TechStuff Classic: The Manhattan Project Part One

episode to talk about the Manhattan Project. We really get into the physics in this one. Hope you enjoy. I don't want to disparage the gravity of what we're doing anything less than a few tangents or puns in this story, because this is a fascinating story. It's a fascinating story, and and you can't get around the fact that the end of the story is massively tragic, right like, like, there's there's a ton of things that we can talk about, and what we are talking about is the Manhattan Project.

And I'm gonna go ahead and let you guys know, this sucker is going to be a two parter because in order to cover the Manhattan Project. You have to have an understanding of what was going on in physics leading up to the beginning of the project, which will be this episode, and then there's another episode that will be all about the actual developments of the project itself. And this is complicated for multiple reasons. One, nuclear physics

not straightforward as it turns out. Yeah, actually lots of pressure because of the implosion technique, but we'll get into that in episode two. Also politics, a lot of politics. I mean, obviously, the Manhattan Project was formed as a result of World War Two. If World War Two had not been happening, the Manhattan Project probably would not have been formed, and nuclear power may have either been pushed back by quite a bit or someone else would have

ended up developing it ahead of the United States. So both of those things. Science and politics by themselves are complex, and when you combine the two and you try to make science work within the realm of a political structure, it gets messy. Yeah, and not not in like a cool I got my hair cut at a nice salon, Look at me. Messy. No, not like rolled out of bed. Oh this didn't take me any time at all, right, messy as in uh is a massive loss of blood

and treasure. I think we're looking at the equivalent of when it got rolling thirty billion dollars you you know, in money. All yeah, today's money. It all depends upon the well, it really depends upon how you define the scope of the project. Because that's something else that's kind of confusing, because you hear Manhattan Project and you think, okay, uh, Manhattan Project, that's the one that took place in oak Ridge, Tennessee, Hanford, Washington,

Los Alamos, New Mexico. Makes sense. We will explain all of that as we go through. So in case you weren't aware, the Manhattan Project was the code named the United States government gave to the the effort to design and build an atomic bomb for use in World War two. And in order for us to talk about we have to go back way before World War two. In fact,

we have to go back before World War One. Yes, yeah, we have to go all the way back to the I guess the end of the nineteenth century, that is correct, late nineteenth century. Uh, there was a fella by the name of Henrie Beccarell alright, who had made an interesting observation observing that some material when placed against some plates

would create a negative image. And he had assumed that this material was phosphorescent, that it absorbed light and then given off some form of ray to create this image, but later determined that he was mistaken, that there was no need for the sunlight. The stuff was giving off the rays by itself. And then you had the Curies coming along, who who went on to study this themselves. Marie Cury coined the term radioactive radioactive with the word

ray in it. And so at this point there was an understanding that certain elements had a type of energy they could give off spontaneously, spontaneous radiation. And that is the beginning the nub, that the kernel that forms the the very center of the Manhattan Project's purpose. So building on that we then have there's a guy in Nive. He had a little theory. It was a special theory, I mean relatively special man. Yes, yes, And that that

man you may know today through countless Internet memes Albert Einstein. Yes, yes, Albert Einstein, al to his friends, was a brilliant physicist, obviously, and it was all the way back in n when Einstein proposed the special theory of relativity, which, among many other things, positive that energy and matter are pretty much interchangeable. And this is where the the famous equation E equals MC squared comes from. The E means energy, the M means mass. The C squared C stands for the constant

of the speed of light through a vacuum. Keeping in mind that light actually can travel at different speeds depending upon the medium through which it travels. Travels more slowly through water than through a vacuum, for example. So you take that constant of lights the speed of light in a vacuum, and you square it, so a number that's already huge gets huger. That huge number, by the way, in case you're wondering, is two hundred fifty eight meters

per second. Squaring that you get eight point nine nine times ten to the sixteen power. It's a big number. So what that tells you if you look at that equation, what that tells you is that a very tiny amount of mass is equivalent to an enormous amount of energy, and vice versa, an enormous amount of energy is equivalent

to a teeny tiny little bit of mass. So if you were to have a physical process in which you start with an atom and you split that atom and the two components of that split atom collectively have less mass than the original atom. You can't destroy or create energy or mass, but you can convert one to the other. That mask gets converted into energy, essentially kinetic energy, which gets convered into heat, and then you get a whole bunch of heat from it. Yeah, that's what Einstein had said.

He says, this is this is the way the universe works. Energy and mass ultimately the same thing. And then there were if I recall, there were three broad historical reactions. Some people said nah, some people said maybe a lot of people went oh, yeah, exactly. Yeah, And and so this really uh, you know, we're gonna be talking about

a lot about two different types of scientists. Theoretical scientists not they're not theoretical, they work in the realm of theory, and experimental scientists who take theory apply experiments to test those theories and then find out if the results either bear the theorial or it needs to be tweaked or whatever. Right, So, uh. In nineteen eleven we get another important development by discovery

by the fellow named Ernest Rutherford. Now, Rutherford proposes a model of the atom in which you have a nucleus of positive particles which are dubbed protons, and they're orbited by negatively charged particles dubbed electrons. That's the Rutherford model of the atom. And it's the simplest version question. Yes, just just for you and the audience. I'm sure a lot of people have wondered this when they were learning this.

