AdamHWeek10

A quick search of tube alloys shows that it was the code name for the British nuclear bomb program. Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed that they shouldn’t tell the rest of the world how close they were to completing the bomb, insuring that the world wouldn’t try and stop them through an agreement. It solidified the agreement between Britain and the US on research and development of the bomb. They also agreed that precautions had to be taken so Neils Bohr didn’t tell anyone, especially the Russians, about his work. In August 1939 Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the president that there was significant progress being made on nuclear energy and therefore nuclear bombs. He told the president that the US needed to make some changes if they wanted to stay at the front most edges of the research. It seems to me that this letter by Einstein almost directly led to the creation of the Manhattan Project. It centralized all of the research in New Mexico and allowed the government to guard the data and preserve its secrecy. It would have also made the government look to try and secure a good supply of uranium for bomb making. In a sense we have Einstein to thank for the victory in the war, because had he not written a letter to the President, Germany may have developed a bomb first. O. R. Frisch and R. Peierls wrote a memo in March of 1940 on the problems facing the development of the bomb. The first problem faced was how to separate the slow moving particles from the fast ones. When they got the fast ones together, the bomb would go off fast enough to be useful. Another problem faced was how to get the particles together but not together, in order to make a bomb. They realized that they would have to be very careful so that it didn’t explode in the lab. Frisch and Peierls realized the immense danger of the radiation from the bomb. They realized nothing could protect anyone from the radiation and that it would linger on after the bomb had dissipated. A great example of this is Chernobyl. Even though it was not a bomb but rather a meltdown of a nuclear reactor it is the same issue. For years after the meltdown, animals were being deformed from radiation poisoning. All the scientist realized the enormous implications of their work and tried to protect and warn the world of the danger.