HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT 8

How To Make An Atomic Bomb

Andrew Thomas studied physics in the James Clerk Maxwell Building in
Edinburgh University, and received his doctorate from Swansea University
in 1992.
His Hidden In Plain Sight series of books are science bestsellers.
ALSO BY ANDREW THOMAS
Hidden In Plain Sight
The simple link between relativity and quantum mechanics

Hidden In Plain Sight 2

The equation of the universe

Hidden In Plain Sight 3

The secret of time

Hidden In Plain Sight 4

The uncertain universe

Hidden In Plain Sight 5

Atom

Hidden In Plain Sight 6

Why three dimensions?

Hidden In Plain Sight 7

The fine-tuned universe

Hidden In Plain Sight 9

The physics of consciousness

Hidden In Plain Sight 10

How to program a quantum computer
HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT 8
How To Make An Atomic Bomb
Copyright © 2017 Andrew D.H. Thomas
All rights reserved.
CONTENTS

PROLOGUE: THE Nth COUNTRY

EXPERIMENT

1) OUR FRIEND THE ATOM

The Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab
Operation Plowshare
Project Orion

2) FAINT FAIRY LIGHTS

Alpha and beta
The alchemists
Nuclear reactions
The power of the atom
Beta radiation
The weak interaction

3) SPLITTING THE ATOM

Artificial radioactivity
The discovery of fission
The nuclear mousetrap

4) THE CHAIN REACTION

The New World
The letter from Einstein
Oppenheimer
Los Alamos
The Los Alamos Primer

5) THE CRITICAL MASS

The ratio of volume to surface area
Spherical coordinates
The build-up of neutrons
The derivative
To cut a long story short …

6) OAK RIDGE
The secret city
The largest building in the world
The Calutron Girls
Mail-order uranium

7) PLUTONIUM
The nuclear reactor
The world's first nuclear reactor
The Demon Core

8) DETONATION
The sex of the bomb
Implosion
Trinity

APPENDIX: CALCULATING THE CRITICAL

MASS
Creating the equation
The genius of Mr. Wolfram
Solving the equation
Calculating the critical mass
PROLOGUE: THE Nth
COUNTRY EXPERIMENT
The year is 1964.
Dave Dobson was a physics student, excited to have just received his
PhD. Dobson was a bright guy, and a science enthusiast. He had a good
general knowledge about several fields of physics, but his knowledge was
nothing spectacular.
To all intents and purposes, Dobson was Mr. Average.
This made it all the more surprising when Dobson received a telephone
call from the renowned nuclear physicist Edward Teller. Teller invited
Dobson to come to Washington D.C. for an interview for a job in one of the
country's leading nuclear research facilities. Dobson was amazed and,
frankly, wondered if they had got his name mixed up with someone else. He
later described everything he knew about nuclear chain reactions at that
time: "I had seen an exhibit with a model of a chain reaction made up of
mousetraps and ping pong balls."
Dobson met Teller and they spent an evening together. Teller quizzed
Dobson to discover everything he knew about nuclear weapons, and
Dobson honestly replied that he knew nothing more than any other amateur
science enthusiast. To be frank, Dobson admitted he knew absolutely
nothing at all about nuclear weapons.
"Great", replied Teller. "You will be perfect for the job".

At that time — the early 1960s — the Pentagon was extremely concerned
about the possible proliferation of nuclear weapons to other countries. Only
the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France possessed nuclear
weapons. Britain had been the third country, France had been the fourth.
Which country would be the fifth country to possess nuclear weapons? Or
the sixth country? Where would it all end? Which country would be the
"Nth country"?
In order to shed some light on that question, the Pentagon had started a
top secret project called the "Nth Country Experiment". Dave Dobson
would be one of two physics students who had been selected to work on the
project.
The worry was that so much information about how to make an atomic
bomb had been published in the popular press. While no classified secrets
had been leaked publically, there was plenty of more general information
freely available to an amateur enthusiast. Given the availability of that
general information, would it be possible for a rogue state, employing
nothing more than a few physicists of very average ability, to create a
nuclear weapon?
Basically, the goal of the Nth Country Experiment was to determine how
difficult (or easy) it was for a bunch of amateurs to make an atomic bomb.
This, then, was to be Dave Dobson's first job straight out of university.
Dobson was given a desk in a corner of a laboratory in the Livermore
Radiation Laboratory in California. He was introduced to another amateur
physics enthusiast, Bob Selden, a 28-year-old soldier who would be
working with him. Neither man had any nuclear expertise whatsoever.
Their job was to imagine they were working for a rogue state (named the
"Nth Country"). They were handed a document explaining their task. Here
is the first paragraph of the document: "The purpose of the so-called Nth
Country Experiment is to find out if a credible nuclear explosive can be
designed, with a modest effort, by a few well-trained people without contact
with classified information. The goal of the participants should be to design
an explosive with a militarily significant yield. A working context for the
experiment might be that the participants have been asked to design a
nuclear explosive which, if built in small numbers, would give a small
nation a significant effect on their foreign relations."
The first thing which needed to be done was to obtain security clearance
for Dobson (Selden had already been cleared because of his military
background). Clearance was necessary because it was against the law to
design nuclear weapons without security clearance.
Dobson and Selden would have access to none of the secret research
material at the laboratory, but they would have access to the general library
and its publically-available material. They were told that the imaginary
"Nth Country" they were working for would have "more resources than
Ghana, but less than an industrialized nation." They should assume they had
access to good machinists able to shape uranium and plutonium, and also
access to some engineers experienced with conventional explosives. Apart
from that, they were given no more instructions on how they should
proceed. They were on their own.
In the library, Selden found a book about the Manhattan Project, the U.S.
project which developed the atomic bomb. According to Dobson: "It gave
us a road map. But we knew there would be important ideas they'd
deliberately left out because they were secret. This was one of the things
that produced a little bit of paranoia in us. Were we being led down the
garden path?"
If Dobson and Selden wanted to perform an experiment, perhaps with
high explosives, they had to describe their desired experiment in great
detail. A team of experts then calculated the result of the experiment and
passed the result back to Dobson and Selden.
Ironically, one of the most useful sources of information came from
President Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" programme, the motivation for
which was to encourage the use of non-military nuclear power around the
world. Atoms for Peace was just one example of the enthusiasm at the time
for nuclear energy, the result of which was to distribute a vast amount of
technical information into the public domain.
After two-and-a-half years, in 1966, Dobson and Selden had finally
finished their design. According to Selden: "We produced a short document
that described precisely, in engineering terms, what we proposed to build
and what materials were involved. The whole works, in great detail, so that
this thing could have been made by Joe's Machine Shop downtown."
However, after they had presented their document, everything went very
quiet, and Dobson and Selden were not informed of the outcome. They
presumed that they had failed in their task. So, one day in Livermore when
they met a senior researcher, Jim Frank, they asked him why things had
gone so quiet. Did he have any knowledge of the outcome of their
experiment? Yes, said Frank, he knew what had happened. The reason why
everyone had gone quiet was because they had realised that if a bomb had
been constructed precisely according to their detailed instructions, it would
have exploded with the same order of magnitude as Hiroshima.
1
OUR FRIEND THE ATOM
In 1870, the French science fiction writer Jules Verne wrote the classic
adventure novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It is the story of
Captain Nemo who terrorised the world's shipping using his mysterious
submarine called the Nautilus.
As usual, Jules Verne showed his amazing talent as a futurist, predicting
technological advances many years before that technology came to exist. In
this case, the submarines of the 19th century were very primitive vessels, so
Jules Verne's description of a craft which could stay submerged for several
days proved to be prophetic. That was because, in 1954, the real-life
Nautilus was launched. And it could, indeed, travel underwater for weeks or
months at a time.
The USS Nautilus — named after the craft in Jules Verne's book — was
the world's first nuclear-powered submarine. In a nuclear-powered
submarine, heat generated by a small nuclear reactor turns water into steam
which, in turn, powers the propeller of the submarine. Unlike a diesel
engine, a nuclear reactor requires no air to operate. As a result, nuclear-
powered submarines are capable of staying at sea for many months without
needing to refuel, and can travel huge distances under water.[1] To prove
the point, in 1958 the real-life Nautilus took four days to complete the first
submerged voyage under the North Pole.
The following photograph shows the USS Nautilus arriving in New York
City in 1958:
 America in the 1950s was an optimistic time, and nuclear power was
viewed very differently from how it is viewed today. The almost unlimited
energy produced by the atom gave the promise of cheap, compact power
sources which could be used for almost any application. The success of the
USS Nautilus inspired ideas for other nuclear-powered forms of transport.
One of the most outrageous suggestions included the world's first nuclear-
powered car, the Ford Nucleon which was proposed by the Ford Motor
Company in 1958. In the rear of the car was to be a small nuclear reactor
which would allow the car to travel 5,000 miles without refuelling
(unfortunately the car never got off the drawing board: such a small nuclear
reactor did not exist, and the required shielding to protect the passengers
would have made the car too heavy).
It was widely-believed that the electricity produced by nuclear power
would be so cheap that it would make more sense to provide it for a flat fee
— or even give it away for free — rather than installing expensive meters.
This optimism was summed-up in a 1954 speech by Lewis Strauss who was
the chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission: "Our
children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter. It is
not too much to expect that our children will know of great periodic
regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel
effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a
minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far
longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what
causes him to age."
It is believed that Strauss was referring to power produced by nuclear
fusion, which would provide almost unlimited power from readily-available
hydrogen. Indeed, if nuclear fusion research proves successful then
Strauss's prediction of too-cheap-to-meter energy might yet come true.
In 1954, feeding off the excitement caused by the launch of the Nautilus,
Walt Disney released the movie Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
starring Kirk Douglas and James Mason as Captain Nemo. To support the
release of the movie, an episode of the Disney television series Disneyland
was devoted to examining the wonders of nuclear power. Continuing the
optimistic tone of the age, the episode was called Our Friend The Atom.
The Our Friend The Atom episode is an excellent introduction to nuclear
physics, and it is available on YouTube:

http://tinyurl.com/movieatom

The programme starts with Walt Disney standing beside a scale model of
the USS Nautilus (including a clip from the Disney movie Twenty Thousand
Leagues Under the Sea featuring the fictional Nautilus). We are then shown
around Disney's "Atomic Energy Lab" which features some very nice
wood-panelling and some "scientists" in white coats looking down optical
microscopes (presumably at "atoms"?). It is rather bizarre to hear Walt
Disney say: "As you can see, we found ourselves deep in the field of
nuclear physics."
We are then introduced to Heinz Haber, a physicist who worked for the
Luftwaffe in World War Two. After the war, he was taken to America
together with Wernher von Braun to keep his expertise out of the hands of
the Soviet Union. Haber went on to provide valuable contributions to the
NASA space programme.
 Haber then introduces some Disney animated sequences which are used
to illustrate various issues associated with nuclear energy. For example, in a
tale from The Arabian Nights, nuclear energy is compared to a genie in a
lamp which has the power to do good or evil, but can never be trapped back
inside the bottle from which it came.
Heinz Haber then proceeds to tell the story of the discovery of the atom,
starting in ancient Greece with Democritus who suggested that matter was
formed of indivisible small hard balls. Democritus could never provide any
evidence to support his atomic theory. However, the story then moves to
consider the work of the 19th century English chemist John Dalton who
proposed the atomic theory of chemistry. Dalton realised that the
combination of chemical elements (such as hydrogen and oxygen) to form
chemical compounds could be explained if the elements were formed of
atoms. This was the first truly scientific theory of the atom. According to
Dalton, when atoms of different elements joined together, compounds were
formed, e.g., two hydrogen atoms can combine with one oxygen atom to
form water.
Haber then considers advances in atomic theory through the 19th and
early 20th centuries. Slowly, Haber builds-up the model of the atom.
Atoms are composed of a tightly-packed nucleus surrounded by orbiting
electrons. The nucleus is made out of positively-charged protons and
electrically-neutral neutrons. Because protons have positive electric charge,
their tendency is to repel each other. The neutrons, therefore, have to act
like glue to hold the protons together and to stop the nucleus from flying
apart. The negatively-charged electrons are held in their orbits by the
electrical attraction to the positively-charged protons (opposite charges
attract).
The following diagram shows a carbon atom. It is composed of six
electrons orbiting a nucleus which is composed of six protons and six
neutrons:
 In this book we are only going to be interested in the nucleus of the atom.
The study of the nucleus of the atom is called nuclear physics. In his book
The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes reveals the key reason
why it is the nucleus of the atom which provides the energy for nuclear
explosives: "Nuclear physics, the study of the nucleus of the atom, is where
most of its mass — and therefore its energy — is concentrated."
A Disney book was published in association with the television
programme, also called Our Friend The Atom. The book was written by
Heinz Haber who hosted the television programme. Here is a photo of me
with a copy of the book in good condition which I bought off eBay:
 When my copy of the book arrived I was delighted to find the pages were
pristine white, completely unfaded, and I got the impression the book had
not been opened for over fifty years. This impression was strengthened
when I opened the book and found a cutting from the Daily Telegraph
newspaper dated April 13th 1961 announcing that the Soviet astronaut Yuri
Gagarin had returned safely from the first manned space flight, having
completed an orbit of the Earth. I was even more delighted to find hand-
written notes (on perfect white paper) detailing contemporary hydrogen
bomb tests and other atomic research. The following photograph shows the
notes I found in my book:
 The book had clearly belonged to a science enthusiast. It is an example of
the interest and excitement of the general public about atomic energy in the
1950s and early 1960s. I was delighted to find these hidden secrets — I
guess sometimes you just get lucky.
Our Friend The Atom was obviously aimed at a young audience, but it
was a superb project. It is a shame to think that such a high-level
educational programme about nuclear energy would never be aimed at
young children today. It is also a shame that we have lost our optimism and
enthusiasm about the potential contained within the atom. In this book, I
hope to restore some of that optimism.

The Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab

Our Friend The Atom was not the only example of 1950s nuclear
education which was aimed at children. Take a look at the following toy.
The boy on the lid of the box looks thrilled. No wonder! He has just been
given the Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab for his birthday and he is busy doing
experiments with radioactive material:

According to its Wikipedia page, the Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab has
been called "The world's most dangerous toy", which is extremely unfair
and — frankly — completely inaccurate. I would prefer to call it "The
world's coolest toy ever".
Alfred Gilbert, the toy maker who released the Atomic Energy Lab,
believed that his toys held the key to building a "strong American
character", and his toys always included some educational quality. But the
Atomic Energy Lab contained genuine radioactive ore samples. So was the
Atomic Energy Lab a safe toy?
Well, in assessing whether it was safe, it is important to realise that we
are all constantly being irradiated by a low-level background radiation. This
radiation may come from the rocks and soil which surround us, or even
from the plants which we eat — particularly bananas, which are
surprisingly radioactive. This has resulted in the creation of a measure of
radiation called the banana equivalent dose (or BED). One BED is
approximately equal to 1% of a day's worth of background radiation (which
would therefore be equal to 100 BEDs). The level of this background
radiation is low, but over a year it all adds up. It is true that the radioactive
ore samples in the Atomic Energy Lab were considerably more active than
the constant background radiation, but you would not be exposed to those
samples for long. In evaluating the safety of the Atomic Energy Lab it is
important to realise that "safe" is a relative concept.
It is perhaps a shame that nowadays the concept of giving children an
atomic energy lab seems bizarre. It exemplifies the public misconceptions
about the relative risks of radioactivity. We have lost sight of the positive
contributions of radioactivity to our world, from power generation to cancer
radiotherapy. I am sure Alfred Gilbert's laboratory was a wonderfully
educational toy.
Later in this book we will be considering my own experiments with
radioactive substances when I have fun by creating my own version of the
"Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab" using a Geiger counter and some highly-
radioactive uranium ore. I can assure you that I do live to tell the tale!

Operation Plowshare
In the 1950s, there was also a much more positive attitude towards
nuclear explosives. Yes, it was the case that the atomic bomb had been
recently used in warfare, but the general belief was that its use had
prevented the loss of the lives of hundreds of thousands of American
servicemen during an invasion of the Japanese mainland. It was also
believed that the awesome destructiveness of the bomb would lead to the
end of mass warfare as countries realised the futility of "Mutually Assured
Destruction", or MAD.
As part of that more positive approach to nuclear explosives, the U.S.
government started Operation Plowshare to investigate the use of nuclear
explosives for peaceful construction purposes. The name "Plowshare" came
from the Biblical quote "They shall beat their swords into plowshares",
indicating a desire to convert weapons into tools. Proposed uses of nuclear
explosives included the excavation of large amounts of earth and rock,
creating artificial harbours, widening the Panama canal, cutting paths
through mountains for highways, and creating underground caverns for
mining and storage.
The largest nuclear test of Operation Plowshare was the Sedan test which
took place on 6th July 1962. The aim of the test was to examine the
feasibility of using nuclear explosives to excavate large amounts of earth
and rock. The nuclear explosive was buried 194 metres underground, and
the explosion displaced twelve million tons of rock. The resultant crater is
called the Sedan Crater and it is the largest man-made crater in the United
States. Over 10,000 visitors a year now visit the site on free monthly tours.
The Sedan test took place at the Nevada Test Site, which is a 1375-
square-mile area of empty desert which is located only sixty miles away
from Las Vegas. The first atomic test at the site took place in 1951, and over
the next four decades it hosted a further 928 tests giving the area the
nickname of "the most bombed place on Earth". Even today, if you search
for "Nevada National Security Site" on Google Maps you will find the
pock-marked area of desert, with each crater representing a nuclear
explosion. It is even possible to see the enormous Sedan Crater at the north
of the site.
In 1951, Las Vegas was a struggling small town with a population of
fewer than 25,000 which was looking to boost its profile. When atomic
bomb testing started at the nearby test site, the Las Vegas Chamber of
Commerce promoted the blasts as a tourist attraction, handing out leaflets
giving the dates of the detonations. Hotels built north-facing penthouses
with the best views of the atomic mushroom clouds.
 The following photograph was taken in Las Vegas and shows the
mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion at the Nevada Test Site rising high
above the casinos in the foreground:

Project Orion
One of the most remarkable proposed uses for nuclear explosives in this
period was Project Orion. The aim of Project Orion was to design a
spacecraft which was to be propelled by a sequence of thousands of nuclear
bombs exploded in succession at the rear of the craft. The craft was to be
protected by a 1,000-ton steel plate (called a pusher plate) and shock
absorbers to protect the crew from the crushing acceleration (though that
would not be a problem if the craft was unmanned). Radioactive nuclear
fallout would not be a problem if the propulsion system was restricted to
being only used in space. So, although the Project Orion proposal might
sound absurd, experiments at the time showed that it would actually be a
viable means of space travel.
In the BBC documentary To Mars by A-Bomb: The Secret History of
Project Orion, the physicist and author Arthur C. Clarke emphasized that
the idea behind Project Orion was not crazy: "After all, every time you get
into a motor car you are being driven around by means of a series of rapid
explosions." [2]
The following image shows a NASA artist's impression of the Orion
spacecraft with Saturn drawn in the background. The image is taken about
four milliseconds after the explosion of a nuclear propellant charge,
showing the blast hitting the pusher plate at the rear of the craft. The line
drawing underneath is another NASA diagram showing the key components
of the Orion craft, including the pusher plate and the multiple shock
absorbers:
 If the spaceship was of standard size (e.g., just a few tons in weight) then
the force of the exploding bombs would pulverise the craft. The solution
was to make the spacecraft big: a few thousand tons in weight. According
to Newton's second law of motion, the resultant acceleration would be
greatly reduced due to the immense mass. Not only would this save the
structure of the craft, it would also make the acceleration endurable for the
on-board travellers. The plan was therefore to make an enormous craft, the
size and weight of an ocean liner. To this day, the Orion technology remains
our only method for moving extremely large payloads around the Solar
System because of the huge energy advantage of nuclear explosives over
chemical propellants. It has been said that: "To this day, Orion is still the
only feasible means of interstellar travel, both robotic and manned, that
could actually be built with current technology and knowledge." [3]
As a result of the necessity for large mass, the spacecraft would be built
using a radically new philosophy. The spacecraft would be constructed out
of steel, resembling a building more than a spacecraft. In fact, it would be
more like a hotel — or an ark. It would have the potential to carry a large
population out of the Solar System to colonise nearby planetary systems.
According to Freeman Dyson, one of the physicists who worked on Project
Orion: "Establishing human colonies was certainly part of our plan".
But surely there could never be a pressing need for such an ark. Why
would humanity ever need to leave the Earth? Why would humanity need to
colonise distant planets? Well, there is potentially one very good reason: a
large asteroid or comet might appear on a collision course with the Earth
threatening the mass-extinction of all life on the planet. In that situation,
Orion might provide our only chance of survival.
If an asteroid on a collision course is detected a long way from Earth,
there would be time to use "kinetic impact" — ramming a spacecraft into
the asteroid — in order to produce a slight deflection to the course of the
asteroid. Because of the great distance left on its course, that small
deflection might be enough to cause the asteroid to miss the Earth. Time is
of the essence when it comes to asteroid deflection.
Unfortunately, we would probably not have a long-enough warning
period to launch such a spacecraft. In 2014, a comet was detected on a
collision course with Mars — just 22 months before it crashed into the
planet. According to Dr. Joseph Nuth, a NASA researcher, that would not
have been nearly enough time to launch a rocket had the comet been on a
collision course with the Earth. It takes five years to design and launch a
spacecraft.
 Orion might be the best technology to intercept and deflect an Earth-
bound asteroid. Johndale Solem, a physicist at Los Alamos National
Laboratory, said that "Orion provides such an advantage in speed over
chemical propellants that it seems that interception could take place in a
much shorter timescale, and consequently the deflection could take place
further away so that it would be easier to make such an object miss the
Earth."
Once intercepted, nuclear explosives could also be deployed either close
to the asteroid to deflect it, or they could be used on the surface or beneath
the surface of the asteroid in order to destroy it. The public perception of
nuclear explosives might be very negative, but one day we might need to
rely on them to save our planet.

