Word: uranium
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...warning from Potsdam a month later, no explicit mention was made of either the Bomb or the Emperor. Radio Tokyo broadcast that the Japanese government would treat the warning with "silent contempt." On the island of Tinian that day, a 300-lb. lead cylinder with a core of enriched uranium was being transferred to the headquarters of Colonel Paul Tibbets' 509th Composite Group...
Discovered in 1900, radon is produced by the radioactive decay of radium, which in turn is a product of the radioactive breakdown of uranium. The gas has long been recognized as a health threat to uranium miners, who suffer abnormally high rates of lung cancer. But as a gas, radon can flow for miles underground, often rising to the surface through faults and porous rock far from any source of uranium. In fact, the Watras house is located in a region called the Reading Prong, from which larger-than-normal quantities of radon rise. The region stretches from Reading...
...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...
...effort, compared with the Americans' $2 billion. For their part, the Japanese physicists simply made the wrong scientific choice in their fission experiments, deciding to work with high-energy rather than low-energy neutrons. Even if they had been able to produce a chain reaction, there was very little uranium in the country and no way to get more. There is little doubt that if the Japanese had made a Bomb before the Americans, they would have used it, but the question is moot. Kakihana always believed that the U.S. would build the Bomb first, but he thought that...