Officials in 1945 at the test site in New Mexico.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/science/30manh.html?em&ex=1193976000&en=4f452d60def283aa&ei=5087%0A
Use that URL for a pic of Columbia's Pupin Physics Lab and a video that I could mostly hear.
Posted on 10/31/2007, 8:24:01 AM by neverdem
By nature, code names and cover stories are meant to give no indication of the secrets concealed. “Magic” was the name for intelligence gleaned from Japanese ciphers in World War II, and “Overlord” stood for the Allied plan to invade Europe.
Many people assume that the same holds true for the Manhattan Project, in which thousands of experts gathered in the mountains of New Mexico to make the world’s first atom bomb.
Robert S. Norris, a historian of the atomic age, wants to shatter that myth.
In “The Manhattan Project” (Black Dog & Leventhal), published last month, Dr. Norris writes about the Manhattan Project’s Manhattan locations. He says the borough had at least 10 sites, all but one still standing. They include warehouses that held uranium, laboratories that split the atom, and the project’s first headquarters — a skyscraper hidden in plain sight right across from City Hall.
“It was supersecret,” Dr. Norris said in an interview. “At least 5,000 people were coming and going to work, knowing only enough to get the job done.”
Manhattan was central, according to Dr. Norris, because it had everything: lots of military units, piers for the import of precious ores, top physicists who had fled Europe and ranks of workers eager to aid the war effort. It even had spies who managed to steal some of the project’s top secrets.
“The story is so rich,” Dr. Norris enthused. “There’s layer upon layer of good stuff, interesting characters.”
Still, more than six decades after the project’s start, the Manhattan side of the atom bomb story seems to be a well-preserved secret.
Dr. Norris recently visited Manhattan at the request of The New York Times for a daylong tour of the Manhattan Project’s roots. Only one site he visited displayed a public sign noting its...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Officials in 1945 at the test site in New Mexico.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/science/30manh.html?em&ex=1193976000&en=4f452d60def283aa&ei=5087%0A
Use that URL for a pic of Columbia's Pupin Physics Lab and a video that I could mostly hear.
I thought most of the research was done in Tennessee. Still, why would you name a super-secret project after the borough it was taking place in?
bttt
More young adults on cholesterol drugs
CUOMO VS. MEDICAID FRAUD Many other stories were mentioned.
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
I think the enrichment took place in TN.
I thought the story addressed that question. You want to make it hidden in plain sight.
The first stable reactor stack was in Chicago. The Uranium came from Oak Ridge. The Plutonium came from Hanford. The development was at Los Alamos, and the testing at White Sands. Manhattan wasn’t involved. The code name was was misdirection.
I know New Yorkers like to believe that they are the only place that is or has ever been important, but why don’t y’all let it go. You can’t be the center of the universe every day.
Thanks neverdem.
http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/shiva/shiva.html
“...now I am become Death [Shiva], the destroyer of worlds...”
Physicist Robert Oppenheimer, Supervising Scientist Manhattan Project on 16 July 1945 at 0529 HRS, in the Jornada del Muerto desert near the Trinity site in the White Sands Missile Range... quoting from the Bhagavad-Gita upon witnessing first atomic detonation by mankind.
The early work happened through the Manhattan office of the US Army Corps of Engineers. The scope of work soon grew beyond what could be done on a crowded island, however. After the move, the name stuck.
Like it or not, a lot of stuff does happen in New York.
New York City is certainly an interesting place.
Most of it, especially the process deemed best likely to succeed.
But there was a little known additional, call it a back-up system for "just in case...", enrichment site using a totally different enrichment process.
Let's just say I don't drink tap water derived from Mississippi River water and won't use Tylenol, the contaminated dirt from the site was moved in open trucks through neighborhood streets in a large metropolitan area to a dump site where workers at a major defense plant played sports until someone showed up with a gieger counter (the ball fields are now fenced off, but along side a major metropolitan interstate).
Scared yet? I discovered it by accident, saw the homemade plaque in a warehouse where the uranium had been improperly stacked and a small reaction had taken place, took a stroll down a in-plant alley between substations and seen the roped off contaminated areas, and had the whole history explained to me by several of the old timers at the facility. The rest was able to be pieced together from news articles in the Post Dispatch.
For Missouri FReepers, remember the Weldon Springs Ammo Plant Clean-up project from the 90's? If only conventional explosives were being made there during WWII, how come the wooden pipes were radioactively contaminated?