I hope this introductory chapter has convinced you that nuclear

explosives are not necessarily evil and maybe one day — in a world without
war — they may prove to be of tremendous benefit to humanity. After all,
dynamite has been a great boon to the construction and demolition
industries, and we do not consider there to be anything fundamentally evil
about dynamite.
A nuclear explosion is just an astonishing natural phenomenon. How we
harness the power of that natural phenomenon represents a challenge — and
an opportunity — for humanity.

Let us now start the long story of the development of the atomic bomb …
2
FAINT FAIRY LIGHTS
Marie Curie looked at the test tube in delight. The year was 1902. Marie
was thirty one years old, and working in the laboratory of her husband
Pierre at the School of Physics and Chemistry in Paris. The test tube
contained radium, a new element which Marie and Pierre had just
discovered. To her delight, she noticed the test tube was glowing with a
beautiful green colour, an effect she innocently called "faint fairy lights".
Even when Marie closed her eyes she could still see the magic colours as
the rays penetrated her eyelids as though they were not there.
In the evenings, she would often sit with Pierre in the laboratory they
shared and gaze in wonder at the eerie blue-green glow of their new
discovery which illuminated the entire room. Marie gave a name to these
emitted rays: radioactivity. In this chapter we will be considering
radioactivity in detail.
Six years earlier, the French physicist Henri Becquerel had first
discovered the radioactive properties of uranium. Becquerel was
investigating the effect of sunlight on photographic plates when he was
frustrated by a cloudy day in Paris. Unable to perform his experiment due to
the lack of sunlight, Becquerel put away his photographic plate into a
drawer — which also happened to contain a nugget of uranium.
The next day, when Becquerel took the plates out of the drawer, he was
surprised to find that the uranium had left clear imprints on the plates as
though they had been exposed to a bright light. This was the first detection
of radioactivity, and Becquerel's cloudy day in Paris stands as a clear
example of the role of good luck in scientific discovery.
The discovery of radioactivity is presented in animated form at the 19:53
minute mark of Disney's Our Friend The Atom. This link takes you there
directly:

http://tinyurl.com/radioactivediscovery
 Becquerel did not take his work any further, so it was left to Marie and
Pierre Curie to pursue this mystery.
Marie discovered that the rays were purely a product of uranium on its
own — not due to any chemical reaction with any other element. Therefore,
Marie had the insight that the rays were a fundamental property of uranium
atoms. It was also clear that there was considerable energy being produced
purely from the atom. This was the first observation of the potential of
atomic power. Marie Curie's "faint fairy lights" were going to light up the
world.
But if uranium was radioactive, might not other elements be radioactive
as well? This was the question which was to lead to the discovery of
radium. Marie tested all eighty known elements for radioactivity, and many
other substances as well. Eventually, Marie found one particular mineral
called pitchblende — a by-product of mining — which appeared to be far
more radioactive than uranium. If radioactivity really was generated from
the atoms of a single element then there had to be some new and mysterious
element in the pitchblende compound. But it would be no easy task to refine
the mystery element. The Curies obtained seven tons of pitchblende from
the mines of Bohemia, a pile of black rubble which filled their laboratory.
The rubble had to be laboriously crushed by hand in a pestle and mortar.
But after four years of hard labour, the Curies managed to extract one tenth
of a gram of a new element — radium — from the pile of rubble.
The discovery of radium proved to be an international sensation. It
appeared to be a new, constantly-glowing miraculous source of energy —
ideal for the luminous paint of watch dials. Radium was also viewed as a
potential cure for numerous diseases, including throat medicines and cough
cures, and you could even buy radium toothpaste, condoms, and
suppositories.
Marie and Pierre were interested in the medical applications of their new
discovery, and were even willing to sacrifice their own health in their
research. At one time, Pierre strapped a test tube filled with radium to his
arm for ten hours, creating a lesion on his arm. Bizarrely, Pierre was thrilled
— and for good reason. If radiation could damage healthy tissue, then it
should also be able to destroy diseased tissue. This gave the Curies the idea
to use radioactivity to treat cancer — the first use of radiotherapy.
Radiotherapy represents one of the ways in which radiation has provided
benefits to humanity.
The declining health of Pierre was noted when Edward Rutherford came
to visit the Curies in Paris in the summer of 1903. To celebrate the award of
Marie's doctorate, a party was held in their garden. Pierre brought out a
glowing tube of radium which impressed Rutherford greatly, describing it
as "a splendid finale to an unforgettable day". However, the light was bright
enough to reveal Pierre's hands to Rutherford, who noted that they were
inflamed and painful due to exposure to radioactivity.
In April 1906, Pierre was crossing the busy intersection of Rue Dauphine
near the Seine when he fell under a horse-drawn carriage. He narrowly
missed being trampled by the horses as the driver attempted to stop the
carriage, but the carriage was carrying six tons of military equipment and
kept slowly rolling. The back wheels of the carriage crushed Pierre's head,
killing him instantly.
Marie was devastated by the loss of her husband and colleague. The
Sorbonne (the University of Paris) awarded Pierre's professorship to Marie,
making Marie the university's first female professor in its 650-year history.
By 1911, Marie was feeling more content about her personal situation,
and there were three reasons for her improved state of mind. The first
reason for Marie's happiness was that she had just received a telegram
confirming that she had won her second Nobel Prize. That award of the
1911 Nobel Prize in chemistry, together with her 1903 award in physics for
the discovery of radioactivity, made her the first person to win two Nobel
prizes.
Secondly, Marie was invited to be a participant at the first International
Solvay Conference in Brussels, which was a meeting of the greatest minds
in physics. Attendees included Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Ernest
Rutherford. The following photograph shows the attendees, with Marie
Curie the second seated person from the right:
 The third reason for Marie's happiness was the presence of her lover,
Paul Langevin, who was standing next to Einstein at the extreme right of
the Solvay photograph. Unfortunately, Langevin also happened to be a
married man. When Langevin's wife saw the photograph of Marie and Paul
together at the Solvay Conference she told the press of the affair and it
quickly became a national scandal with lurid stories in the newspapers. At
one point, an angry mob formed outside Marie's house and threw stones
through her window. Einstein wrote a letter of support to Marie regarding
her treatment by the press: "If the rabble continues to be occupied with you,
simply stop reading that drivel. Leave it to the vipers it was fabricated for."
Paul Langevin, defending his honour, challenged the journalist of the
newspaper to a duel. The two duellists met at eleven o' clock in the
morning. Each took their pistol, and paced-out twenty five yards. But when
they turned to face each other, the journalist fired into the ground.
Explaining his action later, he said: "Paul Langevin has a reputation as a
scientist. However grave may be the errors made by Langevin in his
domestic life, I did not wish to deprive French science of a precious brain."
On seeing his adversary's action, Langevin also fired into the ground,
saying: "I am not an assassin".
Langevin returned to his wife, and the outrage over the affair was brief.
But the incident gives us an insight into the non-conformist life of Marie
Curie, and reminds us of the challenging culture in which she had to work.
Marie Curie died at the age of 66 from exposure to radiation. The bodies
of Marie and Pierre Curie were interred in the Panthéon in Paris. To this
day, Marie's original documents remain so highly radioactive that they are
kept in lead-lined boxes and can only be read whilst wearing protecting
clothing.

Alpha and beta

As has just been described, Marie Curie explained that radioactivity had
to be a property of the atoms of certain elements. But what was the cause of
radioactivity? What was so special about those elements? And what was the
radiation made of? It was the great experimental physicist Ernest
Rutherford who supplied the answers to these questions.
In 1899, Rutherford took a sample of uranium and wrapped it in layers of
thin aluminium foils. As more foil was added, the effect was to reduce the
amount of emitted radiation which could penetrate the total amount of foil.
The experiment revealed that there were two types of radiation being
emitted from the uranium sample with greatly different abilities to penetrate
the foil. Rutherford called these two types of radiation alpha and beta
(named after the first two letters of the Greek alphabet).[4] Alpha rays
could be quite easily stopped by the foil, whereas the beta rays were more
penetrating. Also, it was observed that the two types of rays were deflected
by a magnetic field, suggesting that the alpha rays were composed of
positively-charged particles, while the beta rays were composed of
negatively-charged particles. Also, the alpha rays were deflected by a
smaller amount than the beta rays, suggesting that the alpha particles had
much greater mass than the beta particles.
What particles do we know which have negative charge and low mass
and so have the same properties as the beta particles? Yes, electrons have
negative charge and low mass. Indeed, further experiments revealed that the
beta particles were, in fact, just electrons being emitted from the atoms at
extremely high speed (high energy).
But what were the alpha particles made of? In 1909, Ernest Rutherford
found the answer.
Rutherford was famous for creating ingenious experiments using the very
limited apparatus available at that time. As an example, to examine alpha
particles Rutherford placed a sample of radioactive radon gas in a thin-
walled glass tube and then surrounded that tube with a second glass tube
which had a thicker wall. The alpha particles emitted by the radon were
able to penetrate the first glass wall but could not escape the second wall.
As a result, the alpha particles became trapped in the space between the two
glass walls. After a week, the substance between the two walls was
analysed and found to be helium, which meant that alpha particles are
composed of the nuclei of helium atoms.
The nucleus of a helium atom is composed of two protons and two
neutrons. Rutherford's discovery, therefore, explained why alpha particles
had positive electric charge (supplied by the two protons in the helium
nucleus), and also had greater mass than the beta particles (which were just
electrons).

The alchemists
The type of element (hydrogen, helium, uranium, etc.) is defined by the
number of protons it has in its atomic nucleus. If alpha particles (which
each contain two protons) were being emitted from atoms, then that implied
that the element was changing into a different element, the atoms of which
had two fewer protons. To change an element into a different element (for
example, changing lead into gold) had long been the dream of alchemists.
However, until the start of the 20th century it was considered impossible for
any chemical element to change into a different chemical element — a
process known as transmutation.
However, all that changed when Rutherford — together with Frederick
Soddy — discovered that a sample of the radioactive element thorium
appeared to be converting into radium. When Soddy realised what was
happening, he shouted out "Rutherford! This is transmutation!", to which
Rutherford replied "For Christ's sake, Soddy, don't call it transmutation.
They'll have our heads off as alchemists."
If an element is capable of spontaneously changing into a different
element, it would be very desirable to find a way of quantifying that
change. For example, if I have a sample of uranium, I would like to know
how long it would take for that sample to change into a different element. In
order to be able to quantify the speed of the transmutation, it would appear
we would need to know the precise details underlying radioactive decay (in
physics, whenever an unstable particle transforms into a different particle it
is called "decay"). However, the physics which underlies radioactive decay
is quantum physics, and — if you have read my fourth book — you will
know that all quantum processes are fundamentally random. In other words,
you can never analyse those processes to a deeper level to discover how
they work — you just have to accept that they are completely random. So
that leaves us with a problem: if completely random quantum physics
underlies radioactive decay, then how can we ever hope to develop a precise
formula which describes the transmutation?
Well, even though we can never accurately predict when the decay of a
single atom will occur, if we have billions of decay events then we can
determine the average likelihood of a decay occurring and we can use that
to make reliable predictions (the same method a casino uses to be certain of
making money from probabilistic events).
A single atom of uranium, for example, might decay in the next second,
or it might take billions of years before it decays — we have no way of
knowing, it is fundamentally random. However, if we are considering a
sample of billions of atoms then we can use an averaging statistical measure
to describe the rate of decay. The statistical measure which is generally used
is called the half-life of an element. The half-life is defined as the length of
time it would take for half of the atoms in a sample to decay.
As an example, the half-life of uranium is 4.5 billion years. That means if
I have a sample of uranium and wait for 4.5 billion years, then half of my
sample will have turned into a different element, leaving me with a sample
containing only half the original amount of uranium. If I then wait another
further 4.5 billion years, half of that remaining amount of uranium will turn
into a different element, leaving me with only a quarter of the original
amount of uranium.
 Nuclear reactions
This discussion of radioactive decay has provided us with a clearer
understanding of the cause of radioactivity. Radioactivity occurs in heavy
elements whose nuclei are fundamentally unstable. Those elements are
heavy precisely because their atoms have nuclei made of a high number of
protons and neutrons. As Heinz Haber says in Our Friend The Atom: "Here
Nature has crowded so many protons and neutrons into the nucleus that it
becomes unstable". Parts of those heavy nuclei get radiated-away as those
elements decay into elements which have more stable nuclei. It is the
emitted particles which form alpha and beta radiation.
Let us now consider the effect of the two types of radiation. We will need
to define two important numbers which describe an atomic nucleus.
The atomic number of a chemical element is the number of protons in the
nucleus of each atom of that element. The atomic number is crucial because
an element is uniquely defined by the number of protons in the nuclei of its
atoms. For example, all hydrogen atoms contain one proton, and all oxygen
atoms contain eight protons. Hence, the atomic number defines which
element an atom represents.
The other important number which describes the composition of an
atomic nucleus is the mass number. The mass number is the total sum of
the number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus.
The conventional notation is to describe a sample of an element by
writing its chemical symbol preceded by its atomic number (as a subscript)
and its mass number (as a superscript). This convention is shown in the
following example for uranium (the chemical symbol for uranium is "U"):
 The previous example shows natural uranium, in which the nucleus has
92 protons and 146 neutrons, giving a total mass number of 238 (as shown
in the previous image). Crucially, though, it is possible for an atom of a
particular element to have the same number of protons but a different
number of neutrons, in which case the substance is called an isotope. As
isotopes of elements have different numbers of neutrons they therefore have
different values for their mass number. The natural form of uranium shown
in the previous diagram is uranium-238 where the "238" represents the
mass number. Later in this book we will be examining the vital importance
of the isotope uranium-235 for nuclear reactions.
Let us now consider what happens during the radioactive decay of an
element. Remember, in alpha radioactive decay the nucleus emits a helium
nucleus which is composed of two protons and two neutrons. So the
emission of an alpha particle would decrease the atomic number by two (as
the nucleus has lost two protons) and decrease the mass number by four (as
the nucleus has lost a total of two protons and two neutrons). For the
example of uranium-238, this would transmute the uranium atom into an
atom of thorium:
 You can see from the previous diagram that thorium has an atomic
number of 90 and a mass number of 234. You can also see the emitted
helium nucleus forming the alpha particle.
Any process such as this in which atomic nuclei are modified is called a
nuclear reaction (as opposed to a chemical reaction). When we describe a
nuclear reaction using this notation, we must check two rules which are
always true in any nuclear reaction:

1. The total number of protons and neutrons before the reaction is always
equal to the total number of protons and neutrons after the reaction. In
other words, the total mass number is always unchanged.

2. Electric charge is always conserved through a nuclear reaction.

Let us now examine how those two rules apply in the case of the alpha
decay of uranium we have just considered.
Considering the first rule, and referring back to the previous diagram of
alpha decay, you will note that the total number of protons and neutrons
before the reaction (238, the mass number of uranium) is equal to the total
number of protons and neutrons after the reaction (234 for the thorium
nucleus, plus the mass number of four for the helium nucleus gives a total
of 238). So the first rule is obeyed.
Now let us consider the second rule about conservation of electric charge.
Every proton has a single unit of positive electric charge, so the total
electric charge of the uranium nucleus before the reaction is 92 (the atomic
number of uranium). After the reaction, the thorium nucleus has 90 units of
positive electric charge (its atomic number), and the emitted alpha particle
has two units of positive electric charge (the atomic number of helium). So
electric charge is conserved through the reaction (92 = 90+2), and the
second rule is therefore also obeyed.

The power of the atom

Alpha particles have enormous energy as they are ejected at about 5% of
the speed of light. Plus, these particles are being constantly emitted as the
individual atoms of a piece of radioactive material decays. Each click of a
Geiger counter reveals the detection of one of these charged particles. You
can see the use of a Geiger counter in the following direct link to Our
Friend The Atom, immediately followed by the use of a cloud chamber to
reveal the "constant shower" of radioactive particles emitted by a sample of
radium:

http://tinyurl.com/radioactiveparticles

Now imagine the enormous quantity of energy which would be released

if all those clicks of the Geiger counter happened at the same time. Or,
equivalently, imagine if all those radioactive particles were emitted by the
radium at the same time. Well, that is basically what happens in a nuclear
explosion, with all the energy released in a few microseconds. According to
Ernest Rutherford, a single gram of radium emits enough energy in its
lifetime to raise a 500 ton weight a mile high.
Soddy commented on this energy release in a 1903 paper: "This reaction
sets free more energy for a given weight than any other chemical change
known. The energy of radioactive change must therefore be at least twenty-
thousand times, and maybe a million times, as great as the energy of any
molecular change."
This gives us our first insight into why nuclear reactions (and explosions)
are so powerful. For example, the detonation of dynamite releases about ten
electron-volts of energy per molecule, whereas a nuclear reaction can
release millions of electron-volts of energy per nucleus. Multiply that value
by the trillions of atoms in a sample of nuclear explosive and you can start
to understand the source of its extraordinary power. As Bruce Cameron
Reed says in his book The History and Science of the Manhattan Project:
"This begins to give you a hint as to the compelling power of nuclear
weapons. An 'ordinary' bomb that contains 1,000 pounds of chemical
explosive could be replaced with a nuclear bomb that utilizes only 1/100 of
a pound of a nuclear explosive. Thousands of tons of conventional
explosive can be replaced with a few tens of kilograms of nuclear
explosive."
In a lecture in 1904, Soddy suggested presciently: "It is possible that all
heavy matter possesses — latent and bound up with the structure of the
atom — a similar quantity of energy to that possessed by radium. If it could
be tapped and controlled what an agent it would be in shaping the world's
destiny! The man who put his hand on the lever by which a parsimonious
Nature regulates so jealously the output of this store of energy would
possess a weapon by which he could destroy the Earth if he chose."

Beta radiation
We have just examined alpha radiation so we will now examine beta
radiation.
As explained earlier, Rutherford had discovered that beta radiation from
an atom was composed of an emitted electron. This happens when a neutron
in the nucleus converts into a proton — by a process which we will
examine later in this chapter.
Now let us consider the effect of beta radiation on atomic number and
mass number. The conversion of the neutron into a proton increases the
atomic number by one (one more proton in the nucleus) while leaving the
mass number unchanged (total number of protons and neutrons is
unchanged). Hence, the following diagram shows how an atom of carbon-
14 is transmuted into an atom of nitrogen-14 after beta radioactive decay
(atomic number increases by one, mass number stays the same):
 You will see that an electron and a particle called an antineutrino are also
emitted. We shall consider the antineutrino later in this chapter, but let us
now consider why this conversion of a neutron in a proton necessarily
results in an electron (the beta radiation) being emitted. Well, to see why,
remember our two golden rules of nuclear reactions. The second golden
rule says that electric charge must always be conserved through a nuclear
reaction. With this in mind, remember a proton has positive electric charge,
whereas a neutron has zero electric charge (an antineutrino also has zero
electric charge). So when a neutron converts into a proton during beta decay
we have a situation in which the amount of positive charge is increasing by
one unit — which clearly breaks the law of conservation of charge. In order
for balance to be restored, a negatively-charged electron must also be
produced in addition to the proton. That electron represents the emitted beta
radiation. Hence, the beta radiation emerges as a necessary result of the law
of conservation of electric charge.

