovereignty it had yet confronted—even though that threat, of a German atomic bomb, proved to be an image in a darkened mirror.
the general, acting on behalf of the nation to which he gave unquestioning devotion, exercised himself to hoard for his country’s exclusive use every last pound.
Upon Groves’ appointment to the Manhattan Project he almost immediately judged Szilard a menace. They proceeded to fight out their profound disagreements hand to hand.
anyone who caused him as much pain as Leo Szilard must be a spy. It followed that he ought to be watched.
rather absent minded and eccentric, and will start out a door, turn around and come back, go out on the street without his coat or hat and frequently looks up and down the street as if he were watching for someone or did not know for sure where he wanted to go.
and then, we’ll mop up the Japs.” Mark well those words, please. “And then we’ll mop up the Japs.”1964 Grew thought such bravado ill-advised.
the question the behavior of Japanese soldiers raised was whether such standards applied not only to the military but to the civilians of Japan as well.
“But we are engaged in a life-and-death struggle for national survival, and we are therefore justified in taking any action that will save the lives of American soldiers and sailors. We must strike hard with everything we have at the spot where it will do the most damage to the enemy.”1975
He was only too conscious that British power, and his own, was now just a vestige. So long as the Americans and British had the bomb in sole possession, he could feel that that power hadn’t altogether slipped away. It is a sad story.”2017
When nuclear weapons spread to other countries, as they certainly would, no one would be able any longer to win. A spasm of mutual destruction would be possible. But not war.
I found that my position was untenable because I was essentially in the middle trying to make sense of the efforts of two men who were at each other’s throats.
For the nominal sum of one dollar the Army contracted to borrow his patented process for Oak Ridge. He never saw the dollar.
No essence was ever expressed more expensively from the substance of the world with the possible exception of the human soul.
Single men and women sponsored dorm parties fueled with tanks of punch made potent with mixed liquors and pure Tech Area grain alcohol and invited wall-to-wall crowds.
Fermi sat unbudging, mentally working out the steps. When he was ready he asked Bernice Brode, one of the leaders, to be his partner. “He offered to be head couple, which I thought most unwise for his first venture, but I couldn’t do anything about it and the music began. He led me out on the exact beat, knew exactly each move to make and when. He never made a mistake, then or thereafter, but I wouldn’t say he enjoyed himself. . . . He [danced] with his brains instead of his feet.”2129
By the time we got that matter straightened out—and we did decide to continue it—I was a considerably more learned physicist than I had intended to be a few years earlier when going into physics was not all that different from taking the cloth.