It is amazing how quickly we built the atomic bombs in 1945

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Read "The making of the atomic bomb". Long read but very good research. It was not quick and it wasn't cheap. It required the equivalent resources and money as the rest of the war.

Yet they were able to do it with 1940s tech faster than other countries can do it today?

They did it with brute force, eminent domain, and throwing $30,000,000,000 dollars (2025 equivalent) at it.

For that, we built five bombs by war's end.

And we spent another $52,000,000,000 on the plane to deliver it, the B-29, though the -29 got lots of other use.

I don't think Americans today can understand just what went into the program, in terms of sheer scale. The land for two brand new secret cities was taken and developed, Oak Ridge, TN, and Los Alamos, NM. Not to mention Hanford, Washington, and many others I've forgotten.

Just look at the K=25 plant alone, built in Oak Ridge to produce uranium. It was four stories high, a mile long in a U shape, and covered over 120 acres.

Ain't nobody building a 120 acre nuclear facility that we don't know about these days.

When they built it, they weren't even sure if their processes would work, or what electricity was needed. So they built plants that could supply three different voltage/frequencies, and hoped one of them would work.

And this was before K-25 was built.

Really insane, amazing history. I've gotten to be a bit of a buff of it, as I've visited Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, Trinity Site, and Pantex Plant (when that idiot Hazel O'Leary threw open the doors.)


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-25

EDIT: Got my bomb types mixed up


BTW, we only dropped one gun type bomb (Hiroshima). Didn't even do a test, as the confidence of success was extremely high.

We popped off one implosion bomb in the Trinity Test, Nagasaki got the other, and another was one the way from Los Alamos to the West Coast when Japan finally surrendered. We figured one, at most two would be needed. And we popped them off at a close interval to make the Japanese think we had a huge supply.

IIRC, the bomb LeMay requested from Los Alamos was the last complete one we had, though another was coming. If it hadn't worked, they might have called our bluff.

Queso1 said:

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Yet they were able to do it with 1940s tech faster than other countries can do it today?

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Yes

Clarification, both bombs were fission bombs. Hiroshima was a high confidence gun type device were you basically ram two subcritical masses of uranium together for a prompt supercriticial reaction. The Nagasaki and Trinity bombs were the implosion types to compress a subcritical sphere of plutonium into a prompt supercritical reaction.

A fusion bomb was developed years later with a fission bomb acting as a trigger to create fusion of two tritium atoms.

My grandmother served as a dental tech for the military near Los Alamos in WWII. She said they knew they were working on something top secret but didn't know what. She saw young white-haired men brought in from the secret base that were kept isolated from everyone else. The radiation these men were exposed to altered their appearance and turned their hair white.

Queso1 said:

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Yet they were able to do it with 1940s tech faster than other countries can do it today?

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The hinderacne to any weapons program is the enrichment of plutonium and/or uranium and the processing those into metal slugs/cores. It's a slow time consuming process and requires massive amounts of space, energy, and time. The process is a bit more efficient today but is still very similar to what we did in the 1945.

As I said on other threads for those questioning if Iran had a program, if you are enriching uranium to high amounts you are 90% of the way there.

CanyonAg77 said:

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BTW, we only dropped one fission bomb (Hiroshima). Didn't even do a test, as the confidence of success was extremely high.

We popped off one fusion bomb in the Trinity Test, Nagasaki got the other, and another was one the way from Los Alamos to the West Coast when Japan finally surrendered. We figured one, at most two would be needed. And we popped them off at a close interval to make the Japanese think we had a huge supply.

IIRC, the bomb LeMay requested from Los Alamos was the last complete one we had, though another was coming. If it hadn't worked, they might have called our bluff.

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Interestingly enough, the core from that third bomb was dubbed the Demon Core as it was involved in two accidents which led to two deaths and many radiation poisoning injuries right after the war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

Teslag said:

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Queso1 said:

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Yet they were able to do it with 1940s tech faster than other countries can do it today?

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The hinderacne to any weapons program is the enrichment of plutonium and/or uranium and the processing those into metal slugs/cores. It's a slow time consuming process and requires massive amounts of space, energy, and time. The process is a bit more efficient today but is still very similar to what we did in the 1945.

