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Einstein's Letter to the Bomb: The Full Story of How It Began
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
From Einstein's 1939 warning to Roosevelt to the spies inside Los Alamos, this is the complete origin story of the atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project's cast of characters — Oppenheimer, Groves, Fermi, Fuchs — comes into full focus.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
At five twenty-nine in the morning on July sixteenth, nineteen forty-five, a scientist lying face-down in the New Mexico desert pressed his eyes shut and waited. He didn't know if the device would work.
In August nineteen thirty-nine, Albert Einstein signed a letter addressed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
General Leslie Groves was not a theoretical physicist. He was an Army Corps of Engineers officer who'd just finished overseeing the construction of the Pentagon.
Before Los Alamos, before Trinity, there was a colder and more modest moment. A proof of concept.
The site Oppenheimer chose was a mesa in northern New Mexico. Isolated.
Klaus Fuchs was a German-born physicist who'd fled the Nazis and ended up working at Los Alamos. He was brilliant, calm, and trusted.
Here's where the science nearly broke the project. There were two paths to a bomb.
At the test site in the Jornada del Muerto desert, thirty-five miles from Socorro, New Mexico, a steel tower held the device they called the Gadget. Nineteen kilograms of plutonium, surrounded by two tons of conventional explosive shaped into precise lenses.
The uranium bomb, Little Boy, was dropped on Hiroshima on August sixth, nineteen forty-five. It killed approximately one hundred thousand people.
Oppenheimer returned from Los Alamos to the public world as a hero. He was on magazine covers.
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