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Military Pron - Part 1: Building the Bomb

Jul 19, 2021, 2:46 AM

By request, the history of the bomb. It’s a fascinating story. I’ll follow later with Part 2, Dropping the Bomb

In 1938 two German scientists discovered nuclear fission. Despite all of history to the contrary and a 2000+ year theory by the Greek philosopher Democritus, it appeared the atom COULD be split after all. The Scientific Method wins again. Man being man, it was no time at all before 2 more German scientists theorized you could weaponize the fission process. Word spread like wildfire through the roughly 50 super-nerdy egghead scientists in the world who understood the implications of this idea, including 2 Hungarian scientists.

Mind you, Hungary was an ally of Na zi Germany, so these guys went against the grain and maybe risked their lives to get the secret out to the good guys. They wrote a letter to Einstein, who had already fled to America from Germany, and said “This shizz is fo real. You bedda call somebody.” Einstein signed the letter to give it clout and passed it on to FDR, and within a year of the discovery of fission the race was on for an Atomic Bomb.

In the meantime, the physicist Enrico Fermi was building on this information and soon achieved the world’s first nuclear fission chain reaction beneath the University of Chicago football stadium. Odd place for a lab, a football stadium. Here’s his legacy, Fermilab, America’s particle physics and national accelerator lab, outside of Chicago.

Makes you wonder how much black box research is going on beneath our own Death Valley at this very moment doesn’t it? Alien interbreeding, Sasquatch DNA melding, the search for evidence of UGAs supposed 1980 football championship. Who knows what we're up to? Finding that 1980 trophy would be like finding the Loch Ness Monster.

………………..
But despite all the apparent drama, there was no way in he77 America was going to lose WW2. It just wasn’t going to happen. At the time we controlled 1/3 of all the critical produced resources in the world. 1/3 of the timber, coal, wheat, iron, cotton, electricity production, steel production, everything, except oil, which we controlled 2/3 of the worlds supply. FDR had Sec of War Henry Stimson in his office just after war began in Europe and asked, “Henry, where do we stand?” Stimson replied, we need rubber, that’s it sir, and we can make that ourselves if we need to. I’m pretty sure he was talking about this

not this

but who can be absolutely sure? Maybe it was both. We had a lot of troops in England who were criticized by the British for being “Over-paid, over-sexed, and over here.” We replied that the British were “Under-paid, under-sexed, and under Eisenhower.” Rayyyrrr.

As a matter of fact, it’s easiest to just think of America as Europe but with a centralized government. They have 44 states, we have 50. We have a little more land, they have a few more people. Divide all the world's resource production into 3 slices. We had one slice. All of Europe had one slice, and everyone else had one slice. Europe may have changed forever, and we may have sued for peace to adjust to that new reality, but we weren’t going to be defeated, no way no how. We were simply too far away, too big, and too materially wealthy. Not in the cards.

But the reason we were so concerned about the bomb was that the Germans might get something we didn’t have. And that would be bad. Na zis with atomic bombs on rockets is just something you don’t want to deal with, even if their ultimate defeat is inevitable. So we went full bore on making the theory a reality before they could. As it turned out they never even came close on the design, much less the real problem, production. But more on that later.

The job of making an American atomic bomb went to the Manhattan District of the Army Corp of Engineers which had its office in Tribeca. Thus it became known as the Manhattan Project. It was put under the care of Leslie Groves, who might have given Patton a run for his money had they ever bumped heads.

One of his subordinates described him this way:
“General Groves is the biggest S.O.B. I have ever worked for. He is the most demanding. He is the most critical. He is always a driver, never a praiser. He is abrasive and sarcastic. He disregards all normal organizational channels. He is extremely intelligent. He has the guts to make the difficult decisions. He is the most egotistical man I know. He knows he is right and sticks by his decisions.”

When Groves wasn’t developing the atomic bomb for us, he was building the Pentagon, the largest office building in the world at the time. That’s no joke. He did both at the same time. Yikes.

Groves chose as his chief egghead a chain-smoking, Hindu quoting, “possible Communist” neurotic named Robert Oppenheimer. He obtained his doctorate at age 23 from the University of Gottingen, via Harvard and Cambridge, and everyone was glad to see him go. His fellow students signed a petition demanding he stop talking about physics in every single class, and his own professor said by the end of his Doctorate oral exam he felt like he was the one being questioned and challenged about his knowledge of the subject.

So a hard as nails army man and a red hippie. I imagine these two guys got along swimmingly.

