Related to the 60th Anniversary of Hiroshima

[Tom WA3KLR]

With the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the first nuke on Hiroshima, August 6, I thought that you fellows may be interested to read about the world’s first sustained and controlled nuclear reactor which was built in a doubles squash court under the West Stands of the University of Chicago stadium.  I have taken this excerpt from the book I am currently reading called Great Physicists by William H. Cropper, copyright 2001.  The book covers 30 physicists from Galileo to Stephen Hawking.  

Most of you already know that the first reactor was at the University of Chicago stadium but have probably not heard any additional detailed account.  
From Chapter 23 on Enrico Fermi:

Laura Fermi gives us a dramatic account of the events on an icy day in early December 1942, when CP-1 (Chicago Pile Number One), containing 6 tons of uranium, 40 tons of uranium oxide, and 385 tons of graphite, was safely brought to criticality:

Only six weeks had passed from the laying of the first graphite brick, and it was December 2.
  Herb Anderson (one of Fermi’s collaborators in the design of the pile) was sleepy and grouchy.  He had been up until two in the morning to give the pile its finishing touches.  Had he pulled a control rod during the night, he could have operated the pile and have been the first man to achieve a chain reaction, at least in a material, mechanical sense.  He had a moral duty not to pull that rod, despite the strong temptation.  It would not be fair to Fermi.  Fermi was the leader.  He directed research and worked out theories.  His were the basic ideas.  His were the privilege and the responsibility of conducting and controlling the chain reaction…
  There is no record of what were the feelings of three young men who crouched on top of the pile…They were called the “suicide squad”.  It was a joke, but perhaps they were asking themselves whether the joke held some truth.  They were like firemen alerted to the possibility of a fire, ready to extinguish it.  If something unexpected were to happen, if the pile should get out of control, they would “extinguish” it by flooding it with cadmium solution.  
  [An audience of about twenty] climbed onto the balcony at the north end of the squash court; all, except the three boys perched on top of the pile and except a young physicist, George Weil, who stood alone on the floor by a cadmium [control] rod he was to pull out of the pile when so instructed.
  And so the show began.

Fermi explained the purpose of the control rod, and instructed Weil to withdraw it, leaving thirteen feet inserted in the pile.  The counters measuring neutron intensity responded by clicking faster, and the trace of the pen on a chart recorder, also measuring neutrons, climbed and then leveled off.  The chain reaction, not yet self-sustaining, ceased generating neutrons.  All morning Fermi continued the experiment in this way, instructing Weil to withdraw the control rod in six-inch increments, and each time the observers watched the recorder pen climb and level off in rounded steps.  At 11:30 a.m., Fermi, “a man of habits”, as Laura Fermi remarks, announced that it was time for lunch, “although nobody else had given signs of being hungry”.

At two o’clock in the afternoon, Fermi and his audience, now doubled, returned to the squash court.  With a calculation and an extrapolation, Fermi could see that the pile was nearly critical.  He told Weir to withdraw the control rod twelve more inches.  “This is going to do it”, Fermi told Compton.  “Now it will become self-sustaining.  The trace [on the recorder] will climb and continue to climb, it will not level off.”  

The moment had arrived.  This is what followed, as Herb Anderson recalled:

At first you could hear the sound of the neutron counter, clickety-clack, clickety-clack.  Then the clicks came more and more rapidly, and after a while they began to merge into a roar.  The counter couldn’t follow any more [and it was turned off]…[Everyone] watched in the sudden silence the mounting deflection of the recorder’s pen.  It was an awesome silence.  Everyone realized the significance [of the recorder trace]….Again and again, the scale of the recorder had to be changed to accommodate the neutron intensity which was increasing more and more rapidly.  Suddenly Fermi raised his hand.  “The pile has gone critical”, he announced. No one present had any doubt about it.

“Fermi allowed himself a grin”, writes Rhodes.  “He would tell the technical council the next day that the pile had achieved a k of 1.0006.  Its neutron intensity was then doubling every two minutes [a leisurely rate, thanks to the delayed neutrons].  Left uncontrolled for an hour and a half, that rate of increase would have carried it to a million kilowatts.  Long before so extreme a runaway it would have killed anyone left in the room and melted down.”

Fermi calmly ordered the pile shut down after 4.5 minutes of operation, bringing it to a power of ½ watt, hardly enough to light the bulb of a flashlight.  “When do we become scared?” Leona Woods, the only woman in the Chicago group, whispered to Fermi.

(Fermi died in 1954 in Chicago at the age of 53 from incurable stomach cancer.)

Now how does this compare to bringing up your new transmitter?

[Bacon, WA3WDR]

I read a story about how people would slip and fall on the loose graphite dust, and get totally blackened by it, when they were building the enclosure.  I think it was a book by Fermi's wife Laura.

[WB3JOK]

I also highly recommend: The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes. (Copyright 1986. ISBN 0-671-44133-7, ISBN 0-671-65719-4 Pbk.)
This text from Laura Fermi is also quoted there.

