Welcome to LCE’s course about how history, politics, physics, engineering, industrial capacity, and luck gave America the first atomic bombs. Taking this course can be your celebration of the Bomb’s 75th birthday — July 16.
A good book to read is Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Rhodes’ book superbly blends history and science. If you are uneasy about the science, keep in mind that Rhodes was an English major, and he achieved an excellent understanding of the physics behind the Bomb. You can too; I will help. Rhodes’ book is available from Amazon as a download to your Kindle for a modest price; it is also available as an audio book.
Shapers of our story include Curie, Rutherford, Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg, Chadwick, Szilard, Teller, Bethe, Fermi, Bush, Conant, Compton, Hahn, Meitner, Frisch, Peierls, Oliphant, Lawrence, Groves, Oppenheimer, Roosevelt, Stimson, Truman, Hitler, and Stalin. I will describe some of these strong personalities, and you can use Wikipedia to learn more. Wikipedia also has good accounts of events, episodes, facilities, and processes that affected the making and use of the first Bombs.
Names of things (jargon, vocabulary) are an essential part of our story. Each term — familiar or unfamiliar — represents an advance in understanding of the structure of matter. Once you know what is meant by atom, nucleus, nucleon, nuclide, electron, proton, neutron, atomic number (Z), element, atomic mass, mass number (A), isotope, radioactivity, transmutation, accelerator, alpha ray, beta ray, gamma ray, nuclear reaction, and nuclear fission, you know almost all the nuclear physics you need to know to understand why and how to build a Bomb.
Numbers are important for understanding why and how to make atomic bombs. Some of these numbers are very large; some are very small. I will only do arithmetic with them — add, subtract, divide, multiply — but I will use scientific notation. I will be brisk and often approximate (sloppy). For example, (2 x 105) / (.022) = 107
Big questions and what-ifs include: Should we have dropped the bomb on Japan? On a city? What if the Germans had got the bomb first? What if the war in Europe had not ended in May 1945, would we have dropped it on Berlin? What if the U.S. and Germany had both gotten the Bomb before WWII ended? What if only Germany had gotten the Bomb? What if both countries had the Bomb before WWII started? What were the effects of secrecy on the project? On the American political system? On American security? On international relations? If you have read or seen Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, are nuclear weapons a ring of power with all the attendant dangers?