When I can go with no trons, no tron's I mean, this sounds so much cooler because he was pro it's a positive thing. Well, they're like protons, electrons, protons, no trons. Oh, I got you. But being being negative, those would be the no trons. Well, because electrons are the agent through which electricity is you know, it's a matter of priority

and that transcends a matter of marketing. But I'm saying we could even go back to the fact that Benjamin Franklin was convinced that current means that that's the movement of positively charged particles from one point to the other, which is why current flows in the opposite direction of

actual electricity, which, by the way, drives me crazy. You've talked about it before, and which, by the way, I think we could cut to the end of the show because this means clearly that nuclear weapons are should be the blame for those should be laid at the at the field of Benjamin Franklin, like so many things. Bad guy. But anyway, Yeah, so Ernest Rutherford, So he discovers this, He creates this model, and then Neil's Bore, another important physicist.

He refines that model. He starts to concentrate on the quantum behavior of electrons, and that's where we get the Bore model of Adams. And then I'm going to skip ahead to nineteen nineteen, and that's when Rutherford transmutes nitrogen into oxygen. This is something that alchemists had been attempting to do for centuries, although their form of transportation was more about lead into gold. Sure, sure, or the Philosopher's stone or whatever. But this is an actual transmutation. This

is a point where Rutherford uh crosses. I don't want to say it as though he's like doing something bad, but where he where he goes from just a theory to the application the way we're talking about demonstrating it in the real world. And uh, this triggers even more

changes in our timeline. Right. So the way he does this is he takes some nitrogen atoms and he bombards them with something called alpha particles and alpha particles essentially, although he didn't know this yet, an alpha particle is essentially to protons and two neutrons, also known as a heli helium nucleus. So if you use a helium nucleus, if you strip away the electrons, what you're left with is essentially an alpha particle. And he bobards these nitrogen

adoms with that. That's what converts it over into oxygen. So then we skip ahead by a couple of decades. Are well a little more than a decade to two. Yes, this is when James Chadwick, was one of Rutherford's colleagues, discovers the nucleus of an atom can by the way, two big year in physics. Yeah, so he discovers that the nucleus of an atom can also contain particles that have no charge at all, hanging out. They're just they're they're they're kind of like that roommate I used to have,

who you know. I felt like, come on, dude, just just pay your part of the utilities already. Come on. I'm sorry. I wasn't gonna be so yeah, these are these are neutral. That's that's the neutrons. And by this time there was an understanding now that the atoms typically consisted of protons and neutrons, and the nucleus and orbited by a number of electrons that were equal to the number of protons, and that's what balances out the charge.

There's a but oh, let's infommercial it. But wait, there's more. There is more. Two things that you can you can talk about, one which is really important in nuclear physics, and one which is not going to really play a part. One of the that being that if you have an atom that has an excess or of electrons or too few electrons, it's an UH. It's an ion of that particular atom. But you can also have a different number

of neutrons from the protons. You can have a variety of them, and we call these different varieties of these various atoms isotopes. So an isotope of an atom is UH is a version of that atom that has a specific number of neutrons. So that's important to remember now. At the time when Chadwick made this discovery, hydrogen was the the the lightest, the least massive of all the elements at one and the heaviest or the one with

the most mass, was uranium at ninety two. That number refers to the number of protons in the atom, not the number of neutrons. So chemists had discovered that the atoms of the of the same elements sometimes had different weights. This is what led to the discovery of isotopes. So they'd say, oh, well, here's a uranium atom, but we've got this other uranium atom and they they're chemically identical. They're exactly the same chemically, but this other one is

a little heavier than this one. So what is what? That doesn't make sense, and that's where they discovered isotopes. So uranium has three isotopes. All of them have ninety two protons and ninety two electrons, because if they didn't, it wouldn't be uranium. But it does have a different number of neutrons. So you've got uranium two three eight. That's the most common form of uranium found in nature. U It has a hundred forty six neutrons in the

nucleus and it's nine. It makes all natural uranium. So when you when you go uranium hunting, odds are you going to find? You two thirty eight. Then you have uranium two thirty five which has a hundred forty three neutrons, and uranium two thirty four, which has at two neutrons. And you two thirty five will become incredibly important in this DISCUSSI and you two thirty four is one of

the decay products. Right. So, also in ninety two going on at the same time, you had physicists J. D. Crocroft and E. T. S. Walton split a lithium atom into two helium nuclei. Uh, the the protons and neutrons I was talking about, by bombarding the lithium with protons using a particle accelerator. And this is the first example of someone splitting the atom the very first time. Yeah, it is. In my opinion, this is up there with

the first human footfall on the move. Ye. This fundamentally changes everything, and it's strange that we don't hear more people talk about it. Yeah, a lot of people will talk about the early work in nuclear fission, which we will get to, which happened in a place that precipitated the need from men on projects. So in California two same time as everything else, you had a group with Ernest oh Lawrence, who will be incredibly important in this conversation.