Also according to Rhodes, at the Trinity test just after the detonation, one of the scientists announced, "Now, we are all sons of bitches".

Bend over, put your head between your legs, kiss your ass goodbye...
-Charles

[Ott]

Google "tickling the dragon's tail"... some of these guys were living life  on the hairy edge... and a couple paid the ultimate price...



http://collections.ic.gc.ca/heirloom_series/volume6/252-255.htm

[WA1GFZ]

I think your weights are a bit off but a very cool story.
A nuke is like holding a tube with handles. You know what she will do
so you take care to not miss treat it.

Too bad we didn't have the balls to drop one on Tora Bora

[Tom WA3KLR]

Frank,

The numbers I typed in are what is in the book.


From website http://www.atomicarchive.com/Photos/CP1/index.shtml

The pile contained 771,000 pounds of graphite, 80,590 pounds of uranium oxide and 12,400 pounds of uranium metal when it went "critical." It cost about $1 million to produce and build. The pile took the form of a flattened ellipsoid which measured 25 feet wide and 20 feet high.

So the numbers are confirmed.  I wouldn't have chinced on the graphite shielding either.  Better to be conservative than sorry.

[W0KPX]

I read a book a few months ago entitled "The Last Mission".  It was written by a B-29 radio operator who took part in the last bombing mission of the war over Japan.  It was an excellent account of the last few days of the war from an Allied airmen's perspective and also includes what was going on in Tokyo regarding the surrender.  It also mentions sighting the Enola Gay and two other B-29s heading towards Japan while the author's flight was heading back to Guam.  The author and his crew mates thought the planes were recon aircraft sent to check out the damage done during the previous raid.  There is some information about the book as well as info on the B-29 radio equipment here: http://www.collinsclubs.com/carc/b-29/

I am wanting to get a good book about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions.  Does anybody know if Tibbets wrote a book or if there are any other good books about the subject?

Sean

[Tom WA3KLR]

I don't know of any books off of the top of my head from the mission point of view.  In junior high school in the early 1960's I read John Hersey's "Hiroshima".  It was a thick hardback as I recall, full of personal accounts of the bomb blast by Japanese survivors in Hiroshima that morning.

[WB2RJR]

Found this sometime back. Perfect for home defense.

http://www.lookatentertainment.com/v/v-202.htm


73, Marty WB2RJR

[Bacon, WA3WDR]

Whoa... that's nothing to play around with.  And that was just a little tactical nuke.

I liked the girl climbing onto the flagpole at the end.

[w3bv]

Tibbets wrote an autobiography "Return of the Enola Gay", (c) 1998,  ISBN 0-970366-0-4 available through Enola Gay Remembered, Inc. , 5115 Mountain Top Road, New Hope, PA 18938, (215) 794-8788; www.enolagay.org.  A good b book to read for an understanding of Tibbet's approach to the Hiroshima mission and his "inner workings"  is "Duty", by Bob Green, (c) 2000, William Morrow Publishers, ISBN 0-380-97849-0.

[Bill, KD0HG]

A friend who was once a control op at a Colorado nuclear power plant told me that the supervisor on duty responsible for emergency shutdowns was called the "axeman", and that goes back to the original nuclear pile...Where they apparently had an axe handy to chop the line holding the control rod...Like real fast....If needed.

There was a terriffic opinion piece in today's Denver Post about the debate over using nukes to end WWII. Well worth reading.

http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_2924393

-----------------------------------

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. It came three days after the first military use of the bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.

Despite all those years, the debate continues about whether the United States should have deployed its atomic bombs against Japan. The traditional view says that the bombs saved thousands, perhaps millions, of both Japanese and American lives by forcing an earlier Japanese surrender.

One common view argues that Japan was already defeated and blockaded, and President Harry S. Truman used the bomb, not to defeat Japan, but to deter the Soviet Union from expanding. Japan would have given up earlier, except for the Allied demand for "unconditional surrender."

Truman made the decision to use the atomic bomb on Japan. He took the responsibility then and later. The sign on his desk said, "The buck stops here," and he meant it.

But suppose Truman had decided not to use the bomb against Japan, an aggressive empire that had attacked the United States without warning on Dec. 7, 1941. What would have happened?

Take the bomb out of the equation, and his realistic choices were to blockade Japan while continuing the conventional bombing, or invasion.

Conventional bombing was at least as lethal as the atomic bombs. The fire-bombing of Tokyo on March 10, 1945, killed more than 100,000 people, as compared to 65,000 killed in the Hiroshima blast.

Little was known then about poisoning, cancers, birth defects and other effects of radioactivity - so little that Americans were subjected to radiation as bombs were tested on our soil during the 1950s and 60s. In light of 1945 knowledge, there was no legitimate humanitarian argument in favor of continued conventional bombing.

Strategists of the time worried about how long a bombed and blockaded Japan might hold out, and we Americans are not a patient people. Public pressure for an invasion would have mounted by the day.

