The History and Science of the Manhattan Project, 2nd ed. PDF
Preview The History and Science of the Manhattan Project, 2nd ed.
Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics Bruce Cameron Reed The History and Science of the Manhattan Project Second Edition Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics Series editors Neil Ashby, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA WilliamBrantley,DepartmentofPhysics,FurmanUniversity,Greenville,SC,USA MatthewDeady,PhysicsProgram,BardCollege,Annandale-on-Hudson,NY,USA Michael Fowler, Department of Physics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA Morten Hjorth-Jensen, Department of Physics, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway Michael Inglis, Department of Physical Sciences, SUNY Suffolk County Community College, Selden, NY, USA Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics (ULNP) publishes authoritative texts covering topicsthroughoutpureandappliedphysics.Eachtitleintheseriesissuitableasabasisfor undergraduateinstruction,typicallycontainingpracticeproblems,workedexamples,chapter summaries, andsuggestions for further reading. ULNP titles mustprovide at least oneof thefollowing: (cid:129) Anexceptionally clear andconcise treatment ofastandard undergraduate subject. (cid:129) Asolidundergraduate-levelintroductiontoagraduate,advanced,ornon-standardsubject. (cid:129) Anovel perspective oranunusual approach toteaching asubject. ULNPespeciallyencouragesnew,original,andidiosyncraticapproachestophysicsteaching at theundergraduate level. ThepurposeofULNPistoprovideintriguing,absorbingbooksthatwillcontinuetobethe reader’spreferred reference throughout theiracademic career. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/8917 Bruce Cameron Reed The History and Science of the Manhattan Project Second Edition 123 Bruce CameronReed Department ofPhysics AlmaCollege Alma, MI,USA ISSN 2192-4791 ISSN 2192-4805 (electronic) Undergraduate Lecture Notesin Physics ISBN978-3-662-58174-2 ISBN978-3-662-58175-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-58175-9 LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2018966397 1stedition:©Springer-VerlagBerlinHeidelberg2014 2ndedition:©Springer-VerlagGmbHGermany,partofSpringerNature2019 Thisworkissubjecttocopyright.AllrightsarereservedbythePublisher,whetherthewholeorpart of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission orinformationstorageandretrieval,electronicadaptation,computersoftware,orbysimilarordissimilar methodologynowknownorhereafterdeveloped. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publicationdoesnotimply,evenintheabsenceofaspecificstatement,thatsuchnamesareexemptfrom therelevantprotectivelawsandregulationsandthereforefreeforgeneraluse. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authorsortheeditorsgiveawarranty,expressorimplied,withrespecttothematerialcontainedhereinor for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictionalclaimsinpublishedmapsandinstitutionalaffiliations. ThisSpringerimprintispublishedbytheregisteredcompanySpringer-VerlagGmbH,DEpartof SpringerNature Theregisteredcompanyaddressis:HeidelbergerPlatz3,14197Berlin,Germany This work is dedicated to Laurie. You will always be The One. Preface In August, 1945, two United States Army Air Force B-29 bombers each dropped single bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These new “atomic” bombs, known colloquially as Little Boy and Fat Man, each exploded with energies equivalent to over ten thousand tons of conventional explosive, the normal payload of 1000 such bombers deployed simultaneously. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both devastated. A few days later, Japan surrendered, bringing an end to World War II. In a speech to his people on August 15, Emperor Hirohito specifically referred to “a new and most cruel bomb” as one of the reasons for accepting surrender terms that had been laid out by the Allied powers. A later analysisbytheUnitedStatesStrategicBombingSurveyestimatedthetotalnumber of people killed in the bombings to be about 125,000, with a further 130,000– 160,000 injured. While historians continue to debate whether the bombs can be credited with directly ending the war or simply helped to hasten its end, it is irrefutable that the developmentanduseofnuclearweaponswereawatershedeventofhumanhistory. In 1999, the Newseum organization of Washington, D.C., conducted a survey of journalists and the public regarding the top 100 news stories of the twentieth century. Number one on the list for both groups was the bombings of Hiroshima andNagasakiandtheendofWorldWarII.JournalistsrankedtheJuly,1945,testof an atomic bomb in the desert of southern New Mexico as number 48, and the Manhattan Project itself, the U.S. Army’s effort under which the bombs were developed,asnumber64.TheManhattanProjectwasthemostcomplexandcostly national-level