Word: plutonium
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WATER New York City's Plutonium Scare...
...First we had to figure out how the thing would be designed. Everyone was working just as fast as possible--either on the gun-assembly method, which was used for the uranium bomb in Hiroshima, or on the implosion method, which we used for the plutonium bomb at Trinity and later in Nagasaki. [George] Kistiakowsky pooh-poohed the implosion idea at first; he was a real tough cookie. But then he got behind it. Both bombs were going ahead full steam...
...turned out, the Hiroshima bomb would be the only one of its type America ever built or used, uranium being that much more difficult to obtain than plutonium. One of the spurs to the American atom bomb effort had been a report in 1943 that Hitler had ordered uranium shipped out of mines in Belgium. It was also taken for granted that the gun-assembly method--one piece of purified uranium (uranium-235) fired into another at terrific speed--would work, so the Hiroshima bomb was never tested till the morning it was dropped...
Even by the sometimes shrill standards of the New York Post, the headline seemed lurid: CHILLING DISCOVERY AFTER MANIAC'S THREAT: PLUTONIUM IN CITY'S WATER. Have New York City's 7 million residents been imbibing water that is laced with nuclear-reactor fuel...
...answer last week from New York's ebullient Mayor Ed Koch: Yes, but don't worry. Koch, in making the surprise announcement, explained that on April 1 an anonymous letter writer had threatened to dump "substantial quantities" of poisonous plutonium into the city's water supply unless all charges were dropped against Bernhard Goetz, the subway vigilante who is awaiting trial for shooting four teenagers he alleges were threatening him on a Manhattan train last December. In late April, a sample from the city's water system contained levels of cancer-causing plutonium up to 200 times as high...