I’m surprised that the article does not seem to call it by its proper name, which is (purposely) less intriguing: “Manhattan Engineering District.”
To elaborate slightly, Enrico Fermi built preliminary sub-critical reactor stacks at Columbia. But Arthur Compton, a physicist with the University of Chicago on the board overseeing wartime atomic research, decided that Fermi should move his work there, including the final "pile" (Fermi's term) which went critical on 2 December, 1942, under the stands of Stagg Field. Their work there was given the cover name "Metallurgical Laboratory."
I don't recall whether they needed enriched Uranium (more than .7% U-235) for the original piles, but they did need Uranium and the Carbon used as a moderator purified to unprecedented levels to avoid reaction-killing impurities.
Meanwhile, Glenn Seaborg, on temporary assignment in Chicago away from his home base in Berkeley, isolated enough Plutonium--in microgram quantities at first--to determine its properties.
This led to the possibility of a Plutonium bomb, after much experimental difficulty. First, the difficult mechanical challenge of a spherically symmetrical implosion had to be met. Second, Plutonium-239 had to be produced in industrial quantities (kilograms) by breeding it in Uranium reactors; first, at Oak Ridge, and then, on a large scale, at Hanford.
Fortuitously, both Uranium (gun-type) and Plutonium (implosion-type) bombs became available at about the same time: July 1945. The builders were so confident of the Uranium Gun design that they made the first "gadget" directly into a deliverable bomb, "Little Boy," and this was the first weapon to be delivered, against Hiroshima on 6 August.
But that was not, of course the first detonation of an A-bomb. Deciding that the Plutonium implosion design really needed to be tested before risking its deployment, they set the first one off on 16 July near Alomogorodo--the legendary "Trinity" test. With that success, they had the second unit, already in the pipeline, made into a bomb and delivered it as "Fat Man" against Nagasaki on 9 August.
Irony clarification: There is evidence that there were previous atomic detonations, a long, long time ago, in India (thus the irony, that he'd quote an Indian text).
I was blessed to be in NM for the Oct. open house at Trinity Site two years ago. What an amazing place. I took my mother who had been a little girl, her daddy gone to war in the Pacific, when “everything changed” in 1945. The open house organizers do a nice job, with some plaques to read and some demonstration tents with docents but nothing more structured than that. They don’t need to - the site speaks for itself. It’s a very still place. The visitors were subdued, there was a sense of reverent respect. Except for one child who started whining, “This is boring. Let’s go home.” I suppose it’s reasonable for an elementary school aged kid not to understand, but I fear he’ll grow up into an adult who’ll never understand. If anyone is in NM the first Saturday in Oct. or April, Trinity Site is worth the drive.
ATOMIC MATERIALS
Beryllium Metals 9,681 lbs. -- $ 10,874.
Cadmium alloys 72,535 lbs. -- $70,029.
Cadmium metals 834,989 lbs. - $71,466.
Cobalt ore & concentrate 33,600 lbs. -- $49,782.
Cobalt metal & cobalt-bearing scrap 806,941 lbs. -- $1,190,774.
Uranium metal 2.2 lbs. - (enriched)
Aluminum Tubes 13,766,472 lbs. -- $13,041,152.
Graphite, natural, flake, lump or chip 7,384,282 lbs. -- $812,437.
Beryllium salts & compounds 228 lbs. -- $775.
Cadmium oxide 2,100 lbs. -- $3,080.
Cadmium salts & compounds, n.e.s. * 2 lbs. -- $19.
Cadmium sulfate 2,170 lbs. -- $1,374.
Cadmium sulfide 16,823 lbs. -- $17,380.
Cobalt nitrate 51 lbs. -- $48.
Cobalt oxide 17,800 lbs. -- $34,832.
Cobalt salts & compounds n.e.s. 11,475 lbs. -- $7,112.
Cobaltic & cobaltous sulfate 22 lbs. -- $25.
Deuterium oxide (heavy water) -- $1,100 grs.
Harry "The Hop" Hopkins, FDR's alter ego, was the Director of the Lend-Lease program at the time. And, known now from the VENONA Project, "The Hop" was Soviet "Agent No. 19."
Note - these material shipments pre-date the Trinity shot by nearly two years.
__________________________________________
I understood the 'super-secret' part to mean that almost nobody knew about it at all at the time. I doubt that even those lower level workers knew that they were working on "The Manhattan Project".
“I think the enrichment took place in TN.”
And Hartford, WA, iirc
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