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Implosion: The Breakthrough That Saved the Bomb
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The plutonium bomb was failing — and the Manhattan Project had to solve an impossible engineering problem or lose everything. This episode traces the implosion breakthrough that kept the atomic bomb alive.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
It's the summer of nineteen forty-four. The war in Europe is grinding toward its final chapter.
To understand why plutonium became such a crisis, you need to understand where things stood before it. In our last episode, we tracked the Manhattan Project from its origins in Einstein's warning letter to the moment Enrico Fermi stood under a squash court at the University of Chicago and watched the world's first self-sustaining chain reaction come to life.
The solution had been floating around the edges of the project for a while before it became the only option. Implosion.
Oppenheimer had built Los Alamos around the idea that putting brilliant minds in the same place would accelerate the impossible. By nineteen forty-four, he needed that to be true.
While the implosion team worked through their engineering crisis, the rest of Los Alamos wasn't standing still. Fermi had moved west from Chicago and was contributing to the theoretical work.
There's another layer to this story that the project's security apparatus never fully contained. The Manhattan Project had elaborate secrecy protocols.
By early nineteen forty-five, the implosion design was converging. The explosive lens testing was producing better results.
The morning of July sixteenth, nineteen forty-five, was overcast and tense. There had been thunderstorms overnight.
The Trinity test happened three weeks before Hiroshima. By the time the Gadget detonated, Harry Truman was already at Potsdam, meeting with Allied leaders to shape the postwar world.
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