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The Secret Machine: How 130,000 People Built the Atomic Bomb
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The Manhattan Project was the most secretive scientific operation in history — 130,000 people across 30 sites, none of them knowing the full picture. This first chapter traces everything from Einstein's letter to the moment Enrico Fermi proved the chain reaction was real.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
In August of nineteen thirty-nine, Albert Einstein signed a letter he would spend the rest of his life regretting. He later called it "the one great mistake in my life." And yet, without it, the course of the second world war, and every war that followed, might have looked completely different.
What followed was something without precedent in the history of organized science. At its peak, the Manhattan Project employed roughly one hundred and thirty thousand people across thirty sites in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
Before any bomb could be built, something fundamental had to be proven. The chain reaction, the idea that splitting one uranium atom could release enough energy to split others in an ever-accelerating cascade, had to work at scale, under controlled conditions, in the real world.
And that engineering problem turned out to be one of the most difficult in the history of science. The plan for one bomb design was relatively straightforward.
The implosion design needed a test. Nobody was willing to drop an untested weapon on a city and hope it worked.
President Truman received word of the Trinity success while attending the Potsdam Conference in Germany. He had taken office after Roosevelt's death in April and had only learned of the Manhattan Project's full scope after becoming president.
There was one more dimension to the Manhattan Project that only became clear in the years after the war ended. The elaborate secrecy that sealed Los Alamos from the outside world had not sealed it from the Soviet Union.
Einstein never worked on the Manhattan Project. He lacked the security clearance, and the government didn't trust the associations in his past.
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