research and development project to its time, and its legacy is enormous: America’s postwar military and political power, the cold war and the nuclear arms race, the thousands of nuclear weapons still held in the arsenals of various countries, the possibility of their proliferation to other states, the threat of nuclear terrorism, and public apprehension with radiation and nuclear energy all originatedwiththeProject.Theselegacieswillremainwithusfordecadestocome. vii viii Preface The development of nuclear weapons is the subject of literally thousands of booksandarticles,manyofthemcarefullyresearchedandwell-written.Why,then, do I believe that the world needs one more volume on a topic that has been so exhaustively explored? Source material on the Manhattan Project can be classed into four very broad categories. First, there are many synoptic semipopular histories. This genre began with William Laurence’s Dawn over Zero (1946) and Stephane Groueff’s 1967 Manhattan Project: The Untold Story of the Making of the Atomic Bomb. The current outstanding example of this type of work is Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986); references to a number of others appear in the “Resource Letters” by myself cited in the Further Reading list at the end of this section. Second are works prepared as official government and military histories, primarily for academic scholars. The original source along this line was Henry DeWolf Smyth’s Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, which was written under War Department auspices and released just after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More extensive later exemplars are Hewlett and Anderson’s A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission and Vincent Jones’ United States Army in World War II: Special Studies—Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb. Third are the numerous biographies on the leading personalities of the Project,particularlysomeofthescientistsinvolved.Welloveradozenbiographies have been published on Robert Oppenheimer alone. Finally, there are specialized technical publications which require readers to be armed with some upper- undergraduate or graduate-level physics and Allied sciences to appreciate fully. Synoptic volumes are accessible to a broad audience, but tend to be limited in theextentoftheirtechnicalcoverage.Interestingastheyare,onecanreadthesame stories only so many times; eventually, a curious reader must yearn for deeper knowledge:Whycanonlyuraniumorplutoniumbeusedtomakeafissionweapon? Howdoesonecomputeacriticalmass?Howwasplutonium,whichdoesnotoccur naturally,created?Officialhistoriesaresuperblywell-documented,butalsotendto be non-technical; they are not meant to serve as student texts or popularly acces- sible treatments. Biographies are not usually written to address technical matters, but here a different issue can creep in. While many biographies are responsible treatments of the life and work of the individual concerned, others devolve into questionablepsychologicalorsociologicalanalysesofeventsandmotivationsnow decadesinthepast,where,notinconveniently,theprincipalshavenoopportunityto respond. Some of the synoptic-level treatments fall prey to this affliction as well. The bottom line is that after many years of teaching a college-level general education course on the Manhattan Project, I came to the conclusion that a need existsforabroadlycomprehensibleoverviewoftheProjectpreparedbyaphysicist familiarwithbothitsscienceandhistory.Mygoalhasbeentotrytofindamiddle ground by preparing a volume that can serve as a text for a college-level science course at a basic algebra level, but which is accessible to non-students and non-specialists who wish to learn about the Project. To this end, most chapters in this volume comprise a mixture of descriptive and technical material. For Preface ix technically oriented readers, exercises are included at the ends of some chapters. Forreaderswhoprefertoskipovermathematicaltreatmentsoftechnicaldetails,the text clearly indicates where descriptive passages resume. Another motivation for taking on this project is that, over time, access to sen- sitive informationregarding historicallyimportant events inevitablybecomesmore open.Atthiswriting,almost75yearshaveelapsedsincetheSmythReport,over55 havepassedsincethepublicationofHewlettandAnderson’sNewWorld,andover 30 since Rhodes’ Making of the Atomic Bomb. In the meantime, a considerable number of technical and non-technical publications on the Project have appeared, and many more original documents are readily available than was the case when those authors were preparing their works. From both a personal professional per- spective and an access-to-information viewpoint, the time seemed right to prepare this volume. Writing about decades-old events is a double-edged sword. Because we know how the story played out, hindsight can