Word: atomically
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...last week the New York Sun stumbled across something. In three-bank headlines, it announced that "unknown agents" had stolen atom-bomb secrets from the Oak Ridge plant. The quick-to-panic became panicky. Cried New Jersey's J. Parnell Thomas: "We must take drastic steps." In the Senate, Iowa's Bourke B. Hickenlooper rose to say that, as chairman of AEC, he had "no reason to believe" that anything had been stolen from Oak Ridge. But, said he, there was something he should mention. He revealed the Los Alamos theft...
...atom-smashing goes, the uranium bomb is a comparatively gentle affair. Fissioning the uranium atom is roughly comparable to cracking a ripe coconut in half with a well-placed tap: the atom splits neatly into two pieces (lighter atoms) and two or three almost infinitesimal particles (neutrons) that fly off like sparks. Atom smashers believe that they will eventually do much better than that...
When & if the atom really splits to pieces, it will be more like an exploding electric light bulb-smashed to smithereens. Last week some determined U.S. atom smashers, the cyclotron group at the University of California, coolly reported that the smithereenizing of the atom is now well on its way. They announced that they had smashed some atoms into 22 to 30 pieces...
Successful Debris. Previous cyclotrons, they explained, had just chipped away at the atom, knocking off two or three small particles. But the 184-incher's bullets cause such havoc in atoms that researchers have so far been unable to sort out all the debris. Said one of the California scientists: "With the old cyclotron of 225 tons [60 inches], we could knock two or three floors off a 50-story building, or maybe add a floor or two. But with the new cyclotron, we can knock that 50-story building into a flock of four-room bungalows, with...
Sample smash: an arsenic atom (atomic weight: 75) had 21 particles knocked off by a single blow, and was reduced to radioactive cobalt (atomic weight: 54). When the new cyclotron bombarded an oxygen atom (atomic weight: 16) with neutrons, the light atom split into five pieces (see cut; the arrows point to the five-way split of the oxygen atom, the streaks indicate the path of atomic chips...