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Spies, Plutonium & the Weight of What They Built
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The Manhattan Project's most dangerous secrets collide: the plutonium implosion breakthrough, Soviet spies embedded inside Los Alamos, and the moral reckoning that haunted the scientists who built the bomb. This is the chapter where the physics became history.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Everything that changed about the modern world, the balance of power between nations, the possibility of civilisation-ending war, the cold arithmetic of mutual destruction, traces back to one morning in a desert in New Mexico. July sixteenth, nineteen forty-five.
In August of nineteen thirty-nine, Albert Einstein signed a letter addressed to President Franklin Roosevelt. The letter warned that uranium could be used to produce a bomb of extraordinary power.
The scale of what followed is still difficult to absorb. One hundred and thirty thousand workers spread across thirty sites across the country.
Before Los Alamos could build a bomb, the underlying physics had to be proven. That proof came on December second, nineteen forty-two, in the most unlikely setting imaginable.
Two paths to a bomb were being pursued in parallel. One used uranium-235, which was extraordinarily difficult to enrich in sufficient quantities.
All of this took place under elaborate security. Mail was censored.
By the summer of nineteen forty-five, two bomb designs were ready. The uranium gun-type design, called Little Boy, was considered reliable enough that no full test was planned.
Three weeks after Trinity, the decisions had been made. President Harry Truman, briefed on the bomb at the Potsdam Conference in July, authorized its use against Japan.
What happened to the men who built the bomb is a story in itself. Oppenheimer lobbied for international control of nuclear weapons and opposed development of the hydrogen bomb.
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