be perfect. We know which theories and experiments worked and which did not. The flip side of this is that it becomes far too easy to overlook false starts and blind alleys and set out the story in a linear this–then–that sequence that gives it all a sense of predetermined inevitability. But thiswouldnotgiveaduesenseofthechallengesfacedbythepeopleinvolvedwith the Project, so many aspects of which were so chancy that the entire effort could just as well have played no role in ending the war. After the discovery of nuclear fission, it took some of the leading research personalities of the time well over a year to appreciate how the subtleties of nuclear reactions might be exploited to makeaweaponorareactor.Evenaftertheoreticalargumentsandexperimentaldata began to become clear, technological barriers to practical realization of nuclear energylookedsooverwhelmingastomaketheideaofanuclearweaponseemmore appropriatetotherealmofsciencefictionthantoreal-worldengineering.Physicist andNobelLaureateNielsBohrwasoftheopinionthat“itcanneverbedoneunless you turn the United States into one huge factory.” To some extent, that is exactly what was done. Again, my goal has been to seek a middle ground which gives readers some sense of the details and evolution of events, but without being overwhelming. ThescaleoftheManhattanProjectwassogreatthatnosingle-volumehistoryof it can ever hope to be fully comprehensive. After the Project came under Army auspices in mid-1942, it split into a number of parallel components which subse- quently proceeded to the end of the war. This parallelism obviates a strict chronological telling of the story; each main component deserves its own chapter. Thousandsofotherpublicationsonthistopicexistpreciselybecausemanyofthose components are worthy of detailed analyses in their own right. Thus, the present volume should be thought of as a gateway to an intricate, compelling story, after whichan interested readercanexploreany numberoffascinatingsubplots inmore depth. It is mysincere hope that you will enjoy, learn from, and seriously reflect upon the science and history that unfold on the following pages. I hope also that they whetyourappetiteformore.SourcesofinformationontheProjectaresoextensive x Preface thatasingleindividualcanhopetolookatbutafewpercentofitall;Ihavedevoted over two decades of my professional career to studying the Manhattan Project and know that I still have much to learn. The future will need more scientists and historianstoserveasManhattanProjectscholars.Tostudentsreadingthesewords,I invite you to consider making such work a part of your own career. Remarks on the Second Edition ThissecondeditionofTheHistoryandScienceoftheManhattanProjecthasbeen preparedinresponsetothemanyinsightfulcommentsIreceivedonthefirstedition from readers who took the time to contact me. The most significant additions concern the provision of an extensive index and a new chapter on the wartime German nuclear program. The latter is Chap. 9 in this edition; the former Chap. 9, “The Legacy of Manhattan,” is now Chap. 10. When I prepared the first edition, I opted to not include such a chapter on the rationale that the German program was not a component of the Manhattan Project per se. However, the terrifying possi- bilityofaNazinuclearweaponwasthestimulusforManhattan,andIhavecometo the realization that adding this material gives a more complete picture of the rel- evant history. As with the first edition, I make no comments on the very nascent Japanese nuclear program. Also new is Sect. 6.7, which reviews the Feed Materials Program of the Manhattan Engineer District. Without a reliable supply of tons of uranium ore to feedtheuraniumenrichment andplutonium productionfacilities atOakRidgeand Hanford, the entire Manhattan Project would never have existed. Smaller but still important changes include more details on background experiments to Enrico Fermi’sCP-1reactor(Chap.5);JapaneseballoonbombsatHanford(Chap.6);why onlyU-235andPu-239areviableasbombfuels(Chap.7);therelationshipbetween Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill on atomic matters (Chap. 7); the pro- duction of polonium for use in neutron-generating bomb triggers (also Chap. 7); some revised data on plans for the late-1945 invasion of Japan (Chap. 8); and updates to current nuclear weapons deployments and the status of the Manhattan ProjectNationalHistoricalPark(nowChap.10).Afewfiguresthatappearedinthe first edition have been dropped to make way for some of these additions. A number of readers, particularly John Altholz, Michael Magras, Robert Sadlowe, and Arthur Tassel, contacted me with corrections and valuable sugges- tions for clarifications of some of the more technical material. They and others obviously spent many hours poring over the first edition, and I am humbled and honored by their attention.
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