As I said on other threads for those questioning if Iran had a program, if you are enriching uranium to high amounts you are 90% of the way there.

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What do butt pimples have to do with any of this?

Teslag said:

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Clarification, both bombs were fission bombs. Hiroshima was a high confidence gun type device were you basically ram two subcritical masses of uranium together for a prompt supercriticial reaction. The Nagasaki and Trinity bombs were the implosion types to compress a subcritical sphere of plutonium into a prompt supercritical reaction.

A fusion bomb was developed years later with a fission bomb acting as a trigger to create fusion of two tritium atoms.

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Don't forget a lot of the base work had been done years earlier. They weren't starting from "how do we make a really big bomb?"

Leo Szilard had conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, and is the one who wrote the letter that Einstein signed and sent to Roosevelt which led to the Manhattan Project.

Side note, Szilard came to the idea while sitting at a traffic light after having read HG Wells' The World Set Free which was written in 1914. In the book, there is the famous line "And these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night were strange, even to the men who used them." Now Wells' descriptions of how the bombs work wasn't accurate, but it was enough for Szilard to develop the theory of the nuclear chain reaction.

Numerous other scientists like the Curies, Heisenberg, Bohr, Einstein, Fermi, Lawrence, etc. etc. had done a lot of work which went straight into the development of the atom bomb. Yes, it was still a massive feat of science and engineering, and amazing we did it in ~4 years.

Also, all three weapons detonated in 1945 were fission.

Trinity and Fat Man (Nagasaki) were plutonium implosion while Little Boy (Hiroshima) was a uranium gun style device. If all the models and physics were right, Little Boy would work. If the physics were wrong, then the entire program was an exercise in futility. We also didn't have enough uranium to make 2 so it was either test it, or deploy it.

Broseph said:

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Read "The making of the atomic bomb". Long read but very good research. It was not quick and it wasn't cheap. It required the equivalent resources and money as the rest of the war.

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Second this. A must read. The followup "Dark Sun - the making of the hygrogen bomb" is good as well, but you can tell it was a bit rushed.

Not only is the history correct, and it's more a history book than anything, but the physics are correct.

Just developing the HE for the implosion lens is fascinating. So is the related espionage that went on.

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a fission bomb acting as a trigger to create fusion of two tritium atoms.

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It was a Deuterium-Tritium reaction. And they're nuclei, not atoms.

Teslag said:

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Clarification, both bombs were fission bombs

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You are correct, was typing faster than I was thinking

cecil77 said:

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a fission bomb acting as a trigger to create fusion of two tritium atoms.

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It was a Deuterium-Tritium reaction. And they're nuclei, not atoms.

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YOUR MOM IS A NUCLEI

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The radiation these men were exposed to altered their appearance and turned their hair white.

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Leading atomic researchers usually paid the price for prolonged exposure.

Enrico Fermi and two of his graduation assistants all died of aggressive cancers only a few years after assembling the Chicago Pile and engineering the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction.

Ditto for Mary Curie,who died of adiation-induced aplastic anemia. People still can't touch her working papers and even her cookbooks showed elevated levels of radioactivity.

And who can forget Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin. Both had minor workplace slips that caused their working materials to go critical and dose them with lethal levels of radiation.. Slotin lasted only nine days.

MagnumLoad said:

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It is amazing how quickly we built the atomic bombs in 1945

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Quick? Ummmmm.

Interesting stuff. Thanks

annie88 said:

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MagnumLoad said:

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It is amazing how quickly we built the atomic bombs in 1945

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Quick? Ummmmm.

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Compared to some countries that are still trying, and we did it with 1940's technology

Broseph said:

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Read "The making of the atomic bomb". Long read but very good research. It was not quick and it wasn't cheap. It required the equivalent resources and money as the rest of the war.

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Incredible book. The last chapter detailing the aftermath in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is one of the most spine chilling, horrifying, devastating sections of a book I've ever read. Let us hope and pray these devices are never used on Earth ever again.

AtticusMatlock said:

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Broseph said:

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Read "The making of the atomic bomb". Long read but very good research. It was not quick and it wasn't cheap. It required the equivalent resources and money as the rest of the war.

