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adorai posted:Einstein was a signatory to a letter to the president urging the manhatten project. He was pro-nuclear bomb (at the time) but only to the point of beating the nazis to it. This is probably the letter you heard about. A bunch of physicists wrote it when it looked like uranium could be weaponized, Einstein signed it, FDR took it seriously and the Manhattan Project was born. Before that point, nobody would have been in a position to warn Einstein of anything because the first person who thought of making a weapon out of a fission device ran pretty much straight to him and blew his socks off. He would say later that he regretted signing the letter because the Germans, as it turns out, wouldn't have invented the weapon (they never saw its potential and everyone who did was either Jewish or from a country that the Nazis had attacked) so there would have been no need for the US to have done so and a few hundred thousand civilians wouldn't have been set on fire. I personally don't think that would've mattered because Enrico Fermi and Neils Bohr were both somewhat competent physicists in their own right; if he hadn't signed the letter then the people who wrote it probably would've taken it to one of those two guys next. flakeloaf fucked around with this message at 04:17 on Jan 25, 2016 |
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Jan 25, 2016 04:14
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Morbus posted:While Roosevelt took the letter seriously and formed an Advisory Committee to study and keep an eye on things, no real effort was taken towards making a nuclear weapon based on Einstein's letter. About 3 years later, two (Austrian and German born) scientists working in the UK, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, realized that 1.) Uranium that was isotopically enriched to be nearly pure U-235 would allow efficient and powerful nuclear weapons to be made with kilogram quantities of uranium and 2.) the required isotopic separation was technically and most likely economically feasible. In fact, due to the lack of good experimental data at the time, their calculations actually underestimated the critical mass of U-235 and their report indicated that a bomb could be made with just 1 pound of it. This was communicated in a secret memorandum to the government of the UK and eventually US, and it was this memorandum that really lit a fire under everyone's rear end to start working on a bomb. Cool, I never knew that part of it!
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Jan 25, 2016 16:34
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