Stanley Livingston and Milton White who operated the first cyclotron on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, and Lawrence would end up playing an instrumental role in the Manhattan Project. Yeah. No, for everyone who's wondering a cyclotron, it was a particle accelerator, right right. It was this is the era where we start getting the earliest particle accelerators. The Vandergraf would build one as well, in a different style. Uh. And Lawrence was was working on this early and not

with the goal of nuclear fission necessarily. It was part of particle physics to understand more about the fundamental particles that make up all the stuff around us. Uh. And it ultimately would end up being used to help create the material real for nuclear weapons, but at the time no one had any concept of doing that. Three. There were some early attempts to find a reliable way to

split atoms, but they're largely unsuccessful or very inefficient. They require huge amounts of power, and I'll tell you why. Most of them used protons fired at an atomic nucleus. So here's the thing. Protons have a positive charge. Correct atomic nucleus also has a positive charge because it's only made up of protons and neutrons, so we have positive and positive So what happens if you put two ends, like two northern ends of two different magnets together hate

each other. Yeah, they do. It's uh, you know a lot like me and Josh Clark, we just despite the fact we sit right next to each other, there's just this repulsion. It's the other one. It's kind of amazing, Like, you know, like if I start walking towards Josh's chair just rolls the other way. Now Josh and I get along just time. Obviously he was just recently on the tech stuff, so um. But yeah, it was really hard to get a direct hit on a nucleus because of

this these light charges repelling one another. In fact, there were some estimates that said that it only happened one every one million tries non efficient way to split at him. So while people were starting to think there might be a way of getting some energy from this, like to use this as a means of generating power or perhaps even creating a weapon down the line, the efficiency was so low that it didn't seem like it was going to be uh A viable exactly, Like it's a good

proof of concept. Yeah, So Albert Einstein, niels Bore, and Rutherford all felt that the process would be great for getting a better understanding of nuclear physics, but would remain impractical for pretty much anything else. Now, Rutherford actually described the idea of harnessing nuclear inner g as moonshine. That

was what he called it. Einstein his version was saying, it's like the ability to get a proton to to collide with the nucleus would be akin to walking into an enormous room that's pitch black and shooting at a couple of birds flying around randomly through the right. Yeah, that was his his comparison. And then no way to make it not an accident, right, and heels Bore said, it's pretty much a long shot unless we figure out

something else. And then you had another fellow, a Hungarian physicist who was living in the United States, Leo sciss Lard, and sciss Lard hypothesized that if you use something else, not protons, what have you used a beam of neutrons aimed at an atom, Because neutrons have no charge, so

there's no repulstion there. Yeah, The only thing is that how do you shoot a non charged particle, Because if you're using protons, then all you can do, all you have to do is created a positive charge to repel it or a negative charge to attract it and move it that way, but a neutral one is a little trickier. Um But he thought if you could do this, and if the atom was large enough where it had its own neutrons, sometimes when that atom splits up, it might

give off neutrons too. And if it gives off neutrons with enough energy and you have enough atoms there, those neutrons could collide with other atoms, which could cause them to break apart, and those neutrons could go out and hit other atoms, and each time you would be multiplying

this effect. As long as you had more than one neutron being given off and as long as those were colliding with some other atoms, this trend would continue until you were out of stuff or the neutrons or therere just weren't enough atoms for the neutrons to make contact, and you would get a nuclear chain reaction which you could use to either power or a city or blow

one up. Yes, yes, at that point they you know, the next question and becomes like, well, yes, at that point, the next question becomes a matter of control, because you know, it's all well and good from an academic perspective to say, oh, guys, look at this neat thing that we think we can do. And then you know, for someone to say, okay, well let's let's try it. Let's get the rubber on the road, and then what do you think is going to happen? And they say, well, one or two things. It's either

going to power the city or blow it up. But we're pretty confident it's going to be one of those two. So the next question is like, how do you make this use right? And and for Leo, I'm gonna call Leo because I'm just gonna Putcher his last name off otherwise the Hungarian physicist. Uh. For Leo, the problem was that when he was first trying this out, he was using lighter atoms and he couldn't get these sustained reactions, so he kind of he kind of thought, well, I

guess that's a bust. It's like a good idea, but it's not working. So so so there it became an academic question for a while because there was, they weren't. He wasn't using the heavier atoms, which would have created a sustainable reaction, would have been dense enough to have that impact. They don't decay in the same way that other other ones might just take on the neutron, they wouldn't split apart. In other words, we'll be back with more of this classic episode of tech stuff after this

quick break. So moving on with four, we get another fellow who becomes very important in Manhattan Project, Enrico Fermi, an Italian physicist. He begins to use neutrons to bobard atoms, and he figured the uncharged particles wouldn't meet that same resistance as protons, just as Leo had. He was right. He bombarded sixty three different stable elements with neutrons and

created thirty seven new radioactive atoms. And he also found out that if he used urban and hydrogen, he could actually slow the movement of the neutrons a little bit, and that would actually increase the chances of a nucleus accepting a new neutron. So you wanted to fire the neutrons fast, but not too fast. You had you had to control that. So he then bombarded uranium with neutrons had created something, but he had no idea what it was. In fact, no one was really sure at the time.