In 1946, a Bedouin shepherd named Muhammed edh-Dhib was herding

his sheep through the barren rocky wilderness on the west side of the Dead
Sea. High in the sheer cliffs above, he saw a small cave and decided to
climb up to investigate. Deep in the cave he found a number of small
pottery jars, and in those jars he found seven ancient parchment scrolls on
which there was Hebrew writing.
Muhammed edh-Dhib had just discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls.
After selling the scrolls to an antiquities dealer, they caught the attention
of an archaeologist who believed they dated back to Biblical times. But,
unfortunately, there was no way of accurately dating the scrolls. It was left
to science to provide the answer using a new technology which had just
been developed.
It has just been described how the radioactive isotope carbon-14 will
decay to nitrogen-14 via beta radiation. There is always a small amount of
carbon-14 in the atmosphere, and this combines with oxygen to make
carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is absorbed by plants during
photosynthesis, and those plants are eaten by animals and humans, or that
plant material is used by humans for creating parchment manuscripts. In
other words, a significant amount of carbon-14 ends up in all organic
material.
When a plant dies, it stops absorbing new carbon-14 from the
atmosphere. However, the carbon-14 it absorbed during its life continues to
decay. The half-life of carbon-14 is known to be 5,730 years. Therefore, a
sample which was 5,730 years old would only have half the amount of
carbon-14 compared to a living organism. After 11,460 years it would only
have 25% of the amount of carbon-14 compared to a living organism. On
that basis, in the late 1940s the science of radiocarbon dating was
developed which was based on analysing the proportion of carbon-14 in
dead organic material.
The radiocarbon dating system was calibrated by measuring the amount
of carbon-14 in dead bristlecone pines which are found along the west coast
of North America. Bristlecone pines were known to be the oldest living life-
forms on Earth. The age of bristlecone pines could be measured accurately
by counting the rings of bark which make up the tree trunk. Using this
method, the oldest bristlecone pine was found to be 5,000 years old.
By measuring the amount of carbon-14 in an ancient bristlecone pine, a
graph showing variation of carbon-14 with age was produced. The task now
was to apply this new technique to dating the Dead Sea Scrolls. A sample of
the linen wrapping of the scrolls was tested using radiocarbon dating in
1955 and was found to be 1,917 years old, with a plus or minus error of 200
years. The announcement of this first major success of radiocarbon dating
had a major impact on archaeology, and radiocarbon dating laboratories
have been created around the world.
Radiocarbon dating represents another way in which radioactivity has
provided benefits to humanity. Remember that the basis of all radiocarbon
dating is beta radioactive decay.

The weak interaction

Let us now consider beta radioactive decay in more depth. This section is
quite technical and is not essential knowledge for atomic bomb
construction, so you can skip to the next chapter if you wish. However, if
you want to understand the origin of the antineutrino particle which is
emitted during beta decay, here is the explanation.
It is now known that the protons and neutrons which make up the nucleus
of an atom are not truly elementary particles. Instead, protons and neutrons
are each composed of three particles called quarks, and it is these quarks
which are considered to be truly elementary. Beta radiation is produced
from the interactions between those quarks.
Protons and neutrons are composed of two different types of quarks
called up quarks and down quarks. A proton is composed of two up quarks
and one down quark. A neutron is composed of one up quark and two down
quarks:

There is a symmetry between up and down quarks, which means it is

possible for a down quark to turn into an up quark, and vice versa. This
conversion is achieved via the weak interaction in which the quark interacts
with a boson (a force-carrying particle). The following diagram is a simple
Feynman diagram which shows how a down quark can change to an up
quark when it interacts with a W boson, one of the bosons associated with
the weak interaction. You can see that the W boson also modifies the path
of the original particle — as if acted on by a force — so it is said that the W
boson is the particle which carries the weak force:
 As stated earlier, a neutron is composed of two down quarks and one up
quark. So this conversion of a down quark into an up quark via the weak
interaction would have the effect of converting a neutron into a proton,
which is what we know happens during beta radioactive decay. So we can
now see why the weak interaction is so important for the emission of beta
radiation.
For the next step in our analysis of beta radiation, we need to introduce a
strange and elusive new particle: the neutrino. A neutrino is the only
electrically-neutral matter particle, and it is virtually massless (i.e., it is
extremely light) so therefore travels at speeds close to the speed of light.
Because the neutrino is so light and has a ghostly nature, it passes through
materials as though they were not there — including the materials which
are used to make particle detectors. Unfortunately, a particle which flies
straight through a particle detector without interacting with that detector is a
particle which is not going to be detected easily. When Wolfgang Pauli
predicted the existence of the neutrino in 1930 he said: "I have done a
terrible thing. I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected!"
Don't get a neutrino and a neutron mixed up — their names might sound
similar but they are completely different particles. As explained earlier, a
neutron is composed of three quarks so it is not a genuinely elementary
particle, whereas the neutrino is believed to be truly elementary (i.e., not
composed of any other particles).
We have just seen that there is a symmetry between a down quark and an
up quark, which is moderated by the weak interaction. There is a similar
symmetry between a neutrino and an electron. The following diagram
shows how a neutrino can change to an electron when it interacts with a W
boson:

We have now generated two simple Feynman diagrams showing how the
weak interaction can act to change down quarks into up quarks (and vice
versa), and neutrinos into electrons (and vice versa). These simple Feynman
diagrams which include just one vertex (junction) are called a minimal
interaction vertex. These simple diagrams can be used to completely
characterise the behaviour of a force.
Let us draw our two minimal interaction vertices again, and, so we can
refer to them, let us number them as diagram 1 and diagram 2:
 These are the two diagrams which interest us as these are the diagrams
which are relevant to beta radioactive decay. Let us now use these two
Feynman diagrams to construct the complete Feynman diagram of
radioactive beta decay. This can be achieved because Feynman diagrams
have a very useful feature: they can be rotated and the interaction they
describe will still remain valid. On that basis, the following diagram
includes both diagram 1 and diagram 2 which have been joined together.
Both diagrams have been surrounded by grey dashed circles to make their
position clearer. You will see that diagram 1 has been rotated slightly anti-
clockwise, while diagram 2 has been rotated clockwise by a larger amount:
 In this way, you can see how the complete diagram for beta radioactive
decay can be constructed via these minimal interaction vertices — just like
Lego!
As you can see from the previous diagram, the end result is that a neutron
changes into a proton, and in the process it emits an electron and a neutrino
(these two particles shown at the bottom right of the diagram). The emitted
electron represents the beta radiation which is detected (remember, beta
radiation is just a stream of electrons). The neutrino, meanwhile, does not
interact with anything — it just shoots away at close to the speed of light
straight through the walls of the laboratory as if they were not there and it is
halfway to the moon in a matter of seconds.
Importantly, note that the arrow on the emitted neutrino seems to indicate
that it is travelling backward in the time direction (you will see the forward
time direction indicated by the arrow on the bottom left of the diagram). In
a Feynman diagram, any particle which is travelling backward in time is
equivalent to an antiparticle which is travelling forward in time. In other
words, it is a particle of antimatter (see my fifth book for details). Hence,
the emitted neutrino is not actually a neutrino at all: it is the antimatter
equivalent of a neutrino which is called an antineutrino. This explains the
origin of the antineutrino which is emitted during beta decay.
3
SPLITTING THE ATOM
As we have just seen, radioactive particles have high energy and are
emitted from the nucleus at great speed. The question then arises: what
would happen if one of these particles was directed to collide with a second
nucleus? What would be the outcome?
That was the question first considered by Ernest Rutherford in 1909.
Rutherford knew that the alpha particle had more mass than the beta
particle, so an alpha particle colliding with a second atomic nucleus could
potentially reveal the structure of that nucleus. With this in mind,
Rutherford directed a steam of alpha particles at thin gold foil and placed a
Geiger counter on the other side of the foil to detect the alpha particles as
they passed through the foil. The intention was to consider the scattering of
the alpha particles due to the nuclei in the gold foil.
To Rutherford's great surprise, some of the alpha particles bounced back
from the foil. Rutherford realised this had to mean that there was a minute,
comparatively-heavy, positively-charged nucleus at the heart of the atom.
This was to be Rutherford's greatest discovery.
The following image shows Rutherford's laboratory at Cambridge, which
was fairly typical of nuclear laboratories at that time. It looks very different
from today's LHC, but no particle physics laboratory has made more
historic discoveries than Rutherford's lab:
 So the value of alpha particles as a nuclear probe was clear — but there
was a problem. As described earlier, an alpha particle is a helium nucleus
with two protons and therefore has positive electric charge. But a nucleus
also has positive electric charge. So if an alpha particle is directed towards a
second nucleus, the alpha particle will be repelled by the electric charge of
that nucleus (two charges of the same sign will repel). This makes it very
difficult to use a charged particle as a nuclear probe. The problem becomes
more acute when an attempt is made to probe the nuclei of heavier elements
as heavier elements have more protons in their nuclei and therefore have
greater positive electric charge. As Richard Rhodes says in his book The
Making of the Atomic Bomb: "Farther along the periodic table a barricade
loomed. The naturally radioactive sources Rutherford used emitted
relatively slow-moving alpha particles that lacked the power to penetrate
past the increasingly formidable electrical barriers of heavier nuclei. For a
time, the newborn science of nuclear physics stalled."
However, everything changed in 1932.
James Chadwick was a researcher at Rutherford's Cavendish Laboratory
in Cambridge University. In 1932, in a letter to the British journal Nature,
Chadwick announced the discovery of the neutron. As was described in
Chapter One of this book, the atomic nucleus is composed of protons and
neutrons. The neutron has approximately the same mass as the proton but it
has no electric charge. It was realised very quickly that this meant that the
neutron had the potential to be perfect for probing a nucleus as — unlike
the positively-charged proton — it would not be repelled by the positive
electric charge of the nucleus.
The neutron was to revolutionise the examination of the nucleus. The
Nobel prize-winning nuclear physicist Hans Bethe once said that he
considered everything before 1932 to be "the prehistory of nuclear physics,
and from 1932 onward (after the discovery of the neutron) modern nuclear
physics was born."
As Bruce Cameron Reed says in his book The History and Science of the
Manhattan Project: "Neutrons would prove to be the gateway to reactors
and bombs."

Artificial radioactivity
If nuclear physics had been stalled for over ten years since 1919, with the
discovery of the neutron in 1932 it suddenly sprang into life. Progress
would now be incredibly rapid as we shall see, with the discovery of
nuclear fission in 1938, the construction of the first nuclear reactor in 1942,
and the first man-made nuclear explosion in 1945 — events which all
depended on the discovery of the neutron. After the discovery of the
neutron, the race was on.
The first experimentalist to use neutrons to bombard atomic nuclei was
Enrico Fermi. Fermi was a talented physicist based at the University of
Rome who had been appointed to a full professorship at the age of 26.
Fermi gained a reputation for having uncanny intuition about physics. It
was even suggested that "Fermi had an inside track to God". His near
infallibility at predicting the results of experiments meant his colleagues
gave him the nickname "the Pope".
Fermi started his work on neutron bombardment in 1934, with a
particular interest in bombarding the heavy metals which had many protons
and neutrons in their nuclei. By bombarding various target elements, Fermi
found he could make elements radioactive which would never normally be
radioactive.[5] As an example, by bombarding gold with neutrons he found
that a neutron was sometimes absorbed by the gold nucleus, creating a
heavier nucleus with one more neutron than the natural form. However, the
resultant isotope with its extra neutron was highly-unstable, and — as
explained earlier — an unstable atom is radioactive. So the resultant isotope
atoms were highly radioactive with a very short half-life of sometimes only
a few minutes. As a result, Fermi would have to run down the corridor with
his unstable radioactive isotopes to test them with a Geiger counter in a
second room before the radioactivity faded away (due to the extremely
short half-life).
Let us consider the neutron bombardment of gold in more detail. The first
stage is for the neutron to be absorbed by a gold nucleus, adding one to the
mass number, and thereby creating an isotope of gold:

(You might want to check that our two rules of nuclear reactions apply
here: the neutron is electrically-neutral so electric charge is conserved
before and after, and the total number of neutrons and protons before the
reaction is equal to the total number of neutrons and protons after the
reaction: 1+197=198).
But the additional neutron makes the nucleus unstable, so let us now
concentrate on the gold isotope and consider the second stage of the
process.
The nucleus of the unstable gold isotope decays via the beta radiation we
considered in the previous chapter. That means a neutron in the nucleus
transforms into a proton, with the emission of an electron (beta radiation):

So, as explained in the previous chapter, you can see that the result of the
beta decay is to increase the atomic number of the gold nucleus by one,
transmuting it into mercury ("Hg" is the chemical symbol for mercury). In
the previous diagram you can see that the atomic number has increased
from 79 (gold) to 80 (mercury).
Crucially, this shows that neutron bombardment can be used to increase
the atomic number of the bombarded element, adding a proton to the
nucleus and thereby transmuting it into a heavier element. We shall see later
that this is the process by which heavy elements for nuclear weapons can be
made. Indeed, as we shall see in Chapter Seven, the first atomic bomb used
plutonium produced in an atomic reactor by this method of neutron
bombardment.
If he could transmute gold into a heavier element via neutron
bombardment, Fermi reasoned that he could also transmute uranium into a
heavier element. However, that represented a much bigger deal: uranium is
the heaviest natural element. If he was going to create a heavier element (a
so-called transuranic element) then Fermi would be creating a substance
which had never before existed on Earth.
But that appeared to be precisely what happened when Fermi bombarded
uranium with neutrons. Beta emissions from the bombarded uranium
appeared to suggest the usual increase in the atomic number by one. In June
1934, Fermi announced in Nature that his results "suggested the possibility
that the atomic number of the element may be greater than 92 (the atomic
number of uranium)." This announcement generated a great deal of
excitement in Italy at the time, with some Italian journalists suggesting that
this new element should be called "Mussolinium". However, this was to be
one of the rare occasions when Fermi's intuition failed him.
 In detecting a possible new heavy element, Fermi had been careful to
eliminate the possibility that the radiation might be coming from some
heavy element which was slightly lighter than uranium. However, he had
never considered the apparently crazy possibility that it was coming from
an element which was only half the weight of uranium, as if the uranium
nucleus had been split in two. After all, such an effect had never been seen
before.
But that was his big mistake …

The discovery of fission

In 1912, the German Kaiser decided he wanted to support German
science — and create a symbol of increasing German strength — by
building a new scientific institute. The result was the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute in a suburb of Berlin. The architect of the institute decided to
incorporate a spiked German army helmet on top of a round corner tower.
The intention was undoubtedly to flatter the Kaiser but, as you can see at
the top right of the following photograph, the end result was rather comical:
 Among the first physicists to be based at the new institute were Otto
Hahn and Lise Meitner. Hahn had established his reputation by previously
working with Rutherford, and Meitner had published papers on alpha and
beta radiation, gaining a reputation as an accomplished experimentalist.
Einstein was later to call her the "German Marie Curie" (even though she
was, in fact, Austrian).
By the 1930s, Hahn and Meitner had acquired enough experience to be
acknowledged experts in the field of radioactivity (Richard Rhodes called
Hahn "the ablest radiochemist in the world"). In 1935, they became
intrigued by Fermi's results of bombarding uranium with neutrons and the
claim that transuranic elements were being created. Hahn and Meitner
decided to investigate Fermi's claim, and to help them in their task they
enlisted the chemist Fritz Strassmann.
However, the investigations of Hahn and Meitner were to be derailed by
the darkening atmosphere in Europe. In March 1938, Nazi Germany
invaded Austria (the invasion was called the "Anschluss"). With Austria
now part of the German Reich, Lise Meitner became a German citizen. This
was a worrying development because Meitner was Jewish, so Germany's
many anti-Semitic laws suddenly applied to her. Firstly, as part of the
persecution of Jewish academics, Meitner's research funding was
withdrawn. Meitner decided she had no choice but to flee Germany quickly.
Niels Bohr arranged for her to find a research position at a physics institute
in Sweden.
Hahn and Strassmann continued their research into the neutron
bombardment of uranium, and kept Meitner informed of their progress.
Hahn and Strassmann were discovering some very puzzling results. They
appeared to be detecting barium as one of the side-products of the
bombardment. This seemed to make no sense whatsoever as barium has an
atomic number of 56 (56 protons in its nucleus), whereas uranium has an
atomic number of 92. As was described earlier, alpha and beta decay might
modify an atomic number by one or two places, but there was no known
explanation for a modification of 36 places (92 minus 56).
However, further extensive checking proved that this seemingly
inconceivable result was genuine: barium was being generated. Hahn and
Strassmann were excited, but they were also completely stunned. How
could a nucleus of approximately half the size of the uranium nucleus be
produced? It was as though the uranium nucleus was being split in two!
Hahn contacted Meitner by mail, desperate to obtain a solution to the
puzzle: "Perhaps you can suggest some fantastic explanation", he wrote.
"We understand that it really can't break up into barium." At that moment,
Meitner was being visited by her nephew, Otto Frisch, who was also a
nuclear physicist who was working in Copenhagen with Niels Bohr. They
went for a walk into the nearby Swedish forest to clear her heads and to try
to imagine a possible solution.
At one point, they both sat down on a log to discuss the problem. Meitner
realised that a possible solution might come from the "liquid drop" model of
the atomic nucleus which had been suggested by Niels Bohr. According to
Bohr, the protons in the nucleus were loosely held together by a form of
surface tension in much the same way as a small drop of liquid. The result
was that the nucleus was not a hard ball at all, but instead resembled a
"wobbly drop" of liquid. In that case, the addition of just a single neutron to
the nucleus might well be enough to make the whole wobbly nucleus
unstable, and it might well split in two.
Meitner found a pencil and a scrap of paper in her purse and drew some
rough shapes to explain her idea. You can see a version of Meitner's shapes
in the following diagram. After the addition of the extra neutron, the
unstable nucleus wobbles and becomes elongated. A narrow "waist"
appears, giving the nucleus the shape of a dumbbell. Each end of the
dumbbell would repel the other end due to the intense electrical repulsion
between the protons. This would result in the two halves flying apart and
forming two smaller nuclei:
 Otto Frisch coined the term nuclear fission to describe this splitting of a
nucleus into two roughly equal parts. Let us consider this proposed fission
reaction in more detail.
The proposal was that a nucleus of uranium-235 was absorbing a
neutron, and that resulted in the nucleus splitting into a nucleus of barium
and a nucleus of krypton, as described by the following reaction:

However, there was one other important factor to be taken into account.
A nucleus of uranium-235 is so large that it needs 143 neutrons to act as
"glue" to hold the nucleus together (235-92=143). This is more neutrons
than is required in total by a nucleus of barium plus a nucleus of krypton.
Hence, there would be an excess of neutrons after the reaction. You can see
that the previous reaction also shows three neutrons being expelled. We will
soon see that these three extra neutrons held the key to the all-important
fission chain reaction.
You might like to check that the previous reaction with its three extra
neutrons satisfies our golden rules for electric charge being conserved
(92=56+36) and the total number of neutrons and protons being conserved
(235+1=141+92+3).
Meitner and Frisch then turned their attention to calculating the amount
of energy which would be released by this fission reaction, and the result
left them totally astonished …

The nuclear mousetrap

Immediately after a nucleus fissions, two smaller nuclei are created, and
those are positioned a microscopic distance apart. As both of those nuclei
are heavily positively-charged, there is a huge electrical repulsion between
them — they would actually fly apart at 3% of the speed of light. Meitner
and Frisch calculated that this represented an energy of about 200 million
electron-volts, which is enormous when you consider that — as stated in the
previous chapter — the detonation of dynamite releases only about ten
electron-volts per molecule. This meant that a nuclear explosion based on
fission would be twenty million times more powerful than a conventional
explosion using the same amount of material. One kilogram of uranium
would have the same explosive power as twenty million kilograms
(equivalently, twenty thousand tons) of conventional explosive.
As another way of looking at it, Otto Frisch calculated that the energy
from each split uranium nucleus would be enough to make a grain of sand
visibly jump. That might not sound very impressive, until you realise that in
each gram of uranium there are 2.5 × 1021 atoms, which looks even more
amazing when it is written as 2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms. It has
been estimated that there are "only" 1018 grains of sand on all the beaches
on Earth, which means a single gram of uranium possesses enough energy
to make all the grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth jump — quite
high. It is clear how an atomic fission bomb can release enough energy to
cause catastrophic damage.
Lise Meitner wondered about the source of this tremendous energy, and
then she remembered a lecture she had attended in 1909 given by Albert
Einstein. In the lecture, Einstein had derived his famous formula E=mc2
which described the equivalence between mass and energy, and explained
how a small amount of mass could release a huge amount of energy.
Meitner realised that if a uranium nucleus split into two smaller nuclei of
barium and krypton then the total mass of the barium and krypton nuclei
would be very slightly less than the mass of the original uranium nucleus.
Some mass was being lost during fission. Meitner calculated that the
amount of mass being lost was approximately equal to a fifth of the mass of
a proton, and if that amount of mass was substituted into the E=mc2
formula it could be calculated that the equivalent amount of energy was 200
million electron-volts, which was precisely the amount of energy being
released by fission.
So it was clear that this was the source of the energy being released by
fission: some of the mass of the uranium nucleus was being converted into
energy. Let us consider this storage and release of energy in more detail.
 Protons have positive electric charge, so they would naturally tend to
repel each other via the electric force (like charges repel, opposite charges
attract). It is therefore difficult to hold protons together in an atomic
nucleus, and this must be achieved by a force which is stronger than the
repelling electric force. That force is the strong nuclear force, the force
which holds protons together in the nucleus. The strong nuclear force has a
very short range compared to the electric force. Imagine the electric force
acting like a spring trying to push protons apart. Then, in order to form a
nucleus, protons must be pushed together against that electrical repulsion
until the protons are very close together and then the short-range strong
force can lock them into place like a latch.
The mechanism resembles a mousetrap. The electric force acts like the
spring on the mousetrap. You have to put energy into the mousetrap in order
to bend the spring and prime the trap, and then the strong force acts to lock
the trap in place:

