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Chain Reactions & Hidden Cities: How the Manhattan Project Was Built
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before a single bomb could be built, someone had to prove the physics was real — and then hide an entire industrial civilisation doing it. This episode traces the secret infrastructure, Fermi's Chicago breakthrough, and the plutonium crisis that forced scientists to rethink everything.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before August of nineteen thirty-nine, the atomic bomb was a theoretical concern. After it, it was a race.
The scale of the Manhattan Project is the first thing that's hard to grasp. People think of Los Alamos and they picture a handful of brilliant men in a desert outpost.
Before Los Alamos could build anything, someone had to prove the underlying physics was real. That task fell to Enrico Fermi, and the location he chose was, by any measure, improbable.
Fermi's chain reaction proved the concept. The next problem was producing enough fissile material to actually build a weapon, and that problem nearly broke the project.
All of this was happening inside a security perimeter that was, by design, supposed to be impenetrable. It wasn't.
By the summer of nineteen forty-five, the implosion device was ready to test. It needed to be tested, because nobody was completely certain it would work.
Three weeks after Trinity, the weapon was used. On August sixth, nineteen forty-five, a B-29 bomber called the Enola Gay dropped Little Boy over Hiroshima.
The men who built the bomb did not, for the most part, feel uncomplicated about what they'd built. Oppenheimer became the most prominent scientific voice advocating for international control of nuclear weapons.
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