There was a lot of disagreement in the scientific community about whatever for Me had made because it was new, and because it was new, they didn't know, right. So, Yeah, so they were wondering if it was transuranic, as in a man made element that would not be found in nature, or if for Me had somehow managed to split up uranium so that behave like lighter elements, because some of the stuff that was left over it seemed really similar to lighter elements on the elemental table, But how could

that be magic? Yeah, and it's fine because he had actually achieved nuclear fission but did not know it. He didn't he didn't understand it enough to know that that's what had happened at the time. And that takes us to thirty eight. And this is the event that really creates the need for the Manhattan Project because it takes place in Berlin. Now, nineteen thirty eight. In Berlin, it

was already a very tumultuous time in Europe, right. World War two had not yet begun, but Germany had started to really cause huge problems, including UH cracking down on the Jewish population already UH, and it was you know, the whole Germany Austrian alliance was was an issue. And then there were rumblings about Germany possibly invading other countries. And then this was also spreading to you know, Italy as well. Yes, Italy was also invading African nations at

the time. So this was really a tumultuous period. So in Berlin, UH, Germany was a place where there where particle physics, theoretical physics had really blossomed at the end of the nineteenth century beginning of the twentieth century, and you had a collection of scientists who all were just interested in furthering our understanding of the universe. They just happened to be in a place where that understanding was going to be UH tilted toward the ends of the

German government. So radiochemists Auto Han and Fritz Strassman, we're using firms method of bombarding atoms with neutrons, and they found that uranium nuclei, unlike other nuclei, didn't just absorb the neutrons. They broke apart into two more or less equal pieces. They became fragments of uranium and radioactive barrium isotopes, which explained why some of the substances from firms experi ements resembled lighter elements because they were they were Merriam.

So that was the the scientific explanation of what was going on with Firm and firm. He's like, hum, that's interesting. Um. What's also interesting is that this information, because you know, it also released some energy. Uh. This information was examined by Lease Mightener and her nephew Otto Frish Uh. Mightener was a Jewish exile. She had fled Austria and was living in Sweden and was working with Han and Strassmann

through correspondence. UM and she and Fresh looked at the results of the experiments and concluded that they released an enormous amount of energy and that this marked a new type of process, which was explained by the equals MC squared equation. So again we see a physical proof of a theoretical proposition. Right, and this also started bring a light. Hey,

maybe we should really take that Einstein equation thing really seriously. Um. So Fresh was the one who called the process fission that's where we get nuclear fission was from Otto Frisha's description of the of this. He was taking um inspiration from biological processes and cell division, so that's where he

came up with fission. And just to just to interject not too much of the political landscape, but I do think it's important to note a big thing Hack happened to firm me in thirty eight as well, And why don't you tell me about that? Well, in he left Italy to uh receive his Nobel Prize in physics, which is, uh, you know, it's a pretty good deal. It's like when you get that tenth stamp on your subway card. Oh. I was thinking, like, you finally get that star on

the on the Walk of Fame. Yeah, yeah, you finally get the star, which I think I don't remember which subway stamp that is. No, it's it's like, I think you've got to go like at least twelve times. Oh, Mick,

come on, that's a commitment anyway. Well, somehow I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's because he was a genius, uh, and the based on his discoveries for me, leaves Italy to receive the Nobel Prize, and he never returns because you know at the time, as you know to your earlier point, the situation in Europe is at a slow boil, and especially if you are Jewish, as firm he is, this is uh, this is a time where you can, like legois, smell a

fell wind. Yeah, there's actually there's a I mean, if you and I'm sure I know I've talked about this in a previous episode. I can't remember what the subject was, but I remember specifically talking about um uh German scientists, German and Austrian scientists who fled Europe in advance of the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. UH, and then some who stuck around believing that things would get better, only to find out that in fact was not the case.

And how despite their brilliance and their contributions to science, because of their their heritage, they were treated, they were they were pulled away from their work, some of them, of them were imprisoned. Um. And of course there's a whole other story we could talk about with the United States liberating certain scientists to work for them instead of for the Nazis. That might be it would be a little bit of Yeah, that is definitely a different too far.

That's actually more in rocketry than it is with the man. But at any rate, so nine our buddy Leo. He realizes the work by Han and Strassmann could be the answer to his failures to produce a nuclear chain reaction, and that uranium would be heavy enough and commit neutrons at an energy great enough to cause a split in another atom. So if you had enough uranium, you could presumably create a nuclear chain reaction that way. Uh So this is this renews his interest in the possibility of

creating one of these. Um. He actually asked that for me and Frederick Jolie Currie refrain from publishing their findings. He asks them not to publish them because since he's made this realization that a nuclear chain reaction could be possible, his fear is that if they publish their findings, the Nazis will hear about it, and because the initial study was done in Berlin, they could end up putting this on the fast track to developing a weapons program, which

would change the course of the war. Yeah, which keep in mind, this is when the war officially begins, right when you know, when the World War two start, Well, people would say that's when Germany invaded Poland, and that's that happens in the nine. So he asks them not to publish their findings now for me, says okay and holds off. But Curie goes ahead and publishes his work

in April ninety nine. So it turns out those concerns were warranted to Leo turns to the the rock star of rock stars, because keep in mind, this is an era when scientists had a certain prestige among the public. I mean, this is the era of people like Tesla making headlines and Edison, and meanwhile you've got other scientists and engineers who are capturing the imagination of hundreds of

thousands of people. He turns to the most influential of them all, good old Einstein, and Leo says to al listen here, bat Bubby, Uh that equation you made awesome, turns out your right problem. Now we know how to make a practical application of that. Potentially it's gonna take some years, but the juryman's are already aware of this. And you know how bad the Germans can be. We're having this conversation not in Germany. And when I say Germans,

obviously I'm talking about the Nazi Party. I have nothing against Germans at any rate. So he says, we need to convince the United States government that we have to get on this right now, because if we don't, they will, and then that's just going to be domination for Germany. And so Einstein, convinced by Leo, decides to write a

letter to President Roosevelt FDR not not Teddy. So he writes a letter to Roosevelt and expresses their concerns about the possibility of a nuclear weapon program starting in Germany and arguing that, uh, the United States really has to take that endo consideration. Uh. The letter is sent in August nineteen nine, and on September one, nineteen thirty nine, Germany invades Poland. World War two begins officially because that's when you get other nations in Europe declaring war against Germany.