In the Disney television programme Our Friend The Atom, Heinz Haber
compares the energy trapped in the nucleus to a mousetrap which has been
set. Here is a direct link to the relevant point in the programme:

http://tinyurl.com/fissionmousetrap
 How does the strong force work? How can it hold the protons together?
Well, when protons and neutrons are pushed very close together, the strong
force locks them into place by releasing an amount of energy via gamma
radiation. This released energy is called the binding energy. If you then
wanted to pull the neutrons and protons apart again to return the system to
its initial state — fighting against the attractive strong force — you would
have to do work to put energy into the system which is equal to that lost
binding energy. This is due to the law of conservation of energy: if energy
was lost, you will have to replace that energy to return the system to its
original state. So it can be seen how the binding energy acts to lock protons
and neutrons together via the strong force.
This release of binding energy during the formation of nuclei — by
compressing protons and neutrons together — is called nuclear fusion. This
process occurs in the centre of stars, forming light elements such as helium
from hydrogen, with the release of huge amounts of energy.
But for heavy elements being fused together, with many protons in their
nuclei, the electrical repulsion becomes an ever-larger factor. In other
words, the "spring" on the mousetrap becomes much stronger, and the
mousetrap becomes harder to set (it becomes harder to push the nuclei
together due to the electrical repulsion). In that case, the energy required to
push the protons together is larger than the binding energy that would be
released when the strong force locks the protons together. Therefore, the
generation of energy via nuclear fusion is then no longer possible. Any
element heavier than iron cannot be used for energy production via nuclear
fusion inside a star.
But when a star explodes in a massive supernova explosion, the pressures
and temperatures are so great that even heavy elements, heavier than iron,
can be fused together, pushing against the tremendous strength of the
electrical "spring". This is how uranium, the heaviest naturally-occurring
element is formed: all the uranium now found on Earth was created in one
or more supernova explosions over six billion years ago.[6] Luckily, the 4.5
billion year half-life of uranium explains why not all of the uranium on
Earth has vanished due to radioactive decay over that period.
The energy then lies trapped in the uranium nucleus for billions of years,
like a primed mousetrap. And when the nucleus fissions, the trap explodes
into action. As we have seen, the two halves of the fissioned nucleus fly
apart with tremendous energy because of the intense electrical repulsion
between them. The energy stored in the mousetrap is finally released. As
Robert Serber says in his book The Los Alamos Primer, the two nuclei
"would fly apart with an amount of energy equal to the work that went into
pushing them together."
So when we are watching a nuclear explosion, we are watching the
energy which has been trapped in atoms by supernova explosions billions of
years ago, energy which has waited half the age of the universe before
being set free. Maybe that thought should fill us with increased awe when
we watch the extraordinary phenomenon that is a nuclear explosion.
4
THE CHAIN REACTION
At this point in our story, we must introduce one of the most fascinating
characters in the story of the atomic bomb. This is a man who played a
seemingly peripheral role during the development of nuclear physics in the
early decades of the 20th century, but he had a vision of the true potential of
nuclear power and, perhaps more importantly, he was the first man to see
the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction. As we shall soon see, he then
went on to play a central role in the decision to develop nuclear weapons by
enlisting the help of none other than Albert Einstein.
That man was Leo Szilard.
Leo Szilard (the "s" is silent) was born in Budapest in Hungary in 1898.
After deciding he could not achieve his ambitions in Hungarian universities,
he moved to Germany. He started a course on engineering, but switched to
study physics at the University of Berlin because he heard that several
Nobel laureates including Albert Einstein and Max Planck taught at the
university. At this point we start to see Szilard as a man who was perhaps
unsure of the direction he wanted to take in life, a man who for most of his
life lived in rented rooms, living out of suitcases — which was perhaps not
a bad idea given the political situation in Germany at the time (Szilard was
a Jew): "All I had to do was turn the key of the suitcase and leave when
things got too bad."
Although Szilard was studying physics, he was more of an inventor and
entrepreneur than an academic. In fact, he might even be described as
something of a "hustler", always with an eye for a money-making scheme.
Rather bizarrely, he approached Albert Einstein with an idea for a new type
of refrigerator which had no moving parts. Even more bizarrely, Einstein
agreed to work with Szilard to develop the fridge, with Einstein using his
earlier patent office experience to formulate a patent application.
Yes, the Einstein fridge really was a thing.
 As we shall see later, Szilard's strong working relationship with Einstein
was to play an important role in the development of the atomic bomb.
Perhaps Szilard's greatest talent was an almost uncanny ability to
visualize the future and sense trends — perhaps a necessary talent for any
successful entrepreneur. In the late 1920s he became aware of the promising
advances in nuclear physics and was particularly interested to hear of
Chadwick's discovery of the neutron in 1932. Szilard immediately realised
the potential of the neutron as a way to probe the nucleus without being
repelled. Might the neutron also provide a way to unlock atomic power?
In 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, prompting
Szilard to move to London in anticipation of the Nazi persecution of the
Jews. It was in London that Szilard read a remarkable book by another
visionary figure: the English science fiction writer H.G. Wells.
H.G. Wells had become aware of the discoveries of Rutherford and
Soddy (which were described in Chapter Two) which suggested that there
was a huge reserve of energy contained in the nucleus of an atom. Let us
remind ourselves of Soddy's alarming prediction in 1904: "It is possible that
all heavy matter possesses — latent and bound up with the structure of the
atom — a similar quantity of energy to that possessed by radium. If it could
be tapped and controlled what an agent it would be in shaping the world's
destiny! The man who put his hand on the lever by which a parsimonious
Nature regulates so jealously the output of this store of energy would
possess a weapon by which he could destroy the Earth if he chose."
Such a dramatic statement must have resonated with H.G. Wells who, in
1913, wrote a remarkably prophetic book called The World Set Free. In that
book, Wells imagines a world in which nuclear power has been harnessed
by mankind, but it has also been used to create atomic bombs. Szilard
described the plot of The World Set Free in his own words: "Wells describes
the liberation of atomic energy on a large scale for industrial purposes, the
development of atomic bombs, and a world war which was apparently
fought by an alliance of England, France, and perhaps including America,
against Germany and Austria, the powers located in the central part of
Europe. He places this war in the year 1956, and in this war the major cities
of the world are all destroyed by atomic bombs."
At the time, Szilard was living at the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square in
London, not far from the British Museum, living off his savings of £1,500
(£100,000 in today's money). On the morning of September 12th 1933,
Szilard was lounging in the hotel lobby when he read a report in The Times
newspaper of one of Rutherford's recent speeches at the nearby meeting of
the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Rutherford had
explained how alpha particles could be accelerated to such energies that
they might be able to release energies from atomic nuclei. But Rutherford
said he believed this would require more energy input than could be gained.
Rutherford said that "anyone who looked for a source of power in the
transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine (meaning foolish talk,
or nonsense)."
According to Richard Rhodes: "All of which made Szilard restive. The
leading scientists in Great Britain were meeting and he wasn't there. He was
safe, he had money in the bank, but he was only another anonymous Jewish
refugee down and out in London, lingering over morning coffee in a hotel
lobby, unemployed and unknown."
Szilard was annoyed by Rutherford's negativity. He threw down his
newspaper and stormed out of the hotel onto the street. Walking down the
road, Szilard then had a flash of inspiration which he described in his own
words: "Pronouncements of experts to the effect that something cannot be
done have always irritated me. That day as I was walking down
Southampton Row and was stopped for a traffic light, I was pondering
whether Lord Rutherford might not prove to be wrong. As the light changed
to green and I crossed the street, it suddenly occurred to me that if we could
find an element which is split by neutrons and which could emit two
neutrons when it absorbed one neutron, such an element, if assembled in
sufficiently large mass, could sustain a nuclear chain reaction, liberate
energy on an industrial scale, and construct atomic bombs."
According to Richard Rhodes: "Szilard was not the first to realize that the
neutron might slip past the positive electrical barrier of the nucleus; that
realization had come to other physicists as well. But he was the first to
imagine a mechanism whereby more energy might be released in the
neutron's bombardment of the nucleus than the neutron itself supplied." In
particular, this was the first time that anyone had conceived of the principle
of using neutrons to generate a chain reaction.
So what did Szilard mean by a "nuclear chain reaction"? Well, as he
suggested, if a nucleus can be split (fissioned) by a neutron, then that split
nucleus can produce additional neutrons (as described in the previous
chapter). Those neutrons can then proceed to fission other nuclei. If a split
nucleus emits two neutrons, then that will result in two further nuclei being
fissioned. If those two nuclei emit two neutrons each, then that means there
will be four neutrons in total produced, and those neutrons can proceed to
split a further four nuclei. By this constant doubling of numbers, the total
number of fissioned nuclei will rise extremely rapidly to a huge number.
Remember the analogy from the previous chapter of the energy trapped
in an atomic nucleus being like a mousetrap. In the Disney television
programme Our Friend The Atom, Heinz Haber performs an excellent
visual demonstration in which many mousetraps (representing nuclei) are
used to generate a "chain reaction" of mousetraps and ping-pong balls. Here
is a direct link to the relevant point in the programme:

http://tinyurl.com/mousetrapreaction

The programme segment also considers the discovery of fission by Hahn

and Strassmann.
The mousetrap chain reaction idea was also used in a clever (and
destructive) Pepsi advert:

http://tinyurl.com/mousetrapchainreaction

The following diagram shows the start of a chain reaction in which each
split nucleus releases three neutrons:
 Bearing in mind that a neutron from a fissioned nucleus moves at about
5% of the speed of light, this chain reaction is clearly going to release its
energy extremely quickly. With a great deal of energy released with each
fissioned nucleus, Szilard realised that the total amount of energy released
by an uncontrolled chain reaction could be used to create an atomic bomb.
But Szilard had his idea in 1933, and in the previous chapter we saw that
nuclear fission was not discovered by Hahn and Strassmann until 1938. So,
for the time being, Szilard's idea about a nuclear chain reaction would have
to remain just an idea.

The New World

As another example of Leo Szilard's uncanny foresight, he saw the
oncoming Second World War with great clarity. In 1936 he announced his
intention to "stay in England until one year before the war, and then move
to New York City". It was a very strange thing to say as no one in 1936
could be sure if there would be a war, or when it would start. But Szilard's
prediction was perfectly accurate: he moved to America in 1938, precisely
one year before the war began.
Szilard was joining a group of brilliant physicist refugees from Nazi
Germany who were either Jewish or had Jewish family connections. The
group included Enrico Fermi, Eugene Wigner, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller,
John von Neumann, and Emilio Segrè. According to Emilio Segrè:
"America looked like the land of the future, separated by an ocean from the
misfortunes, follies, and crimes of Europe." All of those aforementioned
refugee physicists were destined to work on the American project to
develop the atomic bomb, designed to be deployed against their former
persecutors in Germany.
In 1939, Leo Szilard travelled from New York to Princeton to visit his
friend Eugene Wigner who informed Szilard of the recent sensational news
of the discovery of fission by Hahn and Strassmann. According to Szilard:
"Wigner told me of Hahn's discovery. Hahn found that uranium breaks into
two parts when it absorbs a neutron. When I heard this I immediately saw
that these fragments, being heavier than corresponds to their charge, must
emit neutrons, and if enough neutrons are emitted then it should be, of
course, possible to sustain a chain reaction. All the things which H.G. Wells
predicted appeared suddenly real to me."
Szilard's phrase describing the two resulting fissioned nuclei as being
"heavier than corresponds to their charge" is interesting. This principle was
described in the discussion of fission in the previous chapter. A nucleus of
uranium is so large that it needs many neutrons to act as "glue" to hold the
nucleus together. But this is more neutrons than is required in total by the
two resulting fissioned nuclei, hence the phrase describing the uranium
nucleus as being "heavier than corresponding to its charge". There would be
more neutrons than required. This fact led to Szilard's suspicion that
neutrons would be released by fission.
As Szilard realised earlier, in order for there to be a chain reaction, a
uranium nucleus had to emit two neutrons when it was absorbed and split
by one neutron. Whether or not this was the case was something Szilard had
to determine.
Szilard was still living an unsettled life in America, but he arranged to
use a laboratory in Columbia University in New York City for three months.
In his experiment, he bombarded uranium with neutrons in order to fission
the uranium nuclei. Any neutrons being released as a result of fission would
be detected and displayed on an oscilloscope. According to Szilard: "If
flashes of light appeared on the screen, that would mean that neutrons were
emitted in the fission process of uranium and this in turn would mean that
the large-scale liberation of atomic energy was just around the corner. We
turned the switch and saw the flashes. We watched them for a little while
and then we switched everything off and went home."
Analysing the results, Szilard found that there were approximately two
neutrons released per fissioned nucleus, which would be enough to sustain a
chain reaction. According to Szilard: "That night there was little doubt in
my mind that the world was headed for grief."

The letter from Einstein

Leo Szilard was now confident that a chain reaction would soon be
achieved, and there was now a race with Nazi Germany to create the first
atomic bomb. However, initial contacts with the military were not
promising. The only interest came from a naval physicist who worked on
submarine propulsion and was attracted to the idea of a power source which
did not require oxygen (remember the discussion of the USS Nautilus in
Chapter One).
Szilard became frustrated at the lack of progress. According to Richard
Rhodes, at this point: "despite his Olympian ego not even Leo Szilard felt
capable of saving the world entirely alone." Szilard contacted his fellow
refugee physicists Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner and asked for their
help. Wigner, in particular, felt it was essential to inform the U.S.
government, maybe even going straight to the president if necessary.
Szilard wondered if he could get his old refrigerator engineer friend, Albert
Einstein, to come on board. Einstein was no longer producing useful work,
but he was still the most famous physicist in the world and his word would
carry weight in Washington D.C.
Despite being unable to swim, Einstein was a keen sailor, and Szilard
learned that Einstein was away sailing in Peconic Bay on Long Island
(Einstein had a reputation as a lousy sailor, getting stuck on a sand bar once,
and on another occasion almost drowning when his boat capsized). Einstein
was staying at a summer house by the sea on Nassau Point.
 Maybe physicists are generally not good at directions and vehicles,
because Szilard could not drive and had to rely on his friend Eugene Wigner
to drive to Long Island. They set out on their journey on Sunday, July 16th,
1939. Inevitably, they got lost and spent hours circling the narrow country
lanes, trying in vain to locate Einstein's house.
On the verge of giving up, Szilard saw a seven-year-old boy standing on
the curb, so Szilard asked him: "Do you know where Professor Einstein
lives?" Luckily, the boy knew the way and was able to direct them to
Einstein's house at the end of Old Cove Road. It is interesting to imagine
how the world might have turned out differently if Szilard and Wigner had
never met that seven-year-old boy, and therefore never managed to find
Einstein.
Once Szilard explained the principle of the nuclear chain reaction to
Einstein, Einstein exclaimed "I never thought of that!" Einstein agreed to
dictate a letter which was to be delivered to Franklin Roosevelt, the
president of the United States. Here is an edited portion of the letter which
was sent:

Albert Einstein
Old Grove Rd.
Nassau Point
Peconic, Long Island
August 2nd, 1939

F.D. Roosevelt,
President of the United States,
White House
Washington, D.C.

Sir:
Some recent work leads me to expect that the element uranium may be
turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. I
believe therefore that it is my duty to bring to your attention the following
facts and recommendations:
It may be possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of
uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new
radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain
that this could be achieved in the immediate future.
This new phenomena would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it
is conceivable — though much less certain — that extremely powerful
bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type,
carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole
port together with some of the surrounding territory.
In view of this situation you may think it desirable to have some
permanent contact maintained between the administration and the group of
physicists working on chain reactions in America.

Yours very truly,

Albert Einstein.

When Roosevelt was handed the letter and read it, he agreed that this
required investigation, but there still no great urgency and only limited
resources were assigned to the investigation.
However, everything changed on the morning of December 7th, 1941. On
that morning, Japan attacked the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor,
triggering the entry of America into the war. From that point, the race to
build the first atomic bomb had begun. Codenamed the Manhattan Project,
it was to be the largest single industrial and scientific project in the history
of the world.
In his book Trinity, Jonathan Fetter-Vorm describes the challenge of the
Manhattan Project: "For all the money and infrastructure invested, the
challenge of the Manhattan Project was still rather mystical. Somehow, a
very small chunk of glowing metal was going to be transformed into the
largest explosion that humans had ever made."

Oppenheimer
Robert Oppenheimer had been a precocious child. He was born in 1904
to an ambitious family. When his grandfather saw his five-year-old
grandson playing with bricks, he gave him an encyclopaedia of architecture.
Oppenheimer developed an interest in science at an early age — mainly
chemistry and mineralogy — and at the age of twelve he gave a lecture to
the members of the New York Mineralogical Club. He had a wide range of
other interests, including writing poems at the age of ten. At school,
Oppenheimer did not hide the fact that he felt superior to the other children,
telling them: "Ask me a question in Latin and I will answer you in Greek".
He was described by a childhood friend as "very frail, very shy, very
brilliant of course, and very superior."
Rather a sickly child, at the age of eighteen he was sent to spend the
summer at a ranch in New Mexico to toughen him up before university. The
ranch was in the mountains northeast of Santa Fe, and Oppenheimer thrived
in the wilderness environment, chopping wood and learning to ride horses.
The area was to make a lasting impression on Oppenheimer who was to say
later that his two great loves were "physics and desert country".
At Harvard to study chemistry, Oppenheimer proved adept in a wide
range of additional subjects including French literature and philosophy. He
also wrote short stories and poetry, often giving an impression of being
overly-sensitive and pretentious — and something of a drama queen. In a
letter to a friend, he described his recent activities as: "Read Greek,
committed faux pas, and wished I was dead. Voila".
In university, Oppenheimer extended his esoteric interests to include
Hindu philosophy, while transferring his main field of study from chemistry
to physics. However, Oppenheimer struggled with the laboratory work,
"unable even to solder two copper wires together", and, as a result, he
concentrated on theoretical physics. Oppenheimer went on to make
significant contributions in the field of quantum mechanics.
Here is a photograph of Robert Oppenheimer:
 In 1942, in a surprising move, Oppenheimer was selected to be the
scientific director of the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer was a surprising
choice in many ways. Firstly, he was a theoretical physicist, rather than an
experimental physicist. Oppenheimer may have been able to speak six
languages, but surely someone in charge of running the largest-ever
research and development project should have been able to solder two
copper wires together.
Secondly, while Oppenheimer had no Nobel Prize he would be in charge
of several physicists who did have Nobel Prizes. It was not so much a
question of whether Oppenheimer was their intellectual equal — he was
undoubtedly brilliant — it was more a question of whether the other
physicists would be happy working under him.
Thirdly, Oppenheimer was well-known for having left-leaning political
sympathies. Though he was not a communist, many of his friends were.
Would he be a security risk? That was to be a question which dogged
Oppenheimer throughout his career.
 But what was impressive about Oppenheimer — and the reason he was
selected to be project director — was his ambition and determination to
make the project a success. Oppenheimer saw this as his opportunity to
prove to others what he knew all along: that he was the best.

