Talk:Manhattan Project

Archive: 0

---

Improving this page

The original author of this page seems to have set out to do something a bit too over-ambitious -- too much detail. As it is, the article is hopelessly top-heavy: if we wrote up the entire project with as much detail as the first year of it currently has then we'd have an article far too long to be useful. I say: let's scrap a lot of the existing text, try starting over, and try to first sketch out a schematic for the project as a whole. A general skeleton structure might be:

1. Developments in 1930s physics
2. WWII breaks out, British interest in bomb, Einstein letter
3. Fission work at U of Chicago. Fermi's pile.
4. British motivate a few US scientists to get the ball rolling again. Take over project from Nat. Bur. Standards.
5. Project given to Army. Becomes MED. Groves and his business style. Planning for Los Alamos. The University of California brought in.
6. Construction for Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Hanford. Research at Berkeley. Emphasize scope and scale.
7. Main difficulties of project: getting refined material, design issues. Uranium mined in Canada, US Southwest, Belgian Congo.
8. Separation methods: electromagnetic, gaseous diffusion. Plutonium breeding at Hanford. Design goes on at Los Alamos and Project Alberta.
9. Concerns about implosion. Discovery that Germans don't have the bomb. Trinity test. Truman informed, Potsdam.
10. Little Boy and Fat Man, their differences and their ad hoc nature.
11. Bombs moved to Tinian. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. End of war. Smyth Report. Heros or villains?
12. MED's postwar actions. Operation Crossroads. The question of whether or not the bomb should be controlled by the military or a civilian committee.
13. Atomic Energy Act of 1946. Dissolution of MED, creation of AEC.

Suggestions/additions? Am I omitting anything or getting things mixed up? If these are all going to fit in a reasonably sized article, they should be only a few paragraphs each, which will be somewhat of a challenge, but is probably doable. --Fastfission 15:31, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

"Trinity" fusion test

The worry was not entirely extinguished in some people's minds until the Trinity test; though if Bethe had been wrong, we would never know.

This passage concerns the first fusion bomb, but generally in this article, and the Trinity article, "Trinity" refers to the first test of a fission bomb. Can anyone clarify? -- Coneslayer 16:09, 2005 Apr 15 (UTC)

Short answer: the passage doesn't concern the first fusion bomb. It is about the fear that a fission weapon could hypothetically start a fusion reaction with the atmosphere (which was false). It turns out that fusion reactions are much harder to start and sustain than their initial fears thought (which is why making a hydrogen bomb was so difficult). --Fastfission 17:28, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

OK, but the paragraph still doesn't make sense: In Bethe's account, this ultimate catastrophe came up again in 1975 when it appeared in a magazine article by H. C. Dudley. . . . The worry was not entirely extinguished in some people's minds until the Trinity test. How could the worry be present in 1975, and then be completely extinguished in 1945? -- Coneslayer 17:36, 2005 Apr 15 (UTC)

I think what it is trying to say is that there an initial worry, extinguished in 1945, which was dredged out again in the mid 1970s through some shoddy reporting. However I'm not 100% sure I understand what the mid 1970s stuff was about (I've never heard of that being a real worry anytime after Trinity, and especially not by the 1970s, when the atmospheric testing was no longer being undertaken by the USA or USSR, and the largest bombs had already been set off without igniting the atmosphere). The confusing sentence, like much of the current entry, should probably be deleted. --Fastfission 20:08, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)