Word: smyth
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Lilienthal found his legacy tied to some annoying problems. Perhaps the most serious was the balancing of military security against the release of scientific information. Even after the release of the Smyth report, a publicly available how-to-do-it manual on the breeding and use of atomic energy--originally authorized by the Army, military officials in the atomic weapons program wanted the AEC to classify almost all atomic information. They also wanted to weed out all scientists not meeting rigorous security standards. At the same time, some very able men were quitting their jobs under the AEC because they...
There was no "atomic secret." The basic fact that uranium atoms can be made to split in two, and release a massive jolt of energy, had been common scientific knowledge since 1939. The famed Smyth Report (A General Account of the Development of Methods of Using Atomic Energy for Military Purposes), which told how to go about making an atomic bomb was published by the U.S. War Department in August 1945. But even without the Smyth Report, U.S. scientists warned it was only a matter of time until some foreign nation, i.e., the U.S.S.R., would build a bomb...
What did the Russians need to do? The Smyth Report told them (as their own scientists could have told them anyway) that there are two roads to the release of explosive atomic energy. One is separating explosive uranium 235 from natural uranium. The other is transmuting uranium into explosive plutonium in a chain-reacting pile. The U.S. has used and is still using both methods successfully...
Poor Bombs Are Easy. The trick is to bring them together quickly enough. If they approach one another slowly, they begin to react before they are fully in contact. The heat developed drives them apart prematurely, and the reaction stops. In the bomb described in the Smyth Report, the masses were driven together, probably in millionths of a second, by some such "low-order explosive" as TNT. Even if the Russians did not do as well as U.S. scientists, their less efficient bomb would still produce an "atomic explosion...
...another case. It involved a science scholarship with a $3,600 stipend, but he did not identify the student. Iowa's Hickenlooper wanted to know why no loyalty check had been made of fellowship recipients. An answer of sorts came from Princeton's Dr. Henry DeWolf Smyth, up before the committee for confirmation as a $15,000-a-year member of AEC. "These men," said Dr. Smyth, "have no access to secret material." He thought that the best potential scientists had "an inquisitive turn of mind" and were "apt to be politically naive." He hoped that the "idea...