Los Alamos
One of the first decisions to be made was where to locate the
development laboratory for the Manhattan Project. As Bruce Cameron Reed
says in his book The History and Science of the Manhattan Project, the
selected location had to satisfy the following criteria: "A laboratory site
would have to be isolated, relatively inaccessible, have a climate that would
permit year-round construction and operations, be large enough to
accommodate a testing area, and be sufficiently inland to be secure from
enemy attack."
Oppenheimer recommended the "desert country" of New Mexico where
he spent summers riding horses as a youth. Specifically, he knew there was
a ranch school in Los Alamos which would be ideal. The army engineers
were concerned about the narrow access road from Santa Fe and the poor
water supply, but otherwise agreed with Oppenheimer that it would be
ideal.
The geography of Los Alamos is striking and unusual. It is situated on
the slopes of the 13-mile-wide extinct volcanic crater called the Valles
Caldera (or Jemez Caldera). Over a million years, rainfall down the slopes
has carved a series of steep canyons, leaving a flat-topped hill on either side
of each canyon. A small flat-topped hill like this is called a mesa ("mesa" is
Spanish for "table"), and Los Alamos was spread out over four mesas. The
following photograph shows the present-day town of Los Alamos spread
over the four mesas, with the canyons visible. The location of the original
Los Alamos laboratory is indicated by an arrow:
 Because of its location on top of the mesa, the Los Alamos laboratory
was given the nickname "The Hill".
For the remainder of 1942, and into the first few months of 1943,
Oppenheimer had the job of touring the physics departments of American
universities to persuade the best available physicists to join the Manhattan
Project. His task was not made easier by the need to maintain strict secrecy.
Although he could not describe the work in detail, he could state that this
was important work which would probably end the war to end all wars.
Almost every physicist he approached decided to join the project.
Security within Los Alamos was strict. In order to reduce the possibility
of security leaks, the entire Los Alamos site was fenced-off. As a result, the
facility operated like a small town, with a school, a general store, a family
doctor, a library, and even a movie theatre. With a whole town having to be
built from scratch, conditions were primitive. There were no paved roads,
and fresh food and water was scarce. Los Alamos resembled a frontier town
of the old American West. A wife of one of the physicists described her role
as being "akin to the pioneer women accompanying their husbands across
uncharted plains westward."
Initially, the military insisted on strict security in the scientific section of
Los Alamos, with a need-to-know restriction on the transfer of information
between sections. However, Oppenheimer argued that scientific progress
could only be made if there was freedom of speech and free exchange of
ideas. Eventually, the military agreed to complete scientific openness within
the camp, but it came at a cost: the technical area of Los Alamos had to be
entirely surrounded by high barbed-wire fence. For the refugee physicists
from Europe, this generated the uneasy feeling that they were in a
concentration camp.
The following photograph shows the entrance to the technical area of Los
Alamos in 1944. The visual similarity to a concentration camp is clear:

The Los Alamos Primer

 Because of the strict security, new scientific personnel arriving at Los
Alamos were completely unaware of the work they would be doing or the
goal of the Manhattan Project. In order to bring them up to speed quickly, it
was decided to hold a series of introductory lectures. The task of giving the
lectures fell to Robert Serber who was a former postdoctoral student of
Oppenheimer. Serber's lectures were recorded in a 24-page document which
was called the Los Alamos Primer.
The document represents everything that was known in 1943 about how
to make an atomic bomb. In which case, it is surprising that this top secret
document was declassified in 1965. Once declassified, the document was
released into the public domain.
Here is a link to the original 1943 Los Alamos Primer document:

http://tinyurl.com/losalamosprimer

It is basically a recipe for making an atomic bomb.

The document was available on the Los Alamos website until 2001.
However, everything changed after the September 11th attacks of that year.
Because of the possibility of terrorists obtaining information about atomic
bomb manufacture, the document was removed from the website on that
day. But, as is the nature of the internet, once the document was released the
genie could never be put back in the bottle.
Using the Los Alamos Primer as our starting point, let us now consider
the physics of how to make an atomic bomb, starting with the most
important calculation …
5
THE CRITICAL MASS
In this chapter we will discover the crucial importance of the volume of
the fissionable material which is used to make an atomic bomb. We shall
see that there exists a certain size of material at which point the chain
reaction will be unstoppable and an explosion becomes a certainty. This
amount of material is called the critical mass.
The accurate calculation of the value of the critical mass is the most
important calculation in the construction of a nuclear bomb. Indeed, when
you consider the impact of nuclear weapons, this is surely one of the most
important calculations in the history of science. Therefore, this chapter
considers the calculation of the critical mass. The calculation is inevitably
highly mathematical, so most of the mathematical details have been
included in the Appendix at the end of this book. I do not believe the
detailed calculation of critical mass presented in this book can be found
anywhere on the internet.

The ratio of volume to surface area

The existence of a critical mass relies on the fact that the ratio of an
object's volume to its surface area is greater for larger objects than for
smaller objects. In order to understand this principle, consider the following
diagram showing three cubes of different sizes:
 The first cube at the top of the diagram is the smallest. We can say that its
volume is equal to one unit of volume (one small cube). If you count the
sides of that small cube, you will find that it has six sides. So the total
surface area of the cube is six units of area. This means that the all-
important ratio of volume to surface area is then 0.166, as shown on the
diagram.
The second cube in the diagram has a total volume of eight small cubes
(you can count them), and a total surface area of 24 units. Hence, the ratio
of volume to surface area has increased to 0.333, as shown on the diagram.
The final cube, shown at the bottom of the diagram, is the largest. You
can count that it has a total volume of 27 cubes, and a total surface area of
54 units. Hence, the ratio of volume to surface area has increased to 0.5, as
shown on the diagram.
 So larger objects have a greater ratio of volume to surface area.
Interestingly, this explains why — in general — larger animals are found in
cold climates, e.g., polar bears, and smaller animals are found in hot
climates, e.g., rodents (I guess we are supposed to ignore the elephant in the
room). A small animal has a larger surface area (proportionately) and so can
cool down better in a hot climate. Whereas a larger animal has a
proportionately smaller surface area so loses less heat through its skin. This
principle is called Bergmann's rule.
The following diagram illustrates Bergmann's rule by showing how
larger moose are found in more northerly parts of Sweden:

Why does this principle allow us to build a bomb based on nuclear

fission? To put it simply, if we have a sufficiently large amount of
fissionable material then the build-up of neutrons inside the volume of the
material will be larger than the loss of neutrons through the surface area of
the material. When that happens, the resultant chain reaction will increase
exponentially and the result will be an explosion.
 If we have a small amount of fissionable material then the surface area of
that material will be proportionately quite large compared to its volume. As
a result, the amount of neutrons being lost through the surface will be
greater than the amount of neutrons being generated inside the material and
the chain reaction will be unable to continue.
As the amount of mass is progressively increased, the surface area
becomes proportionately smaller compared to the volume of the material,
and so the loss of neutrons also becomes proportionately smaller. As the
amount of mass continues to increase it is clear that a certain balance point
will be reached at which point the loss of neutrons through the surface will
be precisely equal to the build-up of neutrons inside the material. This
amount of mass is called the critical mass. A sample of material this size —
or larger — is going to explode.
This is an important point which we be using later in our calculation: if
we have a volume of fissionable material, then critical mass occurs when
the build-up of neutrons inside the material is equal to the loss of
neutrons out of the material.
Put simply, the critical mass is the smallest amount of fissionable
material which will cause a nuclear explosion. Therefore, determining the
correct value of the critical mass is the most important task in designing a
nuclear bomb.

Spherical coordinates
In our analysis of critical mass, we will need to use the most efficient and
natural method of describing the distribution of neutrons within the
material.
Normally, when we want to describe the shape of an object in three-
dimensional space we would use Cartesian coordinates (as shown in the
following diagram). We could then define any point in space by its (x, y, z)
coordinates, where x, y, and z are the distances along the three axes:
 However, for describing the distribution of neutrons within a sample of
fissionable material, we can use a better method of defining a point in
space. This is because nuclear bombs almost always use a solid sphere of
fissionable material as a critical mass (a solid sphere represents the most
efficient use of the material). The most efficient means of defining a point
in a solid sphere is to use spherical coordinates.
Spherical coordinates define a point in space using the distance from the
centre of the space, and two angles of rotation, as shown in the following
diagram:
 This method for defining a point in space is so efficient because our
sphere of fissionable material has rotational symmetry: it does not matter
how we rotate that sphere in space, it would still look the same. Because of
that rotational symmetry, all we need to consider is the distribution of
neutrons along the radial thick dashed line coming out of the centre of the
material, as shown in the previous diagram. We do not need to be concerned
about the two rotational angles because it does not matter how we rotate the
line the distribution of neutrons along it will still be the same.
So, in this calculation of critical mass, we will only be interested in the
distribution of neutrons in the one dimension along the line of length r
coming from the centre of the material.
 The build-up of neutrons
In this section we will consider the build-up of neutrons within a volume
of the fissionable material. In the next section we will consider the loss of
neutrons through the surface of the volume.
You will remember from the previous chapter that when a nucleus
undergoes fission, several neutrons can be released. These neutrons would
then continue the chain reaction by splitting more nuclei. In the diagram
below, you will see an example in which three neutrons (on the right of the
diagram) are released by the fission of a single nucleus:

If we are to generate an ever-increasing chain reaction then the question

of how many neutrons are released in a single fission is crucial. Clearly, if
the chain reaction is to build in intensity then we will need a situation in
which the total number of neutrons in the volume increases.
Considering the example of the previous diagram, what is the net
increase in the number of neutrons due to the fission of a single nucleus?
We can see that one neutron comes in from the left and is absorbed by the
nucleus. The nucleus then fissions and three neutrons are released. The net
increase in neutrons is therefore going to be three neutrons minus one
neutron (the neutron which was initially absorbed), giving a net increase of
two neutrons.
On that basis, we can now calculate the build-up of neutrons within the
volume of fissionable material. Let us define the average number of
neutrons produced per fission as ν (the Greek letter "nu"). In the previous
example, ν would be equal to three. Then the net increase in the number of
neutrons because of the fission of one nucleus will be given by ν-1, the "-1"
term coming from the absorption of the initial incoming neutron. That
means that as long as more than one neutron is produced by the fission of a
nucleus, then the total number of neutrons will increase over time (ignoring
the loss of neutrons through the surface of the volume).
If there is currently a total of N neutrons in a volume of material, and we
assume that each of those neutrons goes on to fission a nucleus, then the
new total number of neutrons in the volume after the round of fissions will
be the net increase in neutrons due to a single fission, multiplied by the
number of fissions:

If the average time between fissions is given by τ (the Greek letter "tau")
then the rate of increase in the number of neutrons will be given by:

This formula then tells us the rate of increase of neutrons within a

volume of the material — ignoring the loss of neutrons through the surface
of that volume. This is the first result we need on our quest to calculate the
critical mass.

The derivative
Now let us start to consider the flow of neutrons out through the surface.
The flow of neutrons out through the surface represents a current flow of
neutrons — just like an electric current is a flow of electrons. And just as
the magnitude of an electric current depends on the potential difference
(voltage) over a distance, so the current flow of neutrons depends on the
difference in the number of neutrons over some distance. In other words,
the neutron current depends on the gradient of the number of neutrons.
We are well aware of the idea of a gradient as representing the steepness
of a hill. In that case, if we are driving up a hill, the gradient is defined as
the change in our vertical height divided by the distance we drive in the
horizontal direction. This is shown in the following diagram:

But the principle of a gradient can be applied to the change of any

variable — not just height. We have seen that a gradient is defined as being
"the amount of change of a variable divided by the amount of change of
another variable". If we have two variables, x and y, then the change of y
with respect to x (i.e., the gradient) is known as the derivative and is written
as:
 You can see how this relates to the gradient at a point:

Mathematically, this derivative notation can be used to describe the flow

of neutrons out of the material. The value of the critical mass can then be
calculated by setting the flow of neutrons out of the material equal to the
build-up of neutrons within the material. The lengthy and detailed
calculation is contained in the Appendix at the end of this book.
If you want to know the mathematical details of how the world's greatest
physicists constructed the world's first atomic bomb, I can highly
recommend that you read the Appendix.

To cut a long story short …

 To cut a long story short, the detailed calculation of the value of the
critical mass which is described in the Appendix reveals that the critical
radius of uranium-235 is 9.1 centimetres. To give an impression of this size
of a critical mass, I made my own "critical mass" of the correct dimensions
(from a rubber ball and a can of silver spray paint) which you can see me
holding in the following photograph:

If this was real, this sphere of metal would explode with a force of
several thousand tons of TNT, taking most of my hometown with it.
If you were to hold an actual solid sphere of uranium of this size, the
overriding impression would be due to its extraordinary weight. Uranium
has the atomic number of 92, which means it has 92 protons in its nucleus
— the most of any naturally-occurring element. As most of the mass of an
atom is found in its nucleus, this explains why uranium is so heavy. The
"critical mass" of uranium I am holding in my hand in the previous
photograph would weigh 52 kilograms, or over eight stone. In other words,
it would weigh more than many people weigh!
We simply never encounter extraordinary substances such as uranium in
our everyday lives. How can this metal weigh so much? How can a small
ball of this metal explode with such force? Sometimes these metals glow
because of their radioactivity, or they are permanently warm. The properties
of these substances seem uncanny and alien. Which raises the question …
how do we obtain these unearthly metals?
6
OAK RIDGE
As explained in Chapter One, it is possible for the nucleus of a particular
element to have a different number of neutrons, in which case the substance
is called an isotope. As isotopes of elements have different numbers of
neutrons they therefore have different values for mass number, the mass
number being the total number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus. As
an example, the isotope of uranium called uranium-238 has a mass number
of 238 (which is composed of the sum of 92 protons and 146 neutrons).
Natural uranium, extracted from uranium ore, is composed of two
isotopes: uranium-238 and uranium-235 (from now on, uranium-235 will be
referred to as "U-235" and uranium-238 will be referred to as "U-238",
where "U" is the chemical symbol for uranium). U-238 is by far the most
common isotope representing over 99% of natural uranium. However, for
purposes of constructing nuclear explosives, it is U-235 which is more
interesting.
In this chapter, we will be considering how to obtain U-235 by separating
it from U-238 in a process known as enrichment.
Remember it was described in Chapter One that neutrons have to act like
glue to hold protons together to stop the nucleus from flying apart due to
electrical repulsion between the protons. As we have just calculated, U-238
has 146 neutrons, whereas you can similarly calculate that U-235 has the
fewer number of 143 neutrons. As the job of neutrons is to act like glue to
hold the nucleus together, those three fewer neutrons mean that a nucleus of
U-235 is not so strongly "glued together". As a result, U-235 is much more
unstable than U-238, and is therefore much more fissionable.
In order to quantify the difference in fission behaviour between U-235
and U-238 we need to introduce the concept of a nuclear cross section.
Using the usual sense of the term, a cross section is a slice through an
object. If we consider a spherical atomic nucleus (or any spherical particle)
then a slice through the middle of that particle is going to be a circle. We
can then interpret that circle as a target, as shown in the following diagram.
The behaviour of the nucleus when it is hit by a bombarding neutron will
then depend on whether that neutron hits the target or not:

The area of the target is called the nuclear cross section. The different
ways in which a nucleus might behave when it is hit by a neutron can be
described by defining different cross sections (different sizes of target) for
each different type of behaviour. If a cross section is smaller, then that
means that the target is smaller, and the behaviour is less likely (the neutron
is less likely to hit the target). Conversely, if a cross section is larger, then
that means that the corresponding behaviour will be more likely.
As an example, when an atomic nucleus is hit by a neutron, one of three
things might happen. Firstly, the neutron might bounce off the nucleus in a
process known as scattering. The probability of this occurring would be
defined by the scattering cross section of the nucleus. Secondly, the neutron
might be absorbed (captured) by the nucleus. The probability of this
occurring would be defined by the capture cross section of the nucleus.
Thirdly, the neutron might cause the nucleus to split. The probability of this
occurring would be defined by the fission cross section of the nucleus.
 The difference in behaviour when a nucleus of U-235 and a nucleus of U-
238 is hit by a neutron can be described in terms of their cross sections. As
was explained earlier, a nucleus of U-235 is more fissionable. It can
therefore be said that it has a larger fission cross section. However,
remember that U-235 represents less than one percent of natural uranium,
the rest being U-238. This represents a problem if we are trying to achieve a
chain reaction in natural uranium because U-238 has a very large capture
cross section. If we consider a neutron emerging from a fissioned nucleus,
we need that neutron to travel unhindered until it reaches a secondary
nucleus which it can fission. If, instead, it hits a nucleus of U-238 then the
large capture cross section of that nucleus means that the neutron will be
captured by that U-238 nucleus without fissioning that nucleus. The chain
reaction will then grind to a halt.
Because of this "poisoning" effect of U-238, the only way to achieve an
explosive chain reaction is to laboriously separate the U-235 from the much
larger proportion of U-238, and then to use only that extracted U-235 in the
atomic bomb core.
As stated earlier, less than 1% of natural uranium is U-235, whereas
weapons-grade uranium needs to be enriched to 90% U-235. It is therefore
clear that a tremendous amount of uranium ore would need to be enriched
to make a bomb. The necessary process would resemble an industrial-scale
operation more than a laboratory experiment. In 1939, Niels Bohr insisted
"it can never be done unless you turn the United States into one huge
factory."
Well, effectively, that is just what happened …

The secret city

The scale of the Manhattan Project was staggering. Apart from the
development facility at Los Alamos, the project involved more than thirty
sites across the United States, Britain, and Canada. These sites included two
vast factories in the United States for the production of fissionable material
for the bomb cores.
The main industrial facility was the 60,000-acre isotope separation plant
(for separating U-235 from U-238) which was located in rural Tennessee.
At the time, the area was virtually uninhabited, so the factories and the
entire town to house the employees had to be built from scratch. The town
was given the rural-sounding name of Oak Ridge in order to make it sound
like a small, uninteresting village which would not attract outside interest.
In 1945, after being in existence for just two years, Oak Ridge employed
80,000 people and had become the fifth-largest town in the state of
Tennessee — and it consumed more electricity than New York City.
At its peak, the Manhattan Project employed 130,000 people and was
larger than the entire American automobile industry. It was simply the
greatest scientific and engineering gamble in the history of the world. Niels
Bohr's prediction that the United States would have to be turned into "one
huge factory" was becoming true.
Oak Ridge had to provide all the facilities of a normal town. It had over
seven thousand houses, two high schools, nine shopping areas, churches,
movie theatres, and a hospital. However, the need for security meant that
the entire town had to be surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, and Oak
Ridge did not appear on any maps until 1949. To its inhabitants it was
called the "Secret City".
To all intents and purposes, Oak Ridge appeared like a normal town,
though none of its inhabitants had any idea of why they were doing the jobs
they were doing. The difficulty of working in such secrecy was described
by one of the managers at Oak Ridge: "Well it wasn't that the job was tough
— it was confusing. You see, no one knew what was being made in Oak
Ridge, not even me, and a lot of the people thought they were wasting their
time here. It was up to me to explain to the dissatisfied workers that they
were doing a very important job. When they asked me what, I'd have to tell
them it was a secret. But I almost went crazy myself trying to figure out
what was going on."
All the workers were sworn to secrecy, and were told never to speak a
word to outsiders about their work at Oak Ridge. They were even told what
to say if anyone outside asked about their work. If they were asked what
they were making in Oak Ridge, they were told to say: "Oh, about 76 cents
an hour." And if they were asked how many people were working in Oak
Ridge, they were told to say: "Oh, about half of them."
Here are some photographs of everyday life in the secret city of Oak
Ridge during the war:
The largest building in the world
 The isotope separation factories at Oak Ridge were faced with a daunting
challenge. In his graphic novel version of the Manhattan Project called
Trinity, Jonathan Fetter-Vorm describes the challenge by using an analogy:
"To make a bomb, you need to enrich the uranium, skimming off the less
reactive isotope and concentrating the amount of U-235. To get some idea
of how hard this is, imagine mixing together two different colours of clay,
then trying to separate the colours from each other."
The problem is made more difficult because the relatively simple and
cheap process of chemical separation cannot be used. Chemical separation
relies on differences in the chemical properties of the two substances being
separated: the substances would behave differently in a chemical reaction.
Those chemical properties are determined by the distribution of electrons in
the shells of the atom, and the numbers of those electrons are, in turn,
determined by the number of protons in the atomic nucleus. But two
different isotopes of an element have the same number of protons (the same
atomic number), so they would have the same distribution of electrons.
Therefore, their chemical properties would be the same and chemical
separation could not be used.
The only possible alternative is to rely on the difference in the physical
properties of the two isotopes, which means the extremely slight difference
in the mass of the atoms due to the additional neutrons. On that basis, it is
possible to separate the isotopes by using diffusion. Diffusion is considered
in the Appendix as a means for calculating the critical mass (by considering
the diffusion of neutrons through an atomic bomb core), but it is stated in
the Appendix that diffusion describes the spread of any group of particles
through a substance (for example, the spread of dust particles in air, or the
spread of a chemical through a liquid). In Oak Creek, diffusion was used to
separate isotopes by considering the diffusion of uranium atoms through a
membrane peppered with microscopic holes.
Firstly, in order to allow diffusion of the uranium, the uranium was
turned into a gas: uranium hexafluoride. The gas was then pumped through
the membrane. Only gas molecules containing the lighter U-235 isotope
would diffuse through the holes in the membrane, so those molecules could
be separated from the heavier U-238.
But the very small difference in the atomic mass of the two isotopes
meant that it was impossible to achieve perfect separation with a single
filter. In fact, the amount of percentage enrichment achieved with each filter
was very small. As a result, a high level of enrichment was only possible by
using a large number of stages cascaded together, with the output of one
stage passing to the input of the next stage. Each stage only provided a very
small amount of percentage enrichment, but with enough stages the material
became progressively more enriched as it passed through all the stages.
The design of the isotope enrichment process using gaseous diffusion
which was used at Oak Ridge was ingenious and is shown in the following
diagram:
 You can see that in each stage the material is pumped against the filter
membrane which separates the material into lighter and heavier isotopes.
By following the small arrows, you can follow the progressive enrichment
of the material on the diagram as it passes through the stages, emerging at
the top as highly-enriched material.
 You will see that even if some of the material fails to pass through the
filter, that material is not wasted. Instead, as you can see on the diagram, the
rejected material just drops down to the stage below and is processed again.
This is because the filtering process could never be perfect with such a
small difference in mass between the isotopes, so the rejected material
might still include some atoms of the lighter isotope which should not be
wasted.
Because of the very small percentage amount of enrichment achieved by
each stage, the extraordinary total of 2,892 stages were required. And these
were not small stages: each diffusion tank held 1,000 gallons. As a result,
the building which contained the sequence of stages was truly monumental.
When it was completed, the Gaseous Diffusion Plant at Oak Ridge was a
four-storey U-shaped building which was half a mile long and a quarter of a
mile wide. It surpassed the Pentagon to become the largest building in the
world — even though the world did not know it existed:

