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The Manhattan Project was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that designed the bombs. The Army component was designated the Manhattan District, as its first headquarters were in Manhattan; the name gradually superseded the official codename, Development of Substitute Materials, for the entire project. The project absorbed its earlier British counterpart, Tube Alloys. The Manhattan Project began modestly in 1939, but employed nearly 130,000 people at its peak and cost nearly US$2 billion. Over 90 percent of the cost was for building factories and to produce fissile material, with less than 10 percent for development and production of the weapons. Research and production took place at more than 30 sites across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
Operation Smiling Buddha or Operation Happy Krishna was the assigned code name of India's first successful nuclear bomb test on 18 May 1974. The bomb was detonated on the army base Pokhran Test Range (PTR), in Rajasthan, by the Indian Army under the supervision of several key Indian generals.
Trinity was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon. It was conducted by the United States Army at 5:29 a.m. MWT on July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project. The test was conducted in the Jornada del Muerto desert about 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, on what was the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range. It was renamed the White Sands Proving Ground on July 9, 1945, and is now a part of the White Sands Missile Range. The only structures originally in the immediate vicinity were the McDonald Ranch House and its ancillary buildings, which scientists used as a laboratory for testing bomb components. A base camp was constructed, and there were 425 people present on the weekend of the test.
Nuclear pulse propulsion or external pulsed plasma propulsion is a hypothetical method of spacecraft propulsion that uses nuclear explosions for thrust. It originated as Project Orion with support from DARPA, after a suggestion by Stanislaw Ulam in 1947. Newer designs using inertial confinement fusion have been the baseline for most later designs, including Project Daedalus and Project Longshot.
La Jolla is a hilly, seaside special community within San Diego, occupying 7 miles (11 km) of curving coastline along the Pacific Ocean. The population reported in the 2010 census was 46,781.
Nuclear weapons possess enormous destructive power from nuclear fission, or a combination of fission and fusion reactions. Building on major scientific breakthroughs made during the 1930s, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and France collaborated during World War II, in what was called the Manhattan Project, to build a weapon using nuclear fission, also known as an atomic bomb. In August 1945, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were conducted by the United States against Japan at the close of that war, standing to date as the only use of nuclear weapons in hostilities.
Project Orion was a study conducted in the 1950s and 1960s by the United States Air Force, DARPA, and NASA into the viability of a nuclear pulse spaceship that would be directly propelled by a series of atomic explosions behind the craft. Early versions of the vehicle were proposed to take off from the ground; later versions were presented for use only in space. The design effort took place at General Atomics in San Diego, and supporters included Wernher von Braun, who issued a white paper advocating the idea. Non-nuclear tests were conducted with models, but the project was eventually abandoned for several reasons, including the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, which banned nuclear explosions in space, and concerns over nuclear fallout.
Technology played a significant role in World War II. Some of the technologies used during the war were developed during the interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s, much was developed in response to needs and lessons learned during the war, while others were beginning to be developed as the war ended. Many wars have had major effects on the technologies that we use in our daily lives, but World War II had the greatest effect on the technology and devices that are used today. Technology also played a greater role in the conduct of World War II than in any other war in history, and had a critical role in its outcome.
The Soviet atomic bomb project was the classified research and development program that was authorized by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union to develop nuclear weapons during and after World War II.
La Cagoule was a French fascist-leaning and anti-communist terrorist group that used violence to promote its activities, in the final years of the Third Republic and into the Vichy Regime.
A thermonuclear weapon, fusion weapon or hydrogen bomb is a second-generation nuclear weapon design. Its greater sophistication affords it vastly greater destructive power than first-generation nuclear bombs, a more compact size, a lower mass, or a combination of these benefits. Characteristics of nuclear fusion reactions make possible the use of non-fissile depleted uranium as the weapon's main fuel, thus allowing more efficient use of scarce fissile material such as uranium-235 or plutonium-239. The first full-scale thermonuclear test was carried out by the United States in 1952; the concept has since been employed by most of the world's nuclear powers in the design of their weapons.
Atomic spies or atom spies were people in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada who are known to have illicitly given information about nuclear weapons production or design to the Soviet Union during World War II and the early Cold War. Exactly what was given, and whether everyone on the list gave it, are still matters of some scholarly dispute. In some cases, some of the arrested suspects or government witnesses had given strong testimonies or confessions which they recanted later or said were fabricated. Their work constitutes the most publicly well-known and well-documented case of nuclear espionage in the history of nuclear weapons. At the same time, numerous nuclear scientists wanted to share the information with the world scientific community, but this proposal was firmly quashed by the United States government. It is worth noting that many scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project were deeply conflicted about the ethical implications of their work, and some were actively opposed to the use of nuclear weapons.
The Secret Code (1942) was the 19th serial released by Columbia Pictures. It features the masked hero "The Black Commando" facing Nazi saboteurs, inspired by Republic Pictures' successful Spy Smasher serial of the same year. The chapters of this serial each ended with a brief tutorial in cryptography.
Hugh Bradner was an American physicist at the University of California who is credited with inventing the neoprene wetsuit, which helped to revolutionize scuba diving and surfing.
Edward Bonfoy Giller was a United States Air Force (USAF) major general who served as the assistant general manager for military application, United States Atomic Energy Commission, Germantown, Maryland. Giller was assistant director and then director of the Research Directorate for the Air Force Special Weapons Center at Kirtland Air Force Base in the 1950s and 60s. He was the USAF Liaison officer for the Project Orion.
Harris Louis Mayer is an American physicist known for his collaboration with Edward Teller and John von Neumann. He worked on the Manhattan Project. Mayer also worked on Project Orion. His work had to do with opacity, mostly in the context of atmospheric opacity to nuclear radiation.
Donald Irwin Prickett (1919-2004) was a United States Air Force (USAF) Colonel who served as the research director for the Air Force Special Weapons Center at Kirtland Air Force Base in the 1950s and 1960s. He was the USAF Liaison officer for the Project Orion.
Jaromir Astl, better known as Jerry Astl, was a Czechoslovakian aeronautical engineer and explosive engineer who helped design the American Project Orion nuclear propulsion spacecraft in the 1950s and 1960s.
Jon Myer was an experimental physicist and inventor who received 50 U.S. patents in the fields of semiconductors, mechanics, electronics, magnetics and optics. His prolific work encompassed a wide field of research and his inventions ranged from supermarket scanners to laser microwelder technology. Over the course of his career, Myer was the author of 11 scholarly papers on semiconductor materials technology, optical instrumentation, information processing and the history of science. In 1972 he was inducted into the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society.
Kenneth Myron Case was an American physicist and applied mathematician, best known for his use of the mathematical methods of quantum field theory and transport theory to a wide range of applied problems, especially many relevant to U.S. national security. He was an early member of the JASON advisory group.
References
- ↑ "Brian Dunne". La Jolla Light. Retrieved 31 December 2018.
- ↑ "Brian Boru Dunne II Obituary (1924 - 2017) La Jolla Light". Legacy.com. Retrieved 2022-03-08.
- ↑ "History Undercover: Code Name Project Orion". IMDb .
- ↑ "To Mars by A-Bomb: The Secret History of Project Orion". IMDb .