So Roosevelt has a meeting with his close friend and unofficial advisor, Alexander Sachs, who's not a politician, he's a financial advisor type. Saxon Roosevelt sit down and on October eleventh, nineteen thirty nine, they talk about Einstein's letter. On October nineteenth, Roosevelt writes back to Einstein and says he has formed a committee made up of representatives from the Army and the Navy plus sacks to research uranium. Yeah, the Advisory

Committee on Uranium headed by Lyman J. Briggs. Yeah, Briggs would become another important figure in this in this story. That has formed officially on October twenty one, nineteen thirty nine. So this happens fast, right, They talked about on the eleventh, on the nineteenth rights back to Einstein. On the twenty one, this new committee meets for the first time. Uh. Briggs, by the way, was the former director of the National

Bureau of Standards. Now you get Faremi and Leo concentrating on using carbon in the form of graphite to slow down neutrons in a pile of you two thirty eight, and by slowing down the neutrons, they hope to increase the chances of a chain reaction. But they discovered that that method would really only be suitable for probably generating power because it would require too large a form factor to make an effective bomb out of it. The uranium didn't react at a level fast enough for it to

be an explosive release of power. Yeah, So Faremi thought the chances of this being useful in a weapon are pretty slim, but it could be a really useful way of generating electricity. Now, meanwhile, uh, if we moved to nineteen forty, physicists were starting to run into a problem. You're two thirty eight was not prone to creating these nuclear chain reactions. They were they were having issues with this, and that's the most common when that's the one that

is of the world's uranium. Right, So here's your stuff, but it don't work. It would be like imagine that you you have, you know, a big battery drawer, and of those batteries have just a little juice in them. They're not enough for you to like, you know, you put them in your RC car and your car just goes. You know, I hate that. But there's another eight percent still out there. Yeah, and some of that is uranium two thirty five, but it's it's usually wrapped up in

you two thirty eight. It's not you know, it's not like you just find little veins of YouTube out there. So John are Dunning observed that uranium two thirty five appeared to be a lot more promising, but only if

you could separate it from you two thirty eight. So now they're they're thinking, well, if there's some way for us to separate these isotopes from two from two thirty eight and concentrate enough to thirty five and one spot, we might be able to create a nuclear reaction chain reaction that is sustainable until a significant amount of that fuel is converted into energy, in which case you would have either a big boom or a sustained power source.

So we're going for the boom. Yes, so without enriching you, two thirty five is pretty much impossible to experiment further, they didn't have a way of doing this, like they figure, well, to thirty five, according to the math, is better. Here's the problem. I don't know how to get the two thirty five out from the two yet right in a way that would come across come up with more than just microscopic amounts of you. And we're talking about the need for kims of the stuff. So it's a problem.

It was also in nineteen forty that the Advisory Committee on Uranium recommended that the government fund research into isotope separation and nuclear chain reactions, which the committee did. So separating two from two thirty five was hard. They're chemically identical. So you can't use chemistry to do it because they're going to react exactly the same way. They're telling Masses differ by less than one per cent, so finding a way of separating them by mass is also a little tricky.

But one of the more promising methods was the electro magnetic method. Now, this meant that you would create a magnetic field generated by a mass spectrometer to separate particles, and essentially you create a magnetic field, and yeah, I had the particles come into contact with a magnetic field. The magnetic field would deflect particles. Particles that had greater mass would be deflected a shorter distance. Yeah, because it

can't push those as far right. So you could do this and deflect those particles, but it wasn't exactly fast. In nineteen forty they estimated that to create a gram of you two thirty five using a mass spectrometer. In this a if you took you two thirty eight and two thirty five together and tried to just get one gram of you two thirty five, it would take you approximately twenty seven thousand years. Not not like not the

ideal time frame. Not if you wanted to respond to escalating aggression in Europe, not not so much twenty seven years. Probably some multiple conflicts would have had that happened and resolved during that time. I think Hitler, who was admittedly an ambitious dude, was only planning on the Reich itself to be like a thousand years. Yeah, so it would have been a pretty it would have been a pretty long long bet. We would have been embarrassingly late to

the party. Yes, So luckily there were other ones too that they were looking into. One of them was Gassiest diffusion, which I have suffered from myself an occasion to say thank you. Gassiest diffusion was that's where you would use a porous barrier and you would use gas that has you two thirty eight and YouTube thirty five atoms in it to pass through this porous barrier. Now, the you too thirty five, being of less mass, would pass more