The Calutron Girls

 The other major factory at Oak Ridge employed a completely different
method of isotope separation based on the electromagnetic force. The
technique, known as electromagnetic separation, considered the deflection
of electrically-charged uranium atoms as they passed through a magnetic
field.
The deflection of the particles is described by Fleming's left-hand rule
for motors, which you might have been taught in your physics class in
school. The rule is described by the following diagram:

The previous diagram shows that if your middle finger points in the
direction in which the charged particles are moving (in the case of a motor,
this would be electrons moving down a wire), and if your index finger is
pointing in the direction of the magnetic field, then the charged particles
will experience a force in the direction of your thumb. This principle was
used by the electromagnetic separation process in Oak Ridge to curve the
path of beam of uranium atoms as they moved through a magnetic field.
In the following diagram, you will see the charged particles emitted from
the source at the bottom of the diagram. At that point, with the direction of
the magnetic field into the page, your index finger should point into the
page. Your middle finger should always point in the direction in which the
particles are travelling (which would be toward the right at the start). In
which case, your thumb represents the direction of the force experienced by
the particles, which — as you can see on the diagram — will always point
toward the centre of curvature:

In fact, at every point of their path, the particles will always experience a
force toward the centre of curvature, which will result in the beam of
particles taking a curved path.
Because the U-235 atoms have slightly lower mass, they will be slightly
more affected by the force. In other words, their path will curve more. If a
receptacle is correctly placed (a bucket is shown on the diagram) then this
will be able to collect only the U-235 atoms and reject the U-238 atoms.
This electromagnetic isotope separation device was called a calutron.
The name derives from a combination of the words "Cal" and "tron". The
"tron" comes from the word cyclotron which was an electromagnetic
particle accelerator developed by Ernest Lawrence. The "Cal" comes from
"California" as Lawrence invented the cyclotron at the University of
California.
It can be seen that this calutron method of isotope separation involves
building-up the enriched uranium atom-by-atom. It is clear that this would
be a very low-yield and time-consuming process: each calutron could
produce only 100 milligrams of U-235 per day. In order to increase the
yield up to 100 grams of U-235 per day, nine buildings were built at Oak
Ridge to house 1,152 calutrons — another monumental operation.
Operating a calutron was a labour-intensive process requiring constant
human intervention. In practice, the operators were young women from the
local Tennessee community — many straight out of high school or fresh off
the farm — who were given the name the "Calutron Girls". Let us now
consider the story of the Calutron Girls as described in Denise Kiernan's
bestselling book about the female workers of Oak Ridge called The Girls of
Atomic City.
Many of the young female workers at Oak Ridge had to work in a state of
constant anxiety as their brothers and husbands were fighting a brutal war
on foreign shores. Despite their anxiety, the women worked tirelessly,
motivated by being told that their mysterious work on these futuristic
machines would make the war shorter and bring their loved-ones home
sooner.
This was the case for Dorothy Jones (affectionately known as "Dot") who
was a young girl from Hornbeak, Tennessee. All three of Dot's brothers
were fighting in the war, including Shorty who was 23 years old and a deck
gunner for the Navy on the battleship USS Arizona. Unfortunately, the
Arizona was one of the ships in dock in Pearl Harbor when the Japanese
bombed it in December 1942. Dot's family had received the news just
before Christmas that Shorty was missing, presumed dead. Dot was
determined to do something for the war effort in Shorty's memory, so she
had signed up to be one of the Calutron Girls at Oak Ridge.
When Dot entered the building which housed the calutrons, she found it
to be a very daunting experience. The building was enormous, with a high
ceiling, bright lights, and constant loud electrical sparking sounds from the
high-voltage calutrons. Also, bear in mind that in 1944 these were the most
futuristic and advanced industrial machines anywhere in the world.
Dot took her place on the wooden stool in front of her calutron control
panel, and started her day's work.
The main job assigned to the Calutron Girls was ensuring that the
magnetic field strength was set precisely so that the beam of U-235 atoms
would be correctly directed into the final receptacle. This was a labour-
intensive process as it requiring continuous twisting of handles to adjust the
strength of the magnetic field and thereby keep the beam correctly aligned.
Here is a photograph of one of the Calutron Girls turning the handles while
keeping her eyes firmly fixed on the dial reading:
 The following picture shows the Calutron Girls, each woman seated in
front of her individual calutron:

Of course, due to the tight security, none of the girls knew the true nature
of the task they were performing. The woman seated at the front right of the
previous photograph was Gladys Owens who only realised the job she had
done during the war when she saw herself in the previous photograph when
she toured a museum of Oak Ridge fifty years later.
The girls were warned never to venture behind their control panels
because that was where the giant magnet used to generate the powerful
calutron magnetic field was positioned. The girls knew that if you
carelessly wandered into the magnetic field it would pull the metal hairclips
right out of your hair. Or, if you had a belt buckle, it could even pin you
against the wall. Legend had it that a maintenance man who had nails in his
shoes had been rooted to the spot.
It is clear that the tireless and focussed Calutron Girls performed an
essential role in the war effort. However, not everyone was so impressed by
the girls. After Ernest Lawrence — the inventor of the calutron — had
visited the plant he ran into the office of the chief engineer and blustered:
"How dare you pick these silly hillbilly girls to run my machines!"
Lawrence insisted that only his male PhD physicists had the ability to run a
calutron correctly. Lawrence was certain that the performance of these
young girls — straight out of school or off the farm — would be inferior to
that of his highly-educated men. However, the chief engineer defended his
girls loyally, and told Lawrence how productive the girls had been. He
persuaded Lawrence that there should be a production race: Lawrence's
highly-qualified physicists versus the Calutron Girls. Whoever produced the
most U-235 would be the winner and would get to keep their job. Lawrence
reluctantly agreed to the race, totally confident that his men would win.
Of course, in predictable Hollywood movie style, when the race started
the Calutron Girls blew the physicists out of the ballpark by collecting a far
larger amount of U-235 (apparently the rather geeky physicists were
constantly being distracted by getting their slide rules out and analysing any
minor variation in the dials). The Calutron Girls were victorious — and
they finally won their much-deserved respect. Of course, they were allowed
to continue doing their fine job.
The story of the Calutron Girls is one of many remarkable stories of the
efforts of the workers at Oak Ridge.

Amazingly, at the end of every week, all the enriched uranium produced
by Oak Ridge was taken to Los Alamos in a briefcase by a plain-clothed
military security officer on a public train, with the briefcase handcuffed to
his wrist. All actual bomb design and manufacture took place in Los
Alamos. It was there that the received uranium was machined to form the
bomb cores.
After the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, the nature
of the work at Oak Ridge was no longer a secret. The Under Secretary of
War, Robert Patterson, sent a letter to all the workers of Oak Ridge: "Today
the whole world knows the secret which you have helped us keep for many
months. I am pleased to be able to add that the warlords of Japan now know
its effects better, even than we ourselves. The atomic bomb which you have
helped to develop with high devotion to patriotic duty is the most
devastating military weapon that any country has ever been able to turn
against its enemy. No one of you has worked on the entire project or knows
the whole story. Each of you has done his own job and kept his own secret,
and so today I speak for a grateful nation when I say congratulations, and
thank you all. We are proud of every one of you."

Mail-order uranium
In this chapter we have examined how the enriched uranium for a nuclear
explosive can be produced. It is clear that this is not a simple process. And
for that we should be grateful: it is only the difficulty in obtaining suitable
nuclear fuel which prevents terrorists and rogue states from making their
own nuclear weapons.
However, I thought it would be interesting to discover how difficult it
actually is to obtain uranium. Especially when you consider the subtitle of
this book is "How to make an atomic bomb". So I did an online search and
found it is surprisingly easy to obtain uranium ore.
There are many online companies who will provide you with uranium ore
— especially in the U.S. The company unitednuclear.com provides a wide
range of radioactive material and scientific equipment. Material and
equipment is also available on Amazon and eBay. I bought an excellent
sample of radioactive uranium ore from eBay.
I also obtained a Geiger counter in order to examine the uranium ore.
You can buy many expensive modern small plastic Geiger counters, but I
went to eBay and bought an ex-military Geiger counter for a very
reasonable price (£50). The Geiger counter was built for the Polish Army in
1970. I get the impression the market is flooded with ex-military
equipment, very reliably-built, the Geiger counter will probably last for
another hundred years.
The Geiger counter is called a DP-66. There are plenty of these available
on eBay. I also bought an external microphone for my DP-66 (to make the
clicks audible) from the company anythingradioactive.com. They also sell
a range of Geiger counters.
A similar American Geiger counter was built around the same time as the
DP-66 and it is called the CDV-700. The CDV-700 Geiger counters are also
available on eBay and Amazon.
I made a five-minute video of my examination of the uranium ore using
my Geiger counter. You can watch the video at the following link:

http://tinyurl.com/radioactivevideo

Here are some stills from the video:

7
PLUTONIUM
In the previous chapter, it was explained that approximately 99% of
natural uranium is the isotope U-238 with less than 1% being the desirable
fissionable U-235. It was described how that large proportion of U-238 acts
to "poison" any chain reaction by capturing stray neutrons. Hence, natural
uranium cannot be used in nuclear explosives.
It was then described how the aim of enrichment is to increase the
amount of U-235 up to 90%, at which point the enriched uranium is capable
of sustaining a chain reaction and is considered to be "weapons-grade"
uranium.
On that basis, it might be imagined that U-238 is nothing more than a
nuisance, only having the effect of poisoning any chain reaction. However,
this would not be a correct assessment of the value of U-238. In fact, U-238
has been used to create more modern nuclear weapons than has U-235.
So how can this be the case? How can U-238 be used to create nuclear
weapons? Well, it is because the U-238 is not directly used as an explosive.
Instead, it is used to create another element which is highly-fissionable:
plutonium. It is that plutonium which can be used as a nuclear explosive. As
Richard Rhodes says in The Making of the Atomic Bomb, using apparently-
useless U-238 to create plutonium "would thereby indirectly put U-238 to
work".
To understand how U-238 can be used to create plutonium, remember the
discussion of beta decay in Chapter Two. It was explained how beta decay
occurs when there are "too many" neutrons in a nucleus, with the result that
a neutron converts into a proton — with the emission of an electron, which
is the beta particle. The conversion of the neutron into a proton increases
the atomic number by one (one more proton in the nucleus) while leaving
the mass number unchanged (total number of protons and neutrons is
unchanged).
 So, in a nutshell, the effect of beta decay is to increase the atomic number
by one, thereby creating an element one position further up in the periodic
table.
Next, remember in the previous chapter it was explained that U-238 acts
to poison a chain reaction because it has a very large capture cross section,
which means it is very likely to capture and absorb any neutron which hits
its nucleus. If U-238 captures a neutron, it turns into U-239 (one extra
neutron increases the mass number by one). The resultant U-239 nucleus
would then have an excess neutron, and beta decay would therefore be
likely. As just described, the effect of that beta decay would be to move the
U-239 one place further up the periodic table, converting it to an element
called neptunium.
The first line of the following diagram shows a nucleus of U-238
capturing a neutron to become U-239. Follow the curved arrow to see that
U-239 then beta decays to neptunium (shown to have an atomic number of
93, which you will see is one more than the atomic number of uranium,
which is 92):

Neptunium is unstable with a half-life of only two days so, as you can see
on the diagram, the neptunium quickly beta decays to produce a new
element — plutonium — which has an atomic number of 94.
 It is interesting to consider the origin of the names "neptunium" and
"plutonium". Uranium was originally named after the planet Uranus (which
is itself named after the Greek god), which is the seventh planet from the
Sun in the Solar System. When the element neptunium was discovered it
was decided to continue this naming convention, so neptunium was named
after the planet Neptune which is the eighth planet of the Solar System, one
place beyond Uranus (Neptune was also named after the Roman god).
When plutonium was discovered, the naming convention was continued so
it was named after Pluto which, at the time, was considered to be the ninth
planet of the Solar System just beyond Neptune (rather ominously, Pluto
was also the name of the Greek god of death).
The following diagram shows the three outermost planets of the Solar
System, together with the three elements named after them. The
consecutive atomic numbers of those elements (92, 93, 94) are also shown:

Uranium and plutonium are the only elements which can be used as
nuclear explosives. So why is it the case that uranium and plutonium are
nuclear explosives, but neptunium is not? After all, as can be seen,
neptunium lies between uranium and plutonium in the periodic table. To
understand why only uranium and plutonium are nuclear explosives, we
need to consider the concept of parity in the atomic nucleus.
In mathematics, parity indicates whether a number is even or odd. If we
consider the number of protons and neutrons in an atomic nucleus, it is
known that the parity of those numbers plays a large role in describing the
fission behaviour of that nucleus.
Firstly, if we consider uranium-235, it has an atomic number of 92. That
means it has 92 protons, which is an even number. It therefore must have
143 neutrons (235-92) which is an odd number. So the parity of U-235 is
even/odd.
If we then consider neptunium in a similar manner, we find it has 93
protons and 146 neutrons, so the parity of neptunium is odd/even, which is
clearly different to the parity of fissionable U-235.
However, if we apply the same reasoning to plutonium, we find it has 94
protons and 145 neutrons, which is even/odd parity, which is the same as
fissionable U-235. So this is the reason why plutonium fissions in a similar
manner to U-235, and why plutonium can also be used as a nuclear
explosive.

The nuclear reactor

If it takes the capture of a single neutron by a single nucleus of U-238 to
produce plutonium then it is clear that to produce a significant amount of
plutonium would require trillions of neutrons. In practice, the only way to
generate those neutrons would be by starting a self-sustaining chain
reaction in uranium, with each fissioned uranium nucleus producing more
than one neutron.
But it has already been explained how U-238 acts to poison any chain
reaction because of its tendency to capture any free neutrons. So how can
U-238 be involved in any chain reaction in uranium?
The answer is that we have to slow the neutrons down.
It might seem counter-intuitive that slowing-down neutrons can
encourage a chain reaction based on the fissioning of nuclei — it might be
suspected that faster neutrons would be more effective at splitting nuclei.
However, a slower neutron can be much more effective. This discovery was
made by Enrico Fermi, and Fermi's discovery was described by Richard
Rhodes: "Everyone had assumed that faster neutrons were better for nuclear
bombardment because faster protons and alpha particles always had been
better. But the analogy ignored the neutron's distinctive neutrality. A
charged particle needed energy to push through the nucleus's electrical
barrier. A neutron did not. Slowing down a neutron gave it more time in the
vicinity of the nucleus, and that gave it more time to be captured." [7]
This effect was particularly notable in the isotope U-235 rather than U-
238. For U-235, the fission cross section for slow neutrons is absolutely
huge. It other words, if you have a sample of U-235 and you bombard it
with slow neutrons, the nuclei will almost certainly fission, rather than the
nuclei capturing those neutrons. In fact, it is that huge fission cross section
of U-235 for slow neutrons which allows a chain reaction to be generated in
natural uranium (i.e., uranium which has not been enriched). This is despite
U-235 making up less than 1% of natural uranium. The remarkable fission
cross section of U-235 allows a chain reaction in natural uranium as long as
the neutrons are slowed down. And this is what happens in a nuclear
reactor: a chain reaction is generated in natural uranium by slowing down
the neutrons.
In order to slow the neutrons down in a nuclear reactor, the uranium has
to be surrounded by a material called a moderator. The neutrons collide
with nuclei in the moderator and lose energy: they slow down. An example
of a moderator which is used in nuclear reactors is graphite, which is a form
of carbon. A fast neutron which has been emitted from a fissioned nucleus
needs to travel through 20 centimetres of graphite, colliding with graphite
nuclei on its way, before its speed is sufficiently reduced. So it is clear that
a nuclear reactor has to be quite a large structure. In the reactor core,
spheres or rods of natural uranium are interspersed with the moderator
material, which acts to slow down the neutrons.
So a nuclear reactor is based on a nuclear chain reaction in much the
same way as we have seen a nuclear bomb is also based on a nuclear chain
reaction. But, because slow neutrons are involved rather than fast neutrons,
the energy released by a nuclear reactor is slow and controllable rather than
fast and uncontrolled (as in a nuclear bomb). This is also the reason why
slow neutrons (and natural uranium) cannot be used to manufacture a
nuclear bomb: a nuclear bomb requires fast neutrons and enriched uranium.
 And if a nuclear reactor is based on a self-sustaining nuclear reaction,
then it has to have a critical mass of material — again, just like in a nuclear
bomb. But the inclusion of large amounts of moderator material, and the
complex arrangement of fuel rods, made it difficult to calculate the value of
that critical mass — unlike the relatively simple critical mass calculation for
a nuclear bomb core which was presented in Chapter Five of this book.
Hence, the value of the critical mass for a nuclear reactor had to be found
from experiment. Richard Rhodes considers the problem: "A slow-neutron
chain reaction in natural uranium, like its fast-neutron counterpart U-235,
requires a critical mass: a volume of uranium and moderator sufficient to
sustain neutron multiplication despite the inevitable loss of neutrons from
its outer surface. No one knew the specifications of that critical volume, but
it was obviously vast — on the order of some hundreds of tons."
It was clear that in order to calculate the value of the critical mass, and to
prove that a nuclear chain reaction was possible, a test reactor would have
to be built.

The world's first nuclear reactor

We are so used to the idea of nuclear reactors producing electrical power
that it may come as a surprise that the very first nuclear reactor was
designed without the slightest interest in its potential to produce power. It
has just been explained that a chain reaction in natural uranium in a nuclear
reactor is the perfect environment to produce plutonium for nuclear bombs,
and it was for this purpose that the first nuclear reactor was built.
To tell the story of the world's first nuclear reactor, we must once again
catch up with the itinerant Leo Szilard. When we last left Leo Szilard in
1939 he was just a guest researcher in Columbia University in New York
City for three months. Amazingly, in November 1940, Szilard had managed
to find himself a proper job at last, and had been added to the Columbia
payroll. Szilard was worked hard with Enrico Fermi throughout 1941,
trying to create an experimental nuclear reactor. They had been trying to
generate a slow-neutron chain reaction in natural uranium, using graphite as
a moderator. So far, they had not been successful.
With the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and the launch of the
Manhattan Project, a decision was taken in January 1942 to centralise all
reactor research at the University of Chicago. Hence, Leo Szilard was on
the move once again.
It was clear that the reactor would be extremely large and would require a
lot of space. The University of Chicago was very supportive of the war
effort, and agreed that the physicists could use any of the extensive sports
facilities. There were a number of rackets courts under the West Stand of
the university's football stadium at Stagg Field. A decision was made to
locate the reactor in a doubles squash court.
In his successive reactor experiments, Fermi had to determine how close
he was to achieving a sustained chain reaction. In order to measure his
progress toward that goal, Fermi calculated a value for the average number
of neutrons produced per fission in the reactor. As explained in Chapter
Five of this book (the calculation of critical mass), as long as more than one
neutron is produced by the fission of a nucleus, then the total number of
neutrons will increase over time and a self-sustaining chain reaction will
result. The goal for Fermi, therefore, was to ensure that the average number
of neutrons produced per fission was more than 1.0. However, in his first
attempt at creating a reactor, Fermi calculated that neutron production
number to be a disappointing 0.87.
By May 1942, Fermi had improved the purity of the uranium and
graphite in his experimental reactor and had managed to improve the
neutron production value to 0.995. While this was still short of the value of
1.0 required for a chain reaction, it was believed that further improvements
to the purity of the materials would now push the value beyond 1.0.
Therefore, at that point, work began on the full-scale reactor.
A total of 45,000 black graphite blocks were required. They were all
machined to a standard size approximately the size of a shoebox. The
reactor was built in layers on the floor of the squash court. The first layer
was purely made of graphite blocks, containing no uranium. The second
layer was made of blocks which had two seven-centimetre diameter
uranium spheres embedded. The layers alternated in this fashion as the
reactor was built up.
The resultant arrangement of the graphite blocks is shown in the
following diagram. You can see that some of the blocks have two spheres of
uranium embedded in them, whereas some of the blocks have no uranium
spheres. The end result is that the uranium spheres form a perfect cubic
lattice, with each sphere surrounded by the necessary 20 centimetres of
graphite moderator:

Ten control rods made of cadmium were used to keep the reaction under
control. The rods were thirteen foot long and were inserted into the reactor.
Cadmium has a huge capture cross section for neutrons, so the control rods
could be used to dampen the chain reaction if necessary and keep it within
safe bounds.
For security reasons, no photographs were taken of the Chicago reactor,
but we do have an artist's rendering. At the top of the ladder, you can see
one of the control rods poking out of the blocks of graphite:
 After 57 layers had been completed, Fermi's measurements of neutron
intensity indicated that the reactor would now go critical if all of the control
rods were removed. By this point, the reactor was 20 feet high and 25 foot
wide. The reactor was completed on December 1st 1942, but it was decided
that the experiment would take place the following day.
The temperature the following morning was below zero. A crowd of
about forty people gathered on the balcony of the squash court to witness
the historic event. As each of the control rods were removed slowly, the
neutron intensity increased but then levelled off — the reactor was still
subcritical. The last remaining control rod was then withdrawn slowly, with
Fermi predicting "Now it will become self-sustaining. The trace on the
recorder will climb and continue to climb; it will not level off." Fermi's
colleague, Herbert Anderson, describes what happened next: "At first you
could hear the sound of the neutron counter, clickety-clack, clickety-clack.
Then the clicks came more rapidly, and after a while they began to merge
into a roar. Suddenly Fermi raised his hand and said that the pile had gone
critical. No one present had any doubt about it."
Now the chain reaction had started, the neutron intensity would keep
rising instead of levelling-off. If the control rods had not been reinserted
then after an hour-and-a-half the rate of increase would have resulted in a
power output of a million kilowatts. But before it would have reached that
stage, it would have killed everyone in the room and melted through the
concrete in the floor and the underlying rock. Theoretically, there is nothing
that can stop a reactor in meltdown before it melts its way to the Earth's
core.
The Chicago event was historic. It was the first artificial nuclear chain
reaction, the birth of nuclear power, and the first time appreciable energy
had been released from the atom. Crucially, it also opened the way to the
production of plutonium as a nuclear explosive.
As described earlier in Chapter Four, just eight years earlier, Leo Szilard
had crossed the road in Southampton Row in London and had first had the
idea of how a nuclear chain reaction might be achieved. Standing on the
balcony of a squash court in Chicago, he had now seen his idea become a
reality.

