Word: fissionability
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Radiant Death. One of them, radioactive poisons, was mentioned briefly and guardedly in the Smyth Report. Wrote Professor Smyth: ". . . The fission products produced in one day's run of a 100,000 kw. chain-reacting pile might be sufficient to make a large area uninhabitable." The three plutonium piles at Richland, Wash. are enormously more powerful. If Professor Smyth's estimate was right, each pile has been producing, every day for more than a year, enough radioactive poisons to depopulate many "large areas...
...would be utter folly to attempt to protect the United States against attack with atomic weapons by 'keeping the secret of the atomic bomb,'" Mather stated. "Almost all the fundamental scientific principles pertaining to nuclear fission were known to physicists of all countries in 1939. The only secrets of the atomic bomb pertain to the techniques of detonation and the specifications of machinery and apparatus...
...present atomic bomb, Professor Wheeler believes, is a mere firecracker. The cornerstone of atomic physics is the Einstein Equation,* which shows that all matter, on earth and elsewhere, is merely frozen energy. "It tells us that the most powerful nuclear transformation so far known, the fission of a heavy nucleus, releases only one-1,000th of the energy locked up in its mass." The sub-atomic particles which form the uranium nucleus are not themselves transformed. They are only reshuffled into smaller nuclei, with a tiny loss of mass. If protons, for instance, which are found in all nuclei, could...
From the mass of fact and solid inference about atomic fission, TIME has abstracted twelve key points...
After giving such fascinating hints about the talents of its betatron, G.E. retreated again into silence. Obviously, a gadget which transmutes elements so handily has more than a nodding acquaintance with nuclear fission, science's most secluded subject...