readily through the barrier. So you would do this once and then the mixture you would have would have a higher concentration of you two thirty five than the previous one did because fewer of the You two thirty eight would have gone through. But then you have to repeat the process, and you repeat the process over and over and over again. It's kind of like passing a solution through a filter, and each pass the filter catches more and more of the stuff you don't want and allows

the stuff you do want to go through. But it's not full proof. That's why you have to keep on doing it. TOSS so again, not terribly efficient. John Dunning focused on that particular method. Then you also had the possibility of using centrifuges. And a centrifuge, you know it essentially it spins around and around and around and use a centrifugal force or tripital force if you prefer, but

centrifical force to to separate out materials. The heavier materials sink to one end, the lighter materials are pushed to the top. So in this case, you two thirty five would be kind of at the top and center of the centrifuge, and the U two three it would be would it sinkle down lower and you would skim it off the top. Centrifuges, however, at the time not terribly reliable. That was headed off by a guy named Jesse W. Beams at the University of Virginia. We've got more to

say in this classic episode of tech stuff. After these quick messages, we're gonna get into the politics. And there's a guy. I have a feeling that he's come up and stuff they don't want you to know. Maybe once or twice. Have you guys ever talked about Vanavar Bush. We have talked about Vanavar Bush. He is a He was an American engineer and inventor. He headed the US

Office of Scientific Research and Development. Yeah. Uh, and he was one of the early uh now, well, okay, he was the go to guy from military R and D at the time in the US. He was also kind of like the liaison between the politicians and the scientists. It's a great way to put it, because he had the analytical scientific mind. He had the chops that would be required from a scientist. Again, like a rock star to respect you. He's incredibly ambitious as well as effective

at maneuvering through different power structures. This guy was like he could get stuff done and no offense to the various stereotypes of scientists. But he probably was better at playing the game of diplomacy. Yeah, you know, because he was he knew he understood how that particular science worked. So he was the president of the Carnegie Foundation, and then was appointed the head of the National Defense Research Committee, which was a voice within the executive branch of government.

And under that the Uranium Committee was reorganized. So the Uranium Committee gets uh kind of a new version, a new yeah, that kind of mission statement. Um And and it also meant that it was no longer organized under the military department, so it didn't have to yeah, I mean,

they could get their funding outside of the military. So instead of the Army or the Navy deciding, all right, we're going to allocate this much of our budget towards uranium research, it was an independent organization underneath this new committee, um so Bush allocated funds to continuing research in nuclear power and weapons. But he made some decisions that ended up um really shaping the direction that the Manhattan Project

would move in. The first decision he made was that no one on the Middy would be allowed to be foreign born. No foreign born scientists would be allowed on the committee. The man Einstein was not part of this party. He also barred the publication of scientific findings on uranium research for an indetermined amount of time because again, like like the the Leo's previous concerns. He didn't want this any know, the discoveries to make their way across into

enemy hands. So now we're getting up to nineteen forty one. World War two is in full swing in Europe. UH. Glen T. S Borg, another important person, identifies element ninety four, a trans uranium or man made element that was produced from radioactive decay of an isotope of neptunium. Neptunium is also a trans uranium element, that's ninety three, So ninety four he gets to name it. I call it plutonium. Yeah.

And he discovers that one of the features of plutonium is that's one point seven times more likely to undergo fission as uranium two thirty five. It loves fission, yeah, to thirty five loves fishing more than two thirty eight. Plutonium loves fission more than uranium two thirty five. So the experiments took place at Ernest Lawrence's radiation laboratory at Berkeley. So Lawrence again very important here. Lawrence personally felt that the Uranium Committee was a little slow, that it was

not responding fast enough, it wasn't funding the research. Uh. And so he met with Van of our Bush and then Bush saw Lawrence as being really persuasive and and influential, so he makes Lawrence an advisor to Briggs. You know, Briggs was the head of that uranium committee. And so once that happens, suddenly the coffers opened up a little bit,

more and more research gets funded. Uh. Vanavar Bush also created a committee to report on the uranium program in the US, and he put Arthur Compton, who was a physicist who specialized in radiation studies, in charge of it. So Compton makes a report in May nineteen forty one and confirmed that either you two thirty five or plutonium were the most likely candidates for some sort of atomic weapon. Yes. Uh. And on June one, the United States establishes the Office

of Scientific Research and Development. This is the one you referred to as Bush being of the head of it. This is when it was officially made a thing. It was officially. Yeah, we we had talked to I think and stuff that I want you to know about about that time, just a few days before this is actually was a few days after the twenty two when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Yes, so yeah, various things are hitting various fans right right. The big one being that

there is a lot of incentive to push this research through. Uh. Meanwhile, James B. Conant, who was president of Harvard became the new head of the National Defense Research Committee, which was now an advisory board that would offer guidance on research and development funding. And guys, we know how not to interject too much, because we know how confusing it can be to hear these very long, dry names of committees.