The Demon Core

Plutonium is an incredibly dangerous substance. Plutonium is extremely
toxic if it is ingested or inhaled, and the radiation from plutonium can also
be deadly. The American environmental activist Ralph Nader once claimed
that a pound of plutonium could kill eight billion people.
A single plutonium core (sphere of plutonium) was responsible for two
separate horrific fatal incidents at Los Alamos. The sphere of plutonium
had been created to be used in a series of "criticality experiments" designed
to accurately determine the necessary critical mass of plutonium for the
bomb. The sphere was only 3.5 inches in diameter — about the size of an
orange. It was designed to be 5% smaller than the critical mass, and
therefore safe for experimentation. However, that was a small safety
margin, and if any neutrons which were emitted by the core were reflected
back into the core then that could cause the core to become critical.
 On August 21st 1945, the physicist Harry Daghlian was working alone,
performing a criticality experiment using the core. When Daghlian
accidentally dropped a tungsten carbide block near the core, the neutrons
which were reflected by the block turned the core critical. There was a
sudden blue flash — and even the air seemed to glow blue (this is because
of the fluorescence of air molecules when they are hit by charged
radioactivity). Daghlian quickly threw the brick away, but it was too late: he
died 25 days later from radiation poisoning.
Precisely nine months later, Louis Slotin was working with the same
core, performing a different criticality experiment. However, Slotin's
dangerous technique was unapproved. Slotin had surrounded the core with
two hemispheres of neutron-reflecting beryllium. Slotin was keeping the
hemispheres apart by using the blade of a screwdriver as a lever. Slotin was
full of bravado, and had performed the experiment a dozen times before to
various teams of observers, proud of his ability to wield his screwdriver.
When Enrico Fermi saw Slotin's experiment he told Slotin that he would be
"dead within the year".
The following photograph shows a re-creation of Slotin's experiment
showing the hemispheres being kept apart by a screwdriver blade (the
spherical core is hidden inside the hemispheres, approximately the same
size as the two spheres you can see on the right):
 On the day of the accident, Slotin's screwdriver slipped and the two
hemispheres came together for a fraction of a second. There was the usual
flash of blue light showing that the core had gone critical. The criticality
lasted for only half a second before the core expanded due to the heat
produced, and was then no longer critical. But the damage was done.
Slotin died nine days later.
As a result of these two fatal incidents by the same core, the core was
given the ominous name the "Demon Core". The second of the Demon Core
incidents was dramatised in the 1989 movie Fat Man and Little Boy. The
character of Louis Slotin in the movie was played by John Cusack. The
Demon Core sequence is accurate and extremely chilling. The sequence is
available on YouTube at the following link:

http://tinyurl.com/thedemoncore

Right at the start of the sequence if you look carefully you can see the
two hemispheres being kept apart by nothing more than the blade of Slotin's
screwdriver, and you can even see the small spherical plutonium core inside
the hemispheres. You can later see Slotin twisting the wooden handle of his
screwdriver to move the upper hemisphere up and down. Then, as Slotin's
screwdriver slips, you can see the deadly flash of blue light.
After these two fatal incidents, all hands-on criticality experiments at Los
Alamos stopped. From then on, remote-controlled machines were used to
perform the experiments, with all personnel safely watching TV cameras a
quarter of a mile away.
8
DETONATION
In this final chapter we will move on to consider the final step of the
process: actual bomb design, and how to detonate a nuclear bomb.

The sex of the bomb

The message from the discussion so far seems to be that the theory
behind building a nuclear bomb is fairly straightforward: you just have to
assemble a critical mass of fissionable material in order to generate an
explosive chain reaction. However, there is another major technical
challenge involved in the detonation of a nuclear bomb: there is a need to
assemble the critical mass in a very short period of time.
The critical mass must be assembled from smaller sub-critical pieces. A
problem arises in that before the critical mass is fully assembled, there is
inevitably a short period of time when the total assembled mass is smaller
than the critical mass. During this very short window of time, it is possible
for a small chain reaction to start in the material. This small chain reaction
might be initiated by an external source, for example, a neutron from a
cosmic ray. Only a very small amount of the material will be fissioned and
the bomb will detonate with a vastly smaller explosive power. This small
explosion will blow the rest of the bomb apart before the majority of the
material is fissioned. This represents a failure of the nuclear explosive. This
problem is called predetonation, and the resultant relatively small explosion
is called a fizzle.
In order to avoid predetonation, it is essential that the entire critical mass
is assembled in an extremely short period of time. In practice, this needs to
be less than one millisecond.
The simplest way in which a critical mass can be rapidly assembled is to
split the critical mass into two sub-critical pieces, and then fire those two
pieces together at great speed by using a conventional explosive. An
example is presented in the following diagram which shows an assembly
mechanism which has been successfully used in a nuclear bomb. The
diagram shows a hollow tube of U-235 being fired down a gun barrel
towards a bullet of U-235. When the two pieces of U-235 are joined
together, the resultant mass will be equal to (or greater than) the critical
mass and the bomb will explode:

It might appear rather perverse to fire the hollow tube of uranium onto
the bullet, rather than performing the reverse operation by firing a "male"
bullet into the hollow tube. In fact for fifty years after the first atomic bomb
was constructed it was always believed that the bullet was fired into the
tube, and this was always how it was presented in every history book.
However, we now know the correct design of the bomb thanks to the
investigative work of a truck driver from Wisconsin named John Coster-
Mullen.
Coster-Mullen, together with his son Jason, has built a perfect replica of
the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The construction details were laboriously
obtained from a huge variety of different sources including interviews with
machinists who worked on the bomb, and by forensic examination of
photographs of the bomb.
In 1994, as part of his detective work to uncover the secrets of the bomb,
Coster-Mullen had a telephone interview with one of the bomb's original
engineers named Harlow Russ. Russ was being careful not to divulge
classified information, but in the middle of the interview he happened to
mention: "You know the projectile was hollow, didn't you?" In other words,
Harlow Russ had revealed that a hollow tube was fired onto the bullet —
not vice versa as had been assumed. Coster-Mullen had discovered that the
"sex" of the bomb was female — not male.
According to the journalist Howard Morland: "Every encyclopaedia in
the world, from the Britannica to the World Book, described how the
Hiroshima bomb was made, and included a diagram. News articles and
school teachers referenced these diagrams. But here's the thing: every single
one got it wrong. John Coster-Mullen and his self-published memoir got it
right."
The story of John Coster-Mullen — and a discussion about the sex of the
bomb — is available at the following link:

http://tinyurl.com/costermullen

Coster-Mullen has also published a book called Atom Bombs which

contains design details of the first atomic bombs. The details are so accurate
that this is truly "the book that the Feds tried to ban". In 2005, Coster-
Mullen was handed an internal Los Alamos email that described
discussions taking place at the highest levels of the Los Alamos National
Laboratory to identify a way to quash his book. The book is also
permanently banned from sale at the National Museum of Nuclear Science
and History in Albuquerque on orders from Sandia National Laboratory.
According to Harold Agnew, the former Scientific Director of Los Alamos:
"There are drawings in there that are absolutely correct. He's got everything
exactly: dimensions, materials, and things that have been really classified.
His cross-section drawings are the most incendiary portions of his book."
Here is a photograph of me looking suitably awestruck at the cross-
sectional diagrams in my copy of John Coster-Mullen's book Atom Bombs:
 Implosion
Let us now calculate how long it takes to assemble the critical mass using
this method. The following calculation is from Bruce Cameron Reed's book
The History and Science of the Manhattan Project.
The gun muzzle velocity will be approximately 1,000 metres/second, and
the lengths of both the projectile tube and the target cylinder will be
approximately 10 cm. These measurements are shown on the following
diagram:
 At that speed of travel, it will take the projectile piece about 100
microseconds to completely surround the target piece. So, using the "gun
assembly" mechanism, it is possible to assemble a critical mass in
approximately 100 microseconds. Hence, this method can be used to create
a critical mass of uranium (it was stated earlier that assembly time for a
critical mass of uranium needs to be less than one millisecond).
However, it was discovered that the problem of predetonation was more
serious for a plutonium bomb. The problem arises because plutonium was
found to have a far higher rate of spontaneous fission than uranium.
Spontaneous fission can occur when a nucleus splits randomly of its own
accord, without being hit by a neutron. Because of random neutrons being
produced by spontaneous fission, it was likely that the chain reaction would
start before the projectile piece had completely surrounded the target piece,
which would result in a much smaller "fizzle" explosion. This meant that
the previously-described gun assembly mechanism taking approximately
100 microseconds would be too slow to detonate a plutonium bomb. As an
alternative, a more sophisticated "implosion" method was developed at Los
Alamos.
In order to understand how the implosion method works, let us remember
the principle which underlies the calculation of the critical mass. As
described in Chapter Five, a critical mass of material is created when the
amount of neutrons escaping through the surface area of the material is less
than the amount of neutrons being generated within the material. So the
obvious way to create a critical mass is to add more material. But it is clear
that an alternate method would be to reduce the surface area of the
material, and thereby reduce the number of neutrons escaping. This can be
achieved by compressing the material, and increasing its density in the
process.
The implosion method works by surrounding the bomb core with
conventional high-explosive. The resultant explosion can have a huge
compressive effect, pushing inward at a speed of several kilometres a
second and achieving pressures comparable to those at the Earth's core. It
takes only about a microsecond to compress the core to criticality, which is
clearly far faster than the 100 microseconds it takes for the gun assembly
method. So the implosion method avoids the predetonation problem of
plutonium.
However, it is extremely difficult to compress a heavy metal object in a
symmetrical manner using implosion. When the method was first proposed,
there were many in Los Alamos who thought it was not possible. The
problem was compared to the problem of crushing a full beer can without
spilling any beer. A brilliant young physicist called Richard Feynman who
was working at Los Alamos considered the implosion method and simply
said "It stinks".
The main problem arises because simply smearing a uniform spherical
coating of high-explosive around the bomb core will not produce a
smoothly symmetrical compression of the core. To understand why that is
the case, consider the following diagram:
 The diagram shows a uniform coating of conventional explosive (shaded
in light grey) spread evenly around a bomb core. You can see that a series
of rectangular detonators are inserted into the explosive at a regular
spacing.
In the diagram, let us just consider the top detonator. Because of the
curvature of the bomb core, you can see on the diagram that the distance
from that detonator to a point A on the surface of the bomb core is slightly
shorter than the distance from the detonator to a point B on the surface of
the bomb core. What this means is that the wave of detonation of exploding
material spreading from the detonator will reach point A slightly earlier
than it will reach point B. As a result, the compression will be applied
earlier to point A and the result would be to deform the bomb core — like
crushing and deforming a beer can in your hand — rather than applying a
smooth compression at all points at the same time.
Clearly, the key to achieving a smooth compression is to ensure that the
detonation wave hits all points on the surface of the bomb core at the same
time. This can be achieved by using a combination of fast-burning
explosive and slow-burning explosive, as shown on the following diagram:
 The previous diagram shows two different types of conventional
explosive being used, which burn at different speeds. The fast-burning
explosive is shown in the lighter grey than the slow-burning explosive.
Because of this arrangement of fast-burning and slow-burning
explosives, you will see that even though the distance from the top
detonator to point A is shorter, the detonation wave will have to pass
through more of the slower explosive. Whereas the distance from the top
detonator to point B is longer, but the detonation wave will only pass
through the fast explosive to get to point B. As a result, the detonation wave
reaches both points A and B at the same time, applying equal compression
to all points at the same time. The result is a smooth compression of the
bomb core.
These arrangements of explosive charges have the effect of "bending" the
emerging shockwave from the detonator so that the shockwave meets the
entire surface of the core at the same time. In other words, the shockwave is
bent in order to fit the shape it is intended to squeeze. These arrangements
of explosives are sometimes called explosive lenses because of the
similarity to the way an optical lens bends a light wave, based on the similar
principle that light travels at different speeds through different media.
Interestingly, in modern implosion bombs the surrounding explosives are
often modified by random amounts so that the timing for individual
detonators has to be correspondingly modified. The timing device is then
stored away from the bomb. In this way, even if a bomb is stolen by a
terrorist group they will not be able to explode it without the corresponding
custom timing device. This technology — called a Permissive Action Link
(PAL) — was developed by the U.S. in the 1960s and freely-given to the
Soviet Union to make the world a safer place.
So that basically describes the structure of a plutonium bomb based on
implosion. However, there are two structures that have not been described
yet, and these are shown on the following diagram:

Around the plutonium core can be seen the tamper, which is a jacket of
heavy metal. This acts to increase the yield (the explosive power) of the
explosion, and it does this in two ways. Firstly, the sheer weight of the
tamper restricts the expansion of the core due to the extreme heat generated
in the core, thus giving the core more time to fission completely. It is
important that the core does not expand too rapidly as once its surface area
grows too large it no longer represents a critical mass and the chain reaction
stops. The tamper also acts to reflect neutrons back into the core and stop
them escaping through the surface of the core.
At the centre of the core you will see a small black sphere, about the size
of a golf ball. This is called the initiator, and it is a neutron source which is
designed to produce the very first neutron of the chain reaction.
The initiator is usually made of a small piece of the radioactive element
polonium surrounded by some beryllium, which is a very light metal. This
arrangement is known to provide a good source of neutrons. Energetic alpha
particles from the polonium can knock neutrons out of the beryllium nuclei.
When the core is crushed, the beryllium mixes with the polonium sending
out a shower of millions of neutrons — enough to kick-start the chain
reaction.

So that completes the design of the plutonium implosion bomb. In the

following final section of this book, we will now see how a bomb such as
this was used in the very first man-made nuclear explosion.

Trinity
In the middle of the barren New Mexico desert, 160 miles south of Los
Alamos, there stands a black stone obelisk, about 12 foot high. The obelisk
is made of local lava-rock. There is a plaque on the obelisk on which just a
few words are written: "Trinity Site Where the World's First Nuclear Device
Was Exploded on July 16, 1945."
 The obelisk marks the hypocentre of the explosion.
There are several reasons why the site was chosen. The site had to be flat
to allow for accurate measurements of the explosion, the site had to have
little wind to prevent the spread of radioactive fallout, and it was preferred
to have a site reasonably close to Los Alamos.
The following map shows the location of the Trinity test site. You can see
it lies about 160 miles south of Los Alamos, and about sixty miles away
from the town of Alamogordo:
 The decision was taken that a test of the plutonium bomb was essential,
because of the uncertainties about the implosion mechanism. The plutonium
had cost about 250 million dollars to produce, and if the test failed then the
plutonium could be recovered and re-used.
The plutonium core and the surrounding shell of high explosive were
manufactured at Los Alamos and transferred separately to the Trinity test
site. The plutonium core left Los Alamos first on the afternoon of Thursday
July 12th (the test was planned for the early morning of the following
Monday). The orange-sized piece of metal was given the VIP treatment,
driven to Trinity on the back seat of an army sedan with a convoy of armed
guards riding in front and behind. The high explosive was driven overnight
to avoid traffic and potential accidents, taking eight hours to travel at thirty
miles an hour to Trinity.
At Trinity, a temporary base camp was constructed nine miles away from
where the bomb was to be detonated. The following photograph shows the
Trinity base camp:

The bomb was to be detonated at the top of a steel tower, one hundred
feet tall. There was an oak platform at the top of the tower which could
support those working on the bomb, and there was a hole in the platform
through which the bomb could be raised. The platform was surrounded on
three sides by corrugated iron, making a shack. Here is a photograph of the
Trinity tower:

At 1pm on the Friday afternoon, the high explosive shell arrived at the
tower. The plutonium core arrived later in the afternoon. Final assembly of
the bomb took place in a canvas tent at the base of the tower. The bomb
assembly group was headed by Norris Bradbury. It was Bradbury who
finished the bomb assembly in the late evening under floodlights.
The following morning, the Saturday, the canvas was removed and the
bomb was hoisted to the top of the tower by an electric winch. When the
bomb was at the top of the tower, the detonators were inserted into the
bomb. Here is a photograph of Norris Bradbury standing by the fully-
assembled bomb at the top of the tower:

The power cables you can see attached to the bomb are attached to the
detonators which were spaced around the high-explosive shell. The power
cables were so thick because a new type of detonator was developed
specifically for the plutonium bomb. If you remember back to the
discussion about implosion earlier in this chapter you will remember the
importance of the shockwave hitting all points of the spherical core at the
same time in order to achieve smooth compression of the core. However, all
that work on explosive lenses would have been pointless if all the
detonators did not all detonate at precisely the same time.
In order to achieve that microsecond accuracy of detonation, a new type
of detonator was developed called an exploding bridge wire detonator. The
detonator was made of a thin wire through which a pulse of extremely high
current was passed. The current needed to be in the region of 100 kiloamps,
which explains the large power cables attached to the bomb. The wire
instantly becomes hot and literally explodes — starting the detonation.
Crucially, all the detonators will detonate within a microsecond when the
pulse of high current is applied.
The detonators were inserted on the Saturday, so Sunday became a day of
waiting before the planned detonation of the bomb early on Monday
morning. An intense thunderstorm hit the site at 2 a.m. on Monday
morning. According to Isidor Rabi: "It was raining cats and dogs, lightning
and thunder. We were really scared that this object there in the tower might
be set off accidentally. So you can imagine the strain on Oppenheimer." The
detonation was delayed until just before dawn. A telephone call was made
to the governor of New Mexico warning him that he might have to declare
martial law if the explosion caused a panic.
At 5:30 a.m., the weather had cleared. The detonation sequence was
controlled from inside an earth-covered concrete control centre six miles
from the bomb tower. Oppenheimer would watch the explosion from that
shelter.
Busloads of visitors from Los Alamos were ready to view the explosion
from the summit of Compania Hill, twenty miles from the bomb. The
crowd included many of the physicists who had worked on the bomb. It was
dark and cold, and the tension was almost unbearable. They had been
advised to lie face down on the ground, with their feet pointing toward the
explosion. They had also been given welding glasses to protect their eyes.
However, Richard Feynman refused the glasses, later claiming to have been
the only person to have viewed the explosion with no eye protection.
According to one observer: "It was an eerie site to see a number of our
highest-ranking scientists seriously rubbing sunburn lotion on their faces
and hands in the pitch-blackness of the night, twenty miles from the
expected flash."
In the control centre just six miles from the bomb, the atmosphere was so
tense that Oppenheimer could hardly breathe. He held onto a post to steady
himself and stared directly ahead as the last seconds ticked away.
5…4…3…2…1…0…
 First came the instant blast of light. Pitch black night suddenly turned to
the most intense daylight, three times brighter than the brightest Sun. Those
lying on the ground at Compania Hill, twenty miles from the explosion, saw
distant hills suddenly brightly illuminated as if by a rising Sun.
Isidor Rabi at Base Camp, nine miles from the explosion, described the
light: "We were lying there, very tense, in the early dawn. Those ten
seconds were the longest ten seconds that I ever experienced. Suddenly,
there was an enormous flash of light, the brightest light I have ever seen or
that I think anyone has ever seen. It seemed to last forever. You would wish
it would stop; altogether it lasted about two seconds. Finally it was over,
and we looked toward the place where the bomb had been; there was an
enormous ball of fire which grew and grew and rolled as it grew; it went up
into the air, in yellow flashes and into scarlet and green. It looked
menacing. It seemed to come toward one. A new thing had just been born; a
new control; a new understanding of man, which man had acquired over
nature."
Philip Morrison described the other overwhelming sensation of the
radiant heat: "The thing that got me was not the flash but the blinding heat
of a bright day on your face in the cold desert morning. It was like opening
a hot oven with the Sun coming out like a sunrise."
Norris Bradbury explained the difficulty in making sense of something
which no one had ever seen before: "Most experiences in life can be
comprehended by prior experiences, but the atom bomb did not fit into any
preconceptions possessed by anybody."
The bomb had exploded with force of twenty thousand tons of TNT. The
temperature at the centre of the explosion was four times greater than the
temperature at the centre of the Sun. The resultant pressure was more than a
hundred billion times the pressure at the surface of the Earth, and was the
greatest pressure ever to exist on the Earth. In Arizona, 150 miles away, it
was reported that a woman was puzzled why she saw "the Sun come up and
go down again".
The greatest physics experiment of all time had been a success.
Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project, was in the
control centre just six miles from the bomb. His brother Frank, also a
physicist, was by his side. After the incredibly tense last few minutes,
Oppenheimer could breathe freely at last.
They both walked outside and climbed on top of the earth-covered
bunker. Frank turned to face his brother — who within the next few days
would become the most famous man in the world — and said "It worked".
Oppenheimer looked at the immense mushroom cloud now climbing high
over the desert.
"Yes", said Oppenheimer, "It worked".
FURTHER READING
The History and Science of the Manhattan Project by Bruce Cameron Reed
A highly-detailed and technical description of the science of the atomic
bomb.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

The definitive account of nuclear physics leading up to the development
and use of the first atomic bomb.

