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20th Century Nuclear Secrets and Atomic Bomb History Trinity and the Manhattan Project--People Events Technology Uranium Plutonium Hiroshima Nagasaki Cold War Author:U.S. Government This up-to-date and comprehensive electronic book on CD-ROM presents an incredible collection of important documents, reports, and publications from the federal government about the Manhattan Project and the history of the atomic bomb, with extraordinary material on America's nuclear weapons program. Journalists and the public have ranked the... more » dropping of the atomic bomb and the end of the Second World War as the top news stories of the twentieth-century. The advent of nuclear weapons, made possible by the Manhattan Project, not only helped bring an end to the Second World War -- it ushered in the atomic age and determined how the next war, the Cold War, would be fought. Momentous events documented in this collection included: 1890s-1939: Atomic Discoveries * 1939-1942: Early Government Support * 1942: Difficult Choices * More Uranium Research, 1942 * More Piles and Plutonium, 1942 * Enter the Army, 1942 * Groves and the MED, 1942 * Picking Horses, November 1942 * Final Approval to Build the Bomb, December 1942 * 1942-1944: The Uranium Path to the Bomb * Y-12: Design, 1942-1943 * Y-12: Construction, 1943 * Y-12: Operation, 1943-1944 * Working K-25 into the Mix, 1943-1944 * The Navy and Thermal Diffusion * 1942-1944: The Plutonium Path to the Bomb * Production Reactor (Pile) Design, 1942 * DuPont and Hanford, 1942 * CP-1 Goes Critical, December 2, 1942 * Seaborg and Plutonium Chemistry, 1942 ? 1944 * Final Reactor Design and X-10, 1942-1943 * Hanford Becomes Operational, 1943-1944 * 1945: Dawn of the Atomic Era * The War Enters Its Final Phase, 1945 * Debate Over How to Use the Bomb, Late Spring 1945 * The Trinity Test, July 16, 1945 * Safety and the Trinity Test, July 1945 * Potsdam and the Final Decision to Use the Bomb, July 1945 * The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945 * The Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki, August 9, 1945* Negotiating International Control, 1945-1946 * Civilian Control of Atomic Energy, 1945-1946 * Operation Crossroads, July 1946 * The VENONA Intercepts, 1946-1980 * The Cold War, 1945-1990 * Nuclear Proliferation, 1949-present There is extensive coverage of every aspect of the atomic weaponry program, with archives of historic documents and previously classified files. The Nevada Test Site and nuclear testing program is covered, along with the factories and facilities used in the development program and subsequent bomb production. There is a full history of the Trinity test explosion. At 5:29:45 am Mountain War Time on July 16, 1945, the world's first atomic bomb exploded one hundred feet over a portion of the southern New Mexico desert known as the Jornada del Muerto ? the Journey of the Dead Man. On seeing the fireball and mushroom cloud, J. Robert Oppenheimer recalled a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita: "I am become death the destroyer of worlds." In the first months of operations at Los Alamos in the spring of 1943, Oppenheimer and others believed that the first atomic bomb would be a gun that would shoot one piece of uranium or plutonium at a second piece of identical material. When the two pieces came together, a nuclear explosion would take place. From April 1943 until mid-summer 1944, almost all work at Los Alamos centered on designing and building such a gun. Experiments directed by future Nobel Prize winner Emilio Segre, however, demonstrated that plutonium could not be used in a gun. Impurities in the metal, which could not be removed, would cause a fizzle. It seemed, for a short time, that plutonium could not be used to make an atomic bomb. Because of serious problems in producing uranium, the plutonium problem put the entire atomic bomb program at risk. The technical solution to this problem lay in the use of high explosives. Seth Neddermeyer proposed using the supersonic shock waves produced by high explosives to crush, or implode, a ball of plutonium to a supercritical state. If a ball of plutonium could be imploded symmetrically to a supercritical state, a nuclear explosion would f« less