But part of this, part of all this restructuring you hear about and all these names, it comes because they were desperately trying to find the best way to approach this problem. Uh, simply because can you imagine. Of course there were, of course there were agents from what would become the Allies in in Germany at the time. However,

the level of access they had was no guarantee. The only way to be there was, the only way to know that you would not be the victim of a nuclear bomb or an atomic weapon was to be first past the post. So this stuff is I mean, Jonathan, there were probably some egos involved. No, no, there are tons of egod but I think I think the I think the main thing to remember is that although we

hear all these dry names. What they're really doing is desperately and it does that work correctly, Desperately trying to find the way to get massive amounts of funding because they already know it's going to be an expensive service. Well that and and at this stage in we're still talking theory, we're still we're still saying that they're saying, if such a thing as possible, you to thirty five and plutonium are our best bets that we can't guarantee

it's possible. If Yeah, and that's the thing is that you've got that's why you have all this research and development going in. And they're going through multiple lines of inquiry, right because they don't want to say, well, let's just look at one and hope that that is going to work out. There's no let's look at all of them and find out which ones are the most promising and

concentrate on those. So, uh so, Conan is head of this board that's going to look at these different um proposals and decide which ones are the ones most the most warrant additional funding. So if you are the head of a research department it's a Columbia university, you're more likely to receive funding than if you're some yahoo in your backyard saying if I smack these two rocks together, sparks fly. So that's the important part that this is

all about. Like the goal here is pushing forward this research. So under this new organization, the Uranium Committee becomes the Office of Scientific Research and Development Section on Uranium. And that's a really long name and they recognized it, so they code named it S one. So as one becomes this specific committee that's looking at uranium research, can it be used as a way of making a weapon? July a group in Britain's National Defense Research Committee which was

code named MAUD in a U d uh. They they their whole purpose was again to look and see if a nuclear weapon could be practical. They submitted a report that, based upon their calculations, you could use tens of you two thirty five to create an enormously destructive bomb and that could be dropped by existing aircraft of the time and it would probably be two years out in development, like within two years of concentrate development, such a bomb

could be built. So by n Britain shares this report with America, and because Britain recognizes that America has an enormous resource in scientific expertise. So that report specifically recommended using gaseous diffusion to separate you two thirty five from you two thirty eight and outright dismisses the idea of using plutonium. Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of this text off classic episode right after we take this break.

So the Brits say, you should use to thirty five, you should use gaseous diffusion to get your two thirty five from two thirty eight, and forget about plutonium. It's a dead end. That was their recommendation. So meanwhile you got fair Me, who becomes the head of theoretical studies at the Ranium Committee. And keep in mind fair Me

is the plutonium guy. Yeah, so there when you say there are probably egos involved, yes there were, And there were people who were absolutely convinced that their approach was the one that was going to be the most economical, the most efficient, the most scientifically sound. So in these arguments, do you think there are a lot of those you fools moments? You fuse ye all be uh in dramatic like style? Uh dialects? Well, not one. In October, Bush

meets with Roosevelt to discuss the state of research. He receives instruction from Roosevelt to continue research and development, but it was expressly told don't build a bomb until I tell you to, which was fine because they were at least a few years away from being able to build

one in the first place, even under ideal situation. November six one, Arthur Compton reports that, based on his calculations, a critical mass of YouTube you two between two and one rams would produce a powerful fission bomb uh and could be created with an investment of around fifty million to a hundred million dollars in isotopes separation technologies, which turned out to be crazy optimistic. Yeah, they were low

ba Yeah. So obviously the Brits come up with ten kilograms and Arthur Compton's and that's probably gonna be somewhere between you in a hundred. It's a slightly larger range. December seven, nineteen for one very important day in World War two, that was the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It's when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor that brings the United States into World War two and sets this all on

an even faster track than it was before. So January nineteenth ninety two, Roosevelt gives Vanavar Bush to go ahead to pursue the development of an atomic bomb. So we've gone from keep on researching this to see if it's possible to build one of these, keeping in mind that we're still working in the realm of theory. Yeah, and the but the funding flight gates were open. They said, uh, no more um figuring out how to do it now, that just becomes a step in my mandate to you

to give me a working atomic bomb. And they form what is called the Top Policy Committee, which was led by Vanavar Bush. They also had Vice President Henry A. Wallace. James Knitt was part of it. Henry L. Stimpson, who is the Secretary of War, was part of it, and General George C. Marshall, who was Chief of Staff at the Army, was part of it. And the Top Policy Group decided to pursue five strategies, four different isotope isolation methods and the use of plutonium as the five different

methods of potentially creating an atomic bomb. The reason they decided to look at five again was because none of the five had so far emerged as the clear superior method. So because they didn't know, they said, well, we would rather go ahead and have all these different groups, all of which have brilliant engineers and physicists attached to them, to independently work on this stuff. They're motivated by one. Many of them come from Europe and they see what's

going on in World War two too. Many of them have egos, and they want to prove that their method is the right one, and three they're they're genuinely interested

in the science. So March of nineteen forty two, UH, Lawrence, the fellow who ran the cyclotron and Berkeley, pursues the electromagnetic isotope separation method using a cyclotron as a mass spectrometer, and he's so successful that vanavar Bush sends another message to Roosevelt saying, Hey, if this pans out, we might be able to have an atomic bomb as early as nineteen forty four. That would turn out to be optimistic. Uh. In April nineteen forty two, Arthur Compton, who was guiding

research into plutonium. So we got Lawrence with electromagnetic isotope isolation. Now we've got Compton who's looking into plutonium. He's funding the work of j. Robert Oppenheimer at Berkeley, who may be familiar to some of you, especially if you've ever checked out of our shows. Yeah, Oppenheimer comes up a lot. I mean, every single person that I'm mentioning here could warrant an entire episode and stuff you missed a history class. I'm sure it has covered many of them in the past.