………………..
The first order of business in building the bomb was getting money and facilities. And it was a whopper order. Two billion dollars worth in 1940. There’s a joke that a Senator from Tennessee was on the Appropriations Committee when the black budget for the bomb came across his desk. The army explained they were looking at several sites all around the country to develop the project. The Senator said “TWO BILLION DOLLARS?! So tell me, in what part of Tennessee do you boys want to build this thing?” And thus was born the Y-12 Complex at Oak Ridge.

To make theory a reality, the Y-12 Complex would build one type of a-bomb, the Uranium type, and Hanford, Washington was selected to build another type of a-bomb, the Plutonium type. Like in the movie Contact, why build just one completely untried project with billions in government money when you can build two for twice the price? So we hedged our bets and built two different versions of the a-bomb, just in in case one was a theoretical dud. Did I mention we were rich AF?

The design for the two bombs would take place at yet a third location. Oppenheimer had fallen in love with New Mexico in his youth (and who hasn’t) and wanted the design complex at his ranch.

But the army put its foot down and said no, we're not building a super secret military base on your personal ranch. Instead, they built it right beside his personal ranch at a place called Los Alamos. On the critical site selection criteria, Oppenheimer said it was the perfect place for an atomic bomb design studio because the mountain views were lovely and the pretty vistas would inspire his scientists and make them feel happy.

Point for being right. Just looking at the pictures of New Mexico makes me feel happy. The hidden base Los Alamos was so secret that for all intents and purposes it didn’t even exist. The over 300 children born there in WW2 had their birthplace on their birth certificate listed as simply P.O. Box 1663, Sante Fe, NM

Sorry bub, military necessity. Talk to General Groves about it.

I haven't been to Los Alamos, though I will own a ranch in New Mexico myself one day even if its only printed on a postcard. If you are ever in the Knoxville area, though, it’s worth hopping over to Oak Ridge. The place is fkng ginormous. There’s a great interpretive center and you can get shuttled around to all the important sites. Well worth a half day. It’s BIG. Essentially we built 4 secret cities in that valley alone, not to mention all the other secret cities around the country.

The K-25 building on the Y-12 campus at Oak Ridge. If you've ever wondered what a mile long building might look like, it's a mile long building.

The full Y-12 Complex, hidden in the valley.

In addition to all that, we were also over in the Congo digging up uranium for the bombs. Seriously, building the largest office building in the world must have been like changing a light bulb compared to the responsibilities Groves had running the whole bomb program.

America's secret bomb cities and supporting municipalities. And to think people get all excited about Area-51. General Groves says "You built a secret airbase? Cute."

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Once you have all your infrastructure in place, it turns out the bombs themselves were pretty cheap. Ninety percent of the money went to building towns all over the country to process the Uranium we were getting from Africa. And believe it or not a sh** ton of that processing was done with manual oversight. Thousands of lovely Volunteer lasses twisting knobs to process uranium, and having no idea what they were doing. He77, no one did. Security all over was blackout tight. Get caught even chatting about turning knobs that you have no idea what they do? 10 years in the slammer.

The X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge. Sort of a giant uranium pin cushion for experimenting with different isotopes and materials.

In the end it was all about refining material. Digging up enough Uranium was hard. Refining enough of what you dug up it was even harder. There simply wasn’t a country on the planet capable of doing all that from scratch besides us. When Wernher von Braun learned about the bomb he thought it was a lie. "You'd need half of America working to process all the Uranium", he said. He wasn't that far off.

Uranium ore, waiting to be processed.

At one point the Army sent a liason to the Treasury department requesting 15,000 tons of silver to be used in Uranium for processing. 15,000 tons of silver. Yeah. The Treasury replied “Please convert your request to ounces. The Army may think of silver in tons, but the Treasury department tracks our silver in ounces.” The request was approved, and every ounce of silver was returned after the war.

And all this was the cheaper military sub-program related to the bomb. You still need a plane capable of dropping the bomb once you’ve got it. That’s the B-29 program. Cha-ching. 3 billion more dollars please. Just put it on the tab of everything we are giving away in Lend Lease plus our function as the Arsenal of Democracy in saving Europe. Did I mention we owned 1/3 of the world’s produced resources, and we’re rich AsFu?

It’s almost like all the individual states of Europe followed their own independent agendas, and we were “united” states. I can’t quite put my finger on the source of our incredible productivity and prosperity.

………………..
So now that we've got the facilities and the material, just how are these the bombs supposed to work? Well, no one was sure they even would. Even Oppenheimer, the lead scientist, made a $50 bet with this fellow scientists that the whole thing would be a colossal bust.

Here’s what’s SUPPOSED to happen. Say you have a box of magic rocks. These rocks get hot when they get close to each other. If you could mash them all together they would get REALLY hot and might even explode. So the question is, how do you get your rocks off? This is called critical mass, and its how you get the boom you are looking for.