Trinity by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm

A graphic novel of the development of the atomic bomb, with plenty of
good science. Extremely well done.
APPENDIX:
CALCULATING THE CRITICAL
MASS
This Appendix is highly-mathematical, so only read it if you are
confident about your mathematical abilities.

This Appendix contains the detailed calculation of the value of the

critical mass, and continues from the discussion in Chapter Five. We will
start by calculating the flow of neutrons out of the material. This initial
section is going to introduce some mathematical terminology which is
likely to be new to you. Please do not worry about it or get bogged-down by
the details. All we will need is the result at the end of this section which is a
well-established result in mathematics.
The spread of particles through a substance (for example, the spread of
dust particles in air, or the spread of a chemical through a liquid) is called
diffusion. The theory behind diffusion has been well-studied, and there is a
branch of physics specifically called diffusion theory. We can apply
precisely the same theory to consider the flow of neutrons out of a volume
(after all, neutrons are just another type of small particle — like dust
particles).
To cut a long story short, in this section we will be seeing that diffusion
theory tells us that that the flow of neutrons out of the material is described
mathematically by the Laplacian operator. All we will be needing from this
section is to find the formula for the Laplacian operator.
OK, so let's go …
 As described in Chapter Five, the value of the neutron current is
proportional to the gradient of the number of neutrons. So, using the
derivative notation, we can express the value of the neutron current, j, as:

where N is the number of neutrons in a volume of the fissionable

material, and r represents the distance from the centre of the material.
Assuming the fissionable material to be in the shape of a solid sphere, then
r represents the distance from the centre of the sphere towards the edge of
the sphere.
You will see that there is another constant in the expression: D is a
constant called the diffusion coefficient which is a fixed property of the
fissionable material. We will be calculating the value of D later in this
chapter.
The minus sign in the formula arises because the current is from the
larger neutron concentration to the smaller neutron concentration, whereas a
positive gradient would normally be from low to high (as in climbing a hill,
which would represent a positive gradient).
But if the value of the neutron current remains the same over a distance
then the number of neutrons entering a volume of the material (the current
in) will be the same as the number of neutrons leaving the volume of the
material (the current out). In other words, the number of neutrons in that
volume will be unaltered. But what we are really interested in is the change
in the number of neutrons in that volume. That will then give us the rate at
which the neutrons are spreading into space, escaping out of the volume.
Mathematically, this is called the divergence.
So if we want to calculate the divergence (the change in the number of
neutrons in a volume) then we have to consider the change in the value of
the neutron current. In other words, we have to consider the derivative of
the neutron current. But we calculated earlier that the value of the neutron
current, j, is given by:
 which is, clearly, a derivative itself. So to find the change in the number
of neutrons we need to take the derivative of a derivative. Therefore, the
change in the number of neutrons in a volume is calculated by the
derivative of j:

What we have done here is show that the change of the number of
neutrons in a volume is given by the divergence of the gradient. In
mathematics, it is well-known that the divergence of the gradient is called
the Laplacian. As I said earlier, this is all we need to know from this
section. The mathematical form of the Laplacian is well-known and you can
even find it on the Wikipedia page for the Laplacian.
The Laplacian for spherical coordinates (which is what we want) is given
halfway down the Wikipedia page:

http://tinyurl.com/laplacianspherical

It does indeed have the two derivatives (a derivative of a derivative),

which is what we just calculated. You will see that the precise form is:
 Creating the equation
So now we have a formula describing the flow of neutrons out of a
volume. We are making good progress.
As stated at the start of Chapter Five, the critical mass occurs when the
loss of neutrons through the surface of a volume is equal to the build-up of
neutrons inside that volume. In Chapter Five we calculated that the rate of
increase in the number of neutrons in a volume of the material is given by:

Putting this value equal to the previous equation for the loss of neutrons
through the surface of that volume gives:

Dividing both sides by D and N, and changing the sign of both sides,
gives:
 This equation describes the distribution of neutrons in a critical mass. So
now all we need to do is solve the equation and find the shape of the
distribution. However, I must admit, the equation does look very
complicated! But do not worry — we will find the equation has a
surprisingly simple solution.
And in order to solve the equation, we are going to use a quite amazing
tool …

The genius of Mr. Wolfram

We now have an equation we need to solve to find the value of N, which
will tell us the distribution of the number of neutrons within the fissionable
material. You will see that the equation includes the value of N, and also the
derivative of N. Equations which include combinations of variables and
their derivatives like this are called differential equations.
Differential equations can capture the dynamics of a complex system in
which elements are moving at different rates to one another. As a result,
differential equations are very useful tools for describing physical
phenomena such as heat flow or the motion of waves, and are used
throughout physics and engineering. But differential equations can also be
used to describe any complex system with "moving parts" such as biology
and economics.
The solution of differential equations then takes a central role in many
science problems. The problem can be complex because differential
equations can come in a huge variety of different forms. For many simple
forms, the method of solution is well known and described in mathematical
textbooks. But when more complicated situations are described (for
example, modelling the movement of airflow in weather forecasting), the
differential equations might have no simple solution and it is then necessary
to use a powerful computer to perform repeated calculations, slowly
converging to a solution.
Our attempt to calculate the critical mass of an atomic bomb has resulted
in the creation of a differential equation, and we now have to solve that
equation. However, the task of solving differential solutions just got a
whole lot easier thanks to the artificial intelligence website Wolfram Alpha.
The driving force behind Wolfram Alpha is the controversial
mathematical genius Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram was a child prodigy who
published physics papers at the age of 15. In 1988 he left academia to
develop the software package called Mathematica. Mathematica can be
used to solve complex problems, and to visualise solutions. The program
was an instant success and made Wolfram his fortune.
In 2002, Wolfram released a controversial book called A New Kind of
Science in which he claimed that great complexity arises from simple rules
called cellular automata. Wolfram claimed to be able to use these simple
programs to model almost any complex system. Unfortunately, the book
was widely-criticised for its arrogant tone and unscientific approach, and
there was the suggestion that the project represented a huge ego-trip for
Wolfram. It would appear that even geniuses have their failings.
In 2008, Wolfram released the Wolfram Alpha search engine (or
"computational knowledge engine" as they call it). The search engine
technology behind Wolfram Alpha claims to be unique in that it can answer
questions which are posed in everyday language. I thought I would test this
claim of Wolfram Alpha, so I went to its webpage:

http://www.wolframalpha.com

In the Wolfram Alpha search box I entered the question "Who was the
oldest Beatle?" Sure enough, in just a few seconds it came back with the
correct answer "John Lennon". In contrast, entering the same query into
Google just returns the usual long list of search results. It is clear that
Wolfram Alpha is attempting to do something very different: it is trying to
understand your question, and calculate an answer (this is opposed to the
usual search engine method of just matching character strings). This is true
artificial intelligence: a brain on the web.
 What makes Wolfram Alpha particularly interesting for our particular
problem is that some of the mathematical processing ability of Mathematica
has been incorporated into Wolfram Alpha. This makes Wolfram Alpha
incredibly useful for solving any mathematical problems you might
encounter. For example, I was surfing the net recently when I saw a
mathematical puzzle asking me to find the value of x in the following
equation:

Can you solve the puzzle and calculate the value of x?

Well, it looked a bit of a brain-ache to me, so I went straight to the
Wolfram Alpha website:

http://www.wolframalpha.com

and in the search box at the top of the page, I typed the puzzle in English
just as it is written:

square root of (x+15) plus square root of x equals 15

So the search box looked like:

Try it yourself. Then click the icon at the extreme right of the search box
to start Wolfram Alpha computing the solution. After a few seconds
computation, it returns the correct answer, giving you the value of x (you
may have to scroll down the page to see the solution). I won't tell you what
the answer is — try it yourself!
So Wolfram Alpha can understand most mathematics problems (or any
question) which you type in natural English. That makes it very handy for
solving a wide range of puzzles. In fact, in typically modest Wolfram style,
it claims to have the ambitious long-term goal of "computing whatever can
be computed about anything".
Of particular interest, Wolfram Alpha is able to recognise a differential
equation and find its solution — and that's good news for us because we are
going to use Wolfram Alpha to solve our differential equation …

Solving the equation

If you remember, this is our differential equation:

Yes, it looks very complicated, but as I said earlier we will find it has a
very simple solution.
I am going to make a temporary modification to this equation purely for
reasons of brevity and convenience, and also to make it easier to enter into
Wolfram Alpha. You will see that the right-hand side of the equation is
formed from a combination of various constants, which are based on the
properties of the fissionable material. The end-result will just be another
different constant. So, purely so that I don't have to write out the same long
expression each time, let us replace the right-hand side of the equation with
the constant value, k. In other words:
 In which case, our differential equation then becomes:

When we finish our calculation, we will replace k with the original

combination of constants.
In order to solve this equation, we have to discover the form of the
distribution of neutrons which is described in the equation by N, with the
value of N varying as we move from the centre of the material to the edge
of the material. We are going to use Wolfram Alpha to solve this equation in
rather a backward fashion. We are going to suggest a likely candidate
solution for N, and then use Wolfram Alpha to check if that potential
solution satisfies the differential equation. If that is shown to be the case,
then we have a verified solution for our equation and we would have
achieved success. However, if the solution is only slightly incorrect then we
will need to slightly modify our candidate solution and run it through
Wolfram Alpha again.
So what type of candidate solution might we try to describe the
distribution of neutrons? Well, we would imagine that the number of
neutrons in the material would be highest in the centre of the material as
that is the region which is furthest from the edge. Conversely, we would
imagine that the number of neutrons would be lowest at the edge of the
material as that is where the losses occur. And in between those two
extremes we would imagine the number of neutrons would decrease
smoothly along a curve.
 This suggests a smooth curve like a sine wave, and there is a simple
potential candidate solution which fits the bill:

Let us now use Wolfram Alpha as a visualization tool to help us see what
this candidate solution looks like. Will it resemble the expected distribution
of neutrons in a critical mass? To find out, go to the Wolfram Alpha
website:

http://www.wolframalpha.com

In the search box at the top of the page, enter the following string into the
search box (take care to note the first "minus pi" term):

plot (sin(r)/r) from r=-pi to r=pi

Your Wolfram Alpha search box should then look like this:

Click the icon at the extreme right of the search box to start Wolfram
Alpha computing the solution. After a few seconds computation, you will
be rewarded with the following graph:
 You can see the distribution of neutrons is at its highest in the middle of
the graph, which represents the centre of the fissionable material (r=0).
There is then a smooth decline in the number of neutrons toward the edge
of the material as losses are higher nearer the edge. The number of neutrons
is zero at the edge as any neutrons produced by fission are free to fly
straight out of the material, so there is never any opportunity there for the
number of neutrons to build up.
So the general shape of this graph looks much as we would expect. This
gives us confidence in our candidate solution.
If you are stuck and having problems getting Wolfram Alpha to work
correctly, I have already entered the correct data and generated the correct
graph. So, only if you are stuck, the following link should always work,
taking you directly to the correct page showing the graph:

http://tinyurl.com/neutrongraph
 For our next step, we will use a different feature of Wolfram Alpha: its
capability to solve differential equations. To recap, our candidate solution
is:

Can this really the solution we are seeking? We might have our doubts as
it does seem to be rather simple. We need to check to see if this potential
solution satisfies our differential equation. To do that, we need to replace
both occurrences of N in our differential equation with sin(r)/r. That gives:

We will check if this is the correct solution by using Wolfram Alpha to

calculate the value of the left-hand side of the equation, and checking that
the result is equal to minus k (the right-hand side of the equation).
So return to the Wolfram Alpha webpage and carefully enter the
following expression as a single continuous line into the search box:

1/(sin(r)/r) * 1/(r squared) * derivative of ((r squared) * derivative of

(sin(r)/r))

This expression represents the left-hand side of the previous differential

equation. Compare the expression with the left-hand side of the differential
equation and see if you can spot that the various elements in the two forms
correspond to each other.
 Your Wolfram Alpha search box should now look like this:

Click the icon at the extreme right of the search box to start Wolfram
Alpha computing the solution. After a few seconds computation, it should
come back with its answer:

If everything has gone correctly then at the top of the answer you should
see that Wolfram Alpha has correctly interpreted the input string into the
correct form of the differential equation. And underneath that you will see
that Wolfram Alpha has calculated the value of the expression and found
that it is equal to minus one.
If you are stuck and having problems getting Wolfram Alpha to work
correctly, I have already entered the correct data and the computation
worked correctly for me. So, only if you are stuck, the following link
should always work, taking you directly to my results page:
 http://tinyurl.com/candidatesolution

The result of minus one is an encouraging result, though it is not quite

correct. We were hoping that the result would be equal to the right-hand
side of our differential equation, which is minus k. But minus one is very
similar to minus k, so all we have to do is tweak our candidate solution
slightly.
Clearly, in order to get a result of minus k, our candidate solution will
have to include the value of k somewhere in it. So let us modify our
candidate solution slightly by including the value of k in some way. With
that in mind, let us try this new candidate solution for the distribution of
neutrons:

You will see that the square root of k has been added to the candidate
solution. Let us now check if that satisfies our differential equation (which
has now become even more complicated!):

Let us enter the left-hand side of this equation into Wolfram Alpha and
see if it gives us the answer we want. So return to the Wolfram Alpha
webpage and carefully enter the following expression as a single continuous
line into the search box:
 1/(sin(r * square root of k)/r) * 1/(r squared) * derivative of ((r
squared) * derivative of (sin(r * square root of k)/r))

Once again, click the icon at the extreme right of the search box to start
Wolfram Alpha computing the solution. After a few seconds computation, it
should come back with its answer:

Hooray! Wolfram Alpha has calculated that the result is equal to minus k,
which is the correct result we were looking for (minus k was the value on
the right-hand side of our differential equation). So our complicated
differential equation turned out to have a really simple answer: the accurate
formula for the distribution of neutrons in our critical mass is given by:

If you are stuck and having problems getting Wolfram Alpha to work
correctly, I have already entered the correct data and the computation
worked correctly for me. So, only if you are stuck, the following link
should always work, taking you directly to my correct results page:

http://tinyurl.com/resultspage

If you followed all the steps and everything worked correctly, then
congratulations! Now, for the last step, let's put some actual numbers into
this result and calculate the value for the critical mass in terms of
kilograms.

Calculating the critical mass

We have now done the hard part of this calculation. The rest is now
relatively simple.
To recap, we have shown that the distribution of neutrons in our critical
mass is described by:

To obtain the value of r when we have a critical mass of the material, we

will use our knowledge of the properties of the edge of the critical mass. In
solving a differential equation, this is called a boundary condition.
We know that the net amount of neutrons produced at the edge will be the
smallest value as that is where neutron losses out of the material are largest.
From our high-school knowledge of trigonometry we know that the sine
function reaches a minimum at π radians (or, equivalently, 180 degrees).
Indeed, if you look at our earlier graph showing neutron distribution, you
will see that it reaches zero when the horizontal scale is at π radians. So, in
the previous formula, with r set equal to the critical radius, Rc, that means
the contents of the bracketed term must be equal to π.
So, just considering the contents of the bracketed term:
 Let us now replace k in this equation with the combination of constants
which k represents (remember, we did the reverse substitution earlier). The
equation now becomes:

Squaring both sides of the equation gets rid of the square root:

Rearranging the elements of this equation gives:

Which is the formula for the critical radius which you will find in Section
10 of the Los Alamos Primer which deals with the calculation of the critical
mass.
 Let us take the square root of both sides to get our final result for the
critical radius:

And that's it! That is the final equation for the critical radius of the
critical mass! If you managed to follow all the steps — and completed the
Wolfram Alpha exercises on your computer — then you can genuinely tell
your friends that you used a computational knowledge engine to solve a
differential equation to calculate the distribution of neutrons in a nuclear
bomb core. If they are not impressed by that — then get new friends.
Let us now put numbers into this formula to get a value for the critical
mass:

If you remember it was explained in Chapter Five that ν is the average

number of neutrons produced from the fission of one nucleus, which
for uranium-235 is equal to 2.52.

Also explained in Chapter Five, τ is the average time between fissions.

This is a very short period of time, only a few nanoseconds. As a
result, a nuclear explosion releases all its energy in just a microscopic
fraction of a second. To be precise, τ is equal to only 8.1 × 10-9
seconds.

D, which was introduced earlier is the diffusion coefficient. D is

calculated from the average distance between collisions (the mean free
path) which is 0.029 metres, multiplied by the velocity of the neutrons
which is 1.7 × 107 metres/second, divided by the number of
dimensions of space which is 3. That means D is equal to 1.6 × 105
metres2/second.
 If you substitute these three values into the previous formula for the
critical radius you will get the result that the critical radius of uranium-235
is 9.1 centimetres.
PICTURE CREDITS
All photographs are public domain unless otherwise stated.
Photograph of Ernest Rutherford's laboratory is licensed under the
Creative Commons license and is provided by Wikimedia Commons
(http://tinyurl.com/rutherfordlaboratory).
Photograph of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute is by Peter Kuley and is
provided by Wikimedia Commons.
Diagram of moose size in Sweden is by Nmccarthy16 and is provided by
Wikimedia Commons.
NOTES
[1] Note that the "Twenty thousand leagues" of Jules Verne's book refers
to a huge distance travelled — not depth under water, as twenty thousand
leagues is twice the circumference of the Earth.
[2] To Mars by A-Bomb: The Secret History of Project Orion,
http://tinyurl.com/projectorionmovie
[3] Paul Gilster, Project Orion: A Nuclear Bomb and Rocket — All in
One, http://tinyurl.com/centauridreams
[4] A third type of radiation called gamma radiation was discovered later.
Gamma radiation is a form of high-energy electromagnetic radiation (such
as light or X-rays). We will not be considering gamma rays further in this
book.
[5] This echoed a discovery in 1932 by Marie Curie's daughter Irène and
her husband Frédéric Joliot who had considered alpha particle
bombardment of light elements.
[6] The Cosmic Origins of Uranium, World Nuclear Association,
http://tinyurl.com/uraniumorigins
[7] This effect can also be understood in a different way. Because we are
dealing with particles, quantum mechanical effects dominate. Every particle
has an associated radius called the de Broglie wavelength which can be
understood as being the cross section of a point particle. A slow-moving
neutron will have low energy and will see a larger de Broglie wavelength of
the nucleus, which means a larger fission cross section.
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