So Oppenheimer and Fermi also gets funding from Arthur Compton. He says, all right for me, he's got a pile, a nuclear pile he's working with at Columbia University. Also funds Eugene Wigner's theoretical work at Princeton. Now over at the University of Chicago, Compton secured some space to create his own uranium and graphite nuclear pile. By securing some space, I mean he converted a racketball court underneath the grandstand at stag Field at the University of Chicago into a

nuclear pile. This, by the way, would scare the heck out of everybody later on, because he didn't bother to tell anyone that that's what he was doing. Well, well, well,

let us remember this was a top secret project. And also, if we're talking, I don't know why my voice was And also if we're if we're talking about public safety, then you know, the dangerous rationalization people can always make is what is the safety of the people above in a grandstand or even the University of Chicago compared to

the safety of the world. But what I'm telling that he was a maverick, Well, I tell you now uh he uh into in his defense, this approach that he was using, which was very similar to Faremi's approach, was low energy. It was not something that was perceived to have risk of it becoming a runaway reaction. It was it was more again to study the actual physics involved to better understand it, and posed very little threat to the people of Chicago. Using the design that he used.

He wasn't using it. He was using a design that didn't require a cooling system or a shield because he wasn't It wasn't the super high energy type of reactions that he was he was looking into. Two Compton Arthur Compton asks J. Robert Oppenheimer to take over research into fast neutron interactions to determine the necessary conditions for a critical mass to explode. So Oppenheimer takes on that work.

Then of our Bush asks James Conant, the guy from Harvard, for recommendations on how to proceed, and the S one Leadership Committee decides that instead of focusing on one area of research, all of them still have to be funded and accelerated. They still weren't certain which of these were going to end up being successful. Is still too early, so they say, well, we can't, we can't pull the trigger on one of these yet, we still have to keep on going. And in June two, the Army's involvement

in the project, uh really picks up. You have a guy named Colonel James C. Marshall come into the picture. So James C. Marshall, he's in charge of the Army Corps of Engineers involvement in this project, and the Army Corps of Engineers their main job was to secure sites that they could then use to build facilities on to test out the theory that was being generated in these

various camps. So in your normal operations, if there's not a war going on, what you would typically do is you have the research and development work that is starting to be promising. You would build a pilot plant that would test these things out and it would be designed in such a way that you can make rapid changes to the plants design in order to best fit whatever the process. Yeah, exactly, so you might say, oh, it turns out that this design we came up with isn't

the best one, we should change it to this. A pilot plant is the kind where you would be able to do that. Then once you figured out what was the best approach, you could build a full production facility, right. Yeah. And at this time I believe the US Army Corps of Engineers was based in New York. Yeah. The headquarters, it was supposed to be a temporary headquarters, was on

Broadway in Manhattan, because you want to keep it locating. Yeah, so they called it the Manhattan Engineering District, or sometimes just the Manhattan District and sometimes just Manhattan. And that, in fact, is where the Manhattan Project gets its name. It gets his name from James C. Marshall's headquarters in Manhattan. And he was really he was on the phone calling up potential land, you know, landowners who could potentially sell

him the land necessary from the build these facilities. And the crazy thing here is the Army Corps of Engineers and and these scientists are essentially skipping the pilot stage. They're going straight from well, we're pretty sure this is the way it's gonna work to let's build this facility to do it. And by skipping the pilot stage it causes huge headaches down the line. But at the same time they said, well, we don't have the luxury of time to go the scientifically responsible routes, so we have

to do it this way. So, uh we get the Manhattan Project. Technical the project has a different name. The the official code name for the project, because it's super secret, y'all. Is the Development of Substitute Metals or sometimes the development of substitute materials depending upon which citation you're reading, or d s M. That's the official code name, but everyone

calls it the Manhattan Project. Uh So we are now at the point where the Manhattan Project comes into being, James C. Marshall being in charge of it, kind of being an administrator to make sure that the scientists are getting the resources they need. And this leads us to the conclusion of this episode so that in our next episode we can focus specifically on what happens with the Manhattan Project. You're going to have a whole list of

new names. This is really just to prepare you in case you ever decide to read the Game of Throne series, so that way you know how to handle all these different characters, because it's kind of similar in that respect. Um. So, Ben, we're gonna be talking about like super top secret stuff in the next episode. Keeping in mind the Manhattan Project was a secret from almost everybody from two when it came into existence to mid nine after the bomb has dropped on Hiroshima. So this is when it comes to

stuff they don't want you to know. This is it. You talk about massive government conspiracy. It doesn't get much bigger than this. We're talking a hundred thirty thousand people or thereabouts employed in somewhere or another, most of whom had no idea what they were contributing to. Right, Yeah, this is uh, this is bigger than a you know, this is something that we talked about our previous fifty one podcast. I'm I'm excited. Yeah, so let's see. I guess this will be a little bit of a cliffhanger

for the listeners. Yeah, so you guys have to tune in next week, same bad time, same bad channel. You know, it's always weird to talk about enjoying an episode that's about the technology that is so incredibly destructive, but I hope you learn something, and of course next week we will continue the discussion about the Manhattan Project. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out and let me know.

The best way to do that is on Twitter. To handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon, y. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.