Turns out Uranium-235 is a really good magic rock. It’s big, with 235 protons and 143 neutrons and it's just waiting to burst. When it takes on just one more neutron it cracks into 2 parts and gives off 3 neutrons and a whole HELLA lot of energy. Like millions of times more energy than a conventional weapon chemical reaction. Like E=MCsquared energy. In cartoon land it looks like this.

Now, any or all of the three neutrons it gives off when it cracks may fly off into space, or any or all may get absorbed by a U-238 atom and dud out, but if just one is lucky enough to hit another U-235 atom, you’ve got a chain reaction! Explosions on top of explosions!

Naturally, if you have more and more and more Uranium, you can compound your explosions on top of more explosions on top of more explosions!. More material, bigger bomb!

Thank you Ariel for the Mermaid Industrial Complex position on the matter. And, if you root out those bummer U-238 buzz killers you can get an even bigger bang. So you want your Uranium, like your blow, as pure and refined as possible. You might think of the whole Manhattan Project as a 2 billion dollar refining lab.

It turns out that when you are researching, though, you don’t really want any unexpected atomic explosions. So another primary problem you have with a fission reaction is how to control it when you want it controlled. We took a design path that used graphite to control the reactions, but the German's research led them to a heavy water solution. If a reaction happens to occur in a bath of heavy water some additional neutrons will be absorbed by the isotopes in the water and the reaction can be curbed considerably, which is really helpful if you have no idea what you are doing.

There’s a whole exciting subplot here with a heavy water hydro-electric plant the Germans captured in Norway for their research. Real life “Where Eagles Dare” stuff...paratroopers dropping at night in the snow, ski troops shooting it out in the dark. Cloak and dagger intrigue coupled with midnight Commando raids to blow the place up and keep German research curtailed. But that’ll be for another time.

So finally, how do you smash these magic uranium rocks together so they go boom? Well there are two ways.

The first is the rifle method, where you shoot a wad of material at an even bigger wad of material, smashing it all together to achieve critical mass, and boom! The other is the implosion method, where you build a hollow sphere, distribute material all around it, and simultaneously explode it all together, like wadding up a piece of paper or crushing an egg in your hand. They look like this in concept:

and like this in reality:

The "Little Boy" Uranium bomb, named after FDR

The "Fat Man" Plutonium bomb, named after Churchill

If you want to go second generation, an atomic bomb uses conventional explosives as a trigger, but a Hydrogen bomb uses an atomic bomb as a trigger. That will get you a REALLY REALLY big boom, about 5000 times more oomph than an old fashioned atomic bomb. But that’s a story for the Cold War.

So there you have it, for the low low price of 2 billion dollars and 6 years of research, development, and production, you've got your first two atomic bombs. Now, what are you going to do with them?

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You should know better.

When "The Wolf Man," came to the theater in Rockwood I was 6. I'm not sure 'Granddaddy,' knew what was on at the theater but he gave me permission to go to 'the show,' with my 12 y/o cousin 'Doosie.'

It was daylight when we walked the mile between Granddaddy's house and the theater and it was a straight walk down Gateway Ave to main street downtown. It was dark-thirty when the show was over and you couldn't have driven a toothpick in my tight little fat butt with a sledgehammer.

The wolf man was behind every building and every tree. I didn't find out why he didn't get me until I got to granddaddy's house. The raging fear inside must have been pretty evident because Granddaddy took me into the dining room and told me he was going to tell me something that nobody else knew but Nan, my grandmother.

Granddaddy told me he was the wolfman. I wanted to see his wolf suit and all I remember is that he let me know that couldn't happen. I was satisfied that the wolfman was no threat to me or any of my family.

That story was one example of how Granddaddy managed me. He was my hero. That is why I insisted all my grand children called me granddaddy. I'm not nearly as talented as the real Granddaddy but that's my goal.

Sentence frag only I could do.
Message was edited by: ClemsonTiger1988®

Military Pron - Part 1: Building the Bomb

Most excellent- I echo your recommendation to visit

Re: Most excellent- I echo your recommendation to visit

Re: Most excellent- I echo your recommendation to visit

some pics from Clemson library website

Re: some pics from Clemson library website

Ah, Pre-Fab Land over by the P&A building

Re: Most excellent- I echo your recommendation to visit

Gotdang that's a quality post.

Check the website on the schedule

Re: Check the website on the schedule

Re: Military Pron - Part 1: Building the Bomb

If any of you are interested in a deep dive podcast of the

As I've said a a few times over the years Rockwood is home.

If the evasive welding answer piqued your curiosity,

How dare you remind me of a story.

dang, good work Ford... and you're right, those raids to knock

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