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Incredible book. The last chapter detailing the aftermath in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is one of the most spine chilling, horrifying, devastating sections of a book I've ever read. Let us hope and pray these devices are never used on Earth ever again.

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Ironically, dropping those two bombs is likely the reason that one has never been used again. W/out those drops, who knows what would have happened in the Cold War, and with much more devastating bombs.

Windy City Ag said:

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The radiation these men were exposed to altered their appearance and turned their hair white.

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Leading atomic researchers usually paid the price for prolonged exposure.

Enrico Fermi and two of his graduation assistants all died of aggressive cancers only a few years after assembling the Chicago Pile and engineering the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction.

Ditto for Mary Curie,who died of adiation-induced aplastic anemia. People still can't touch her working papers and even her cookbooks showed elevated levels of radioactivity.

And who can forget Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin. Both had minor workplace slips that caused their working materials to go critical and dose them with lethal levels of radiation.. Slotin lasted only nine days.

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Slotins was self induced through

cecil77 said:

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a fission bomb acting as a trigger to create fusion of two tritium atoms.

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It was a Deuterium-Tritium reaction. And they're nuclei isotopes, not atoms.

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The Louis Slotin accident is absolutely horrifying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Slotin#Criticality_accident

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(T)he screwdriver slipped and the upper beryllium hemisphere fell, causing a "prompt critical" reaction and a burst of hard radiation. Scientists observed the blue glow of air ionization and felt a heat wave. Slotin experienced a sour taste in his mouth and an intense burning sensation in his left hand.

He jerked his left hand upward, lifting the upper beryllium hemisphere, and dropped it to the floor, ending the reaction. He had already been exposed to a lethal dose of neutron radiation.

As soon as Slotin left the building he vomited, a common reaction from exposure to extremely intense ionizing radiation. Slotin's colleagues rushed him to the hospital, but the radiation damage was irreversible.

Over the next four days, Slotin suffered an "agonizing sequence of radiation-induced traumas", including severe diarrhea, reduced urine output, swollen hands, erythema, "massive blisters on his hands and forearms", intestinal paralysis and gangrene.

He had internal radiation burns throughout his body, which one medical expert described as a "three-dimensional sunburn." By the seventh day, he was experiencing periods of "mental confusion." His lips turned blue and he was put in an oxygen tent. He ultimately experienced "a total disintegration of bodily functions" and slipped into a coma. Slotin died at 11 a.m. on 30 May, in the presence of his parents.

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TRM said:

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cecil77 said:

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a fission bomb acting as a trigger to create fusion of two tritium atoms.

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It was a Deuterium-Tritium reaction. And they're nuclei isotopes, not atoms.

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They are nuclei, each a different isotope of Hydrogen.

Nerd on...

I approve of this thread

I did not know the secondary fuel is a Lithium isotope. I figured since it's called a hydrogen bomb, it was hydrogen getting compressed. But it starts as a Lithium isotope and emits - deuterium and tritium? - which are the hydrogen isotopes that fuse to make the big boom.

Also had never heard of the Castle Bravo test that was supposed to be 5 Mt but was really 15 Mt due to a mistake made in the bomb design. Some would call that serendipity.

The Castle Bravo device was not a mistake in the design per se. It was just that all of the lithium reaction pathways were not well understood yet, especially the emission energies.

It basically boiled down to still learning fundamental nuclear physics on the fly.

Well, a miscalculation then. But when the yield is 3X what it was supposed to be, it's a mistake of some kind.

fc2112 said:

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Well, a miscalculation then. But when the yield is 3X what it was supposed to be, it's a mistake of some kind.

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That's true. I'm a nuclear engineer/physicist in my day job, so I get a little pedantic over that topic.

Andrew99 said:

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My grandmother served as a dental tech for the military near Los Alamos in WWII. She said they knew they were working on something top secret but didn't know what. She saw young white-haired men brought in from the secret base that were kept isolated from everyone else. The radiation these men were exposed to altered their appearance and turned their hair white.

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Interesting

Once, there was this kid who got into an accident and couldn't come to school. When he finally came back, his hair had turned from black into bright white.

He said it was from when the cars had crashed so hard.

Understood. I design delivery systems, not weapons.