”Uranium! Uranium! Uranium!” A voice shouted out into the night from the second floor of a dormitory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It was 6 August 1945. That day, President Harry S Truman had announced to the world that the US had dropped a new weapon, a uranium bomb, on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. For years, those of us on the bomb project were cautioned not to say the word uranium, but now it was okay. There were code words and code letters for the things we worked with, and each of our new designs received a new name. The teletype messages that went back and forth between the radiation laboratory in Berkeley, California, and the Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge were total gibberish. The purpose of our effort was to separate “P,” or 235U from “Q,” or 238U. Those were easy to remember because P stood for...
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1 May 2005
May 01 2005
The Uranium Bomb, the Calutron, and the Space-Charge Problem
A participating scientist relates the story of a World War II project dedicated to electromagnetically separating uranium-235 from uranium-238.
Physics Today 58 (5), 45–51 (2005);