Quote:
Originally Posted by GB SISSON
Half way through it and loving it. Earlier this year I read 'Killing the Rising Sun'. That was great too. The good guys won.
|
Yep I agree but what was left of the bad guys ended up with booming economies thanks to the generosity of the good guys rebuilding them afterwards ( The Marshall Plan)
The making of the Atomic Bomb is fascinating . Essentially they threw money at the problem till they solved it. An example is that they needed to purify the Uranium 235 one way of doing this is through gas diffusion through a membrane (there are others like the cyclotron and they used those as well) Uranium hexofluaride gas is very corrosive They didn't know if they could make a membrane or if they could make a pump that would work but they knew if they did they would need power for the pumps so they build a power station first - not knowing if they could even solve the other problems (which they did)
I was reading up about Little Boy last night - It had 64kg of uranium in it of which only 1kg fissioned and only 0.6 of gram was converted in to kinetic and heat energy -All that blast apparently came from 0. 6 grams of material -I find that incomprehensible ! Karl