Related papers: Thirty Minutes Before the Dawn -- Trinity
This article is set during the 1944 and 1945 final push to complete Project Y -- the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos -- and focuses primarily on overcoming the challenge of creating and demonstrating a successful convergent explosive…
On July 16, 1945, the Trinity nuclear test exploded in the desert near Alamogordo, NM. A variety of new diagnostic experiments were fielded in an effort to understand the detailed performance of the nuclear device. This article describes a…
The atomic bomb uses fission of heavy elements to produce a large amount of energy. It was designed and deployed during World War II by the United States military. The first test of an atomic bomb occurred in July of 1945 in New Mexico and…
One hundred and one atmospheric nuclear weapon tests were conducted between 1945 and 1962 in the United States, resulting in widespread dispersion of radioactive fallout, and leading to environmental contamination and population exposures.…
The Christy Gadget is the informal name for the plutonium device detonated in the Trinity test on July 16, 1945. In September 1944, Robert Christy, working in the theoretical implosion group, proposed a novel concept that altered the design…
This article addresses shortcomings in the existing secondary literature describing the nature and involvement of computing at the World War II Los Alamos Lab. Utilizing rarely used source materials, and identifying points of bias among…
The atomic bomb American program known as Manhattan Project has been studied in detail. Historians argue that the beginning of this program is rooted in the letter Einstein sent to American President Roosevelt in the summer of 1939. This…
In 1943 fear that the German war machine might use atomic bombs was abating and among physicists another fear was taking its place - that of a postwar nuclear arms race with worldwide proliferation of nuclear weapons. Manhattan Project…
We describe the wartime challenges associated with the rapid developments in plutonium chemistry and metallurgy that were necessary to produce the core of the Trinity Device. Beginning with microgram quantities of plutonium metal late in…
In this article, I trace the early historical developments that ultimately led to the creation of the atomic bomb. Even after the completion of weapons, many scientists continued to argue that nuclear armaments were indispensable for…
A collection of articles reviewing Trinity on its 75th anniversary.
Nuclear physics advances in the US and Britain, from 1939-1945, are described. The Manhattan Project's work led to an explosion in our knowledge of nuclear science. A conference in April 1943 at Los Alamos provided a simple formula used to…
The hydrodynamic response of materials under extreme conditions of pressure, temperature and strain is dependent on the equation of state of the matter in all its states of existence. The Trinity plutonium implosion device development…
New measurement and assessment techniques have been applied to the radiochemical re-evaluation of the Trinity Event. Thirteen trinitite samples were dissolved and analyzed using a combination of traditional decay counting methods and the…
Criticality experiments with $^{235}$U (metal and hydride) and $^{239}$Pu (metal) were performed during the Manhattan Project. Results from these experiments provided necessary information for the success of the Manhattan Project. These…
We describe the earliest measurements of the DT fusion cross section commissioned by the Manhattan Project, first at Purdue University in 1943 and then at Los Alamos 1945-6 and later, in 1951-2. The Los Alamos measurements led to the…
A personal account of work on the Manhattan Project in Chicago by one of the few remaining survivors of the war-time project is given, illustrating, among other things, how absurd things can happen at a time of great stress and concern.. As…
The Manhattan Project was one of the largest scientific collaborations ever undertaken. It operated thanks to a complex social network of extraordinary minds and it became undoubtedly one of the most remarkable intellectual efforts of human…
A concise point kinetic model of the explosion of a prompt supercritical sphere driven by a nuclear fission chain reaction is presented. The findings are in good agreement with the data available for Trinity, the first detonation of a…
We propose and analyze experiments to test distinguishability and determinism in atoms. As a first step, we consider experiments to test if atoms are distinguishable from each other due to small differences in the nuclear magnetic moment.…