Atomic bomb supply

The British had proceeded less expeditiously. The Chiefs of Staff advised in October 1945 that the best defence against atomic bombs was likely to be the deterrent effect that the possession of the means of retaliation would have on a potential aggressor, and in January 1946 they said that a stock in the order of hundreds rather than scores would be necessary to deter a country with widely dispersed industries and population (like the Soviet Union). In December 1945, ministers in the Gen 75 committee approved the construction of the first reactor capable of producing plutonium, and in August 1946 the CAS sent the first requisition for an atomic bomb to the Ministry of Supply. The McMahon Act was amended in October 1950 to allow rather more cooperation between American and British scientists but the first British test did not take place until 3 October 1952, in the hold of a ship off Australia. The first test of a British atomic bomb dropped by an aircraft did not occur until 11 October 1956. 

Uranium is the essential ore in the production of the weapon and steps have been taken and will continue to be taken to ensure adequate supplies of this mineral. The series of discoveries which led to development of the atomic bomb started at the turn of the century when radioactivity became known to science. Prior to 1939 the scientific work in this field was worldwide, but more particularly in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Denmark. One of Denmark s great scientists. Dr. Niels Bohr, a Nobel Prize winner, was whisked from the grasp of the Nazis in his occupied homeland and later assisted in developing the atomic bomb. 

The idea of bringing a country to its knees by inducing wholesale starvation was not original. The British, for example, had used a naval blockade against the Germans in the First World War with just such an intention. But, as the authors of the post-war paper pointed out, here was a weapon which would be more speedy than blockade and less repugnant than the atomic bomb . They also foresaw ... their possible use for the purposes of internal security within the Empire, e.g. for the destruction of food supplies of dissident tribes in order to control an area. ., 67... 

A second Welsh chemical warfare establishment was at Rhy-dymwyn, near Mold in Clwyd. Here, the Ministry of Supply built a gas factory which was joined, in 1942., by an even more secret installation an isotope-separation plant, part of the British project to create an atom bomb. The atomic plant employed over one hundred people, supervised by twenty Oxford scientists from the Clarendon Laboratory. Employees from one site were not allowed into the other, but as workers at both had to carry gas masks it was assumed by the local inhabitants that they were all engaged on the same project this, it was rumoured, was a scheme to manufacture synthetic rubber. 

The capture of this material, which was the bulk of uranium supplies available in Europe, would seem to remove definitely any possibility of the Germans making use of an atomic bomb in this war. 

In addition. Nuclear Changes and Nuclear Power (Chapter 4 in the third edition) has been moved to follow Chapter 12 (Energy and Hydrocarbons) since the major focus of the chapter is on nuclear power and its beneficial uses, as opposed to history and the atomic bomb. This placement logically follows a discussion of the use of fossil fuels and the problems associated with their diminishing supply. It also reinforces atomic concepts and encourages students to think about atoms in some detail again later in the semester as they prepare for a final examination. 

By the time Truman took office, Japan was near defeat. American aircraft were attacking Japanese cities at will. A single firebomb raid in March killed nearly 100,000 people and injured over a million in Tokyo. A second air attack on Tokyo in May Idlled 83,000. Meanwhile, the United States Navy had cut the islands supply lines. But because of the generally accepted view that the Japanese would fight to Ae bitter end, a costly invasion of the home islands seemed likely, though some American policy makers held that successful combat delivery of one or more atomic bombs might convince the Japanese that further resistance was futile. 

Breeder reactors can extend the supply of fissionable fuels for many many years, and they re currently being used in France. But the United States is moving slowly with the construction of breeder reactors because of several problems associated with them. First, they re extremely expensive to build. Second, they produce large amounts of nuclear wastes. And, finally, the plutonium that s produced is much more hazardous to handle than uranium and can easily be used in an atomic bomb. 

As Einstein s remarks illustrated, the atomic era was serious business. No incident exemplified the fear of an atomic arms race more than the revelation that during the 1940s two Americans, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, headed a spy ring that had stolen scientific documents from the Los Alamos laboratory and supplied them to the Soviets, evidently helping the Soviets develop the atomic bomb. In 1951 the Rosenbergs were tried and convicted of espionage they were executed two years later. 

That is the advantage of fission. Its drawback is the deadly radioactivity it generates, particles whose mass, from one type of reactor, is almost equal to the mass of the fuel consumed. Waste from a fission reactor typically requires thousands of years before it breaks down into biologically safe levels. Fission reactors are also relatively inefficient. They can use but a single isotope (atoms of an element that have the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons) of uranium, U-235, which makes up less than 1 percent of natural uranium ore. (More than 99 percent of natural uranium is nonfissionable U-238.) So-called fast breeder reactors might overcome the supply limitation by breeding fissionable fuel from U-238. But the fuel it produces from the uranium is plutonium, the same stuff that was inside the Nagasaki bomb—not an ideal by-product in a politically unstable world. 

One nuclear reaction seems to fill the bill fusion. The awesome process that powers the sun and the stars, and the hydrogen bomb, fusion occurs when the nuclei of smaller, lighter atoms are squeezed together—fused—under intense heat to form larger, heavier, and more stable nuclei. The reaction produces enormous bursts of energy which, if controlled and made self-sustaining, could provide a virtually unlimited supply of power from so innocuous and plentiful a source as seawater, and do it far more safely than the fission process. 

Fusion reactions are accompanied by even greater energy production per unit mass of reacting atoms than are fission reactions. They can be initiated only by extremely high temperatures, however. The fusion of H and occurs at the lowest temperature of any fusion reaction known, but even this is 40,000,000 K Such temperatures exist in the sun and other stars, but they are nearly impossible to achieve and contain on earth. Thermonuclear bombs (called fusion bombs or hydrogen bombs) of incredible energy have been detonated in tests but, thankfully, never in war. In them the necessary activation energy is supplied by the explosion of a fission bomb. 

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