The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

The practice of science was not itself a science; it was an art, to be passed from master to apprentice as the art of painting is passed or as the skills and traditions of the law or of medicine are passed.98, 99 You could not learn the law from books and classes alone. You could not learn medicine. No more could you learn science, because nothing in science ever quite fits; no experiment is ever final proof; everything is simplified and approximate.

Learning the feel of proof; learning judgment; learning which hunches to play; learning which stunning calculations to rework, which experimental results not to trust: these skills admitted you to the spectators’ benches at the chess game of the gods, and acquiring them required sitting first at the feet of a master.

Rutherford’s experiments still stun with their simplicity.157 “In this Rutherford was an artist,” says a former student. “All his experiments had

“There is a statement of rather common currency around here and Berkeley that goes something like this: ‘No matter what you do with the rest of your life, nothing will be as important to the future of the World as your work on this Project right now.’ ”

But fusion was essentially a thermal reaction, not inherently different in its kindling from an ordinary fire; it required no critical mass and was therefore potentially unlimited. Once ignited, its extent depended primarily on the volume of fuel—deuterium—its designers supplied. And deuterium, Harold Urey’s discovery, the essential component of heavy water, was much easier and less expensive to separate from hydrogen than U235 was from U238 and much simpler to acquire than plutonium. Each kilogram of heavy hydrogen equaled about 85,000 tons TNT equivalent.1622 Theoretically, 12 kilograms of liquid heavy hydrogen—26 pounds—ignited by one atomic bomb would explode with a force equivalent to 1 million tons of TNT. So far as Oppenheimer and his group knew at the beginning of the summer, an equivalent fission explosion would require some 500 atomic bombs.1623

Men like to recall, in later years, what they said at some important or possibly historic moment in their lives. . . . I remember only too well what I said to General Somervell that day. I said, “Oh.”