The military favored an invasion, starting that November at Kyushu, the southernmost of the Japanese islands. Gen. George C. Marshall, chief of staff, estimated 31,000 American casualties in the first 30 days after a landing. Adm. Ernest J. King, citing the terrible struggle for Okinawa, estimated 41,000 dead and wounded in the first month. Adm. Chester Nimitz predicted 49,000 - 7,000 more than the first 30 days after the Normandy landing. Gen. Douglas MacArthur's staff estimated 50,000.

Pentagon planners estimated the overall cost of a Japanese invasion at 220,000 casualties, and Secretary of War Henry Stimson, in the words of Truman biographer David McCullough, "was certain the Japanese would fight as never before," and "American dead and wounded could reach a million."

Suppose Truman had foregone the bomb, and ordered the invasion. It likely would have meant at least a year of bloody, brutal fighting.

The atomic bomb was as secret as any enterprise that large could have been, but eventually someone in the know would have looked at the mounting casualties and spoken out: "Despite the deaths of thousands of American boys, President Truman refuses to use a powerful secret super-bomb that could force Japan's immediate surrender."

How would he have answered that? He might have said he would not discuss military secrets. Or that the powerful secret weapon was just too horrible to use on the same nation that had massacred 300,000 people at Nanking in 1937-38.

Neither sounds like an answer that the American public would have accepted, and Truman was a public servant.

He ordered the Hiroshima bombing. Nagasaki followed, in accordance with military plans but without specific presidential orders. One more bomb was available, but Truman forbade its use without his express permission, for he was horrified by its effects. Japan surrendered on Aug. 14.

Truman made the right decision in accordance with his first priority - minimizing American casualties while forcing Japan to surrender. Any other course would have required fortune-telling, and tends to reflect a modern fantasy that restraint would have somehow averted the nuclear age. After 60 years, the debate should be over.

But of course it isn't, and perhaps that's for the best. There are some things we have to ponder from time to time, depressing as they may be, and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki anniversaries serve that purpose.

[K1JJ]

This topic has always interested me.

I think after five years of war and it becoming commonplace to bomb civilians in cities, I think everyone involved was desensitized to death and destruction. It was simply "what can we use, develop or ramp up to get a better edge, to kill more than the other side? That was their duty.

In addition, precious few really understood what dropping a nuclear bomb really meant in terms of initial death and the effects afterwards.

Though, one statement that I heard on the history channel sticks in my head. It's hindsight, of course. A Japanese official, after the surrender stated that it really wasn't the nuclear bombs that caused them to surrender... what's the difference if they slowly destroy our cities with incendiary bombing or quickly do it with nuclear? 

He said what did it was the invasion a few weeks earlier by the Russians on their western shore. They had little defense there and figured it was much better to surrender to the Americans than have the Russians over run their country from their weak west and possibly permanently take over.  I think they made the right decision considering the way it turned out for them years later.

BTW, it was said that the Russian invasion added another reason to Truman's decision to drop the bomb and get it over with before the Russians covered much more ground in Japan.

For what it's worth..

T

[John K5PRO]

In the late 1980s I worked with a guy who was present when they lit off that first graphite pile. He later became the guy who signed the agreement with Ike for E.I. Dupont Co. to build the Savannah River plant to make heavy water and other stuff for hydrogen bombs.

Hey while we are on the subject today, in a few hours here in Los Alamos:

Special Event to Commemorate the
60th Anniversary of the End of WW II

Tuesday, Aug. 9 at 7 PM in Fuller Lodge
Manhattan Project Veteran John Mench will recite the poem "The Ragged Old Flag," followed by Paul Numerof, former SED who worked on the uranium for the Hiroshima bomb, will speak about "In August, 1945." Then Vice Admiral Frederick L. Ashworth, the Fat Man weaponeer on Bock's Car, will wrap up the evening with some reminiscences.

[Bill, KD0HG]

John, do you  know what are those pieces of fused sand called that the locals find around Almagordo from the Trinity site blast? Someone showed me one once, and I can't remember what they're called.

-Bill

[WA1GFZ]

The first nuke weighed 9000 pounds and only had a yield of 10 kT.  That was the 201 triode of nukes! Today they are a lot lighter and make a bigger bang.

[Todd, KA1KAQ]

John, do you  know what are those pieces of fused sand called that the locals find around Almagordo from the Trinity site blast? Someone showed me one once, and I can't remember what they're called.

-Bill

Bill -

I believe it was called Trinitite, spelling might be wrong.  Always had hopes of going out there and finding a chunk. Was told they have the site fenced off now?

Went right past Rocky Flats on my way from Broomfield to Golden back in 2002. Didn't know they had a Cold War museum. Bet there's some cool stuff in it.  Ah well, the Coors brewery was a lot of fun anyhow.   

~ Todd  'KAQ

[Bill, KD0HG]

John, do you  know what are those pieces of fused sand called that the locals find around Almagordo from the Trinity site blast? Someone showed me one once, and I can't remember what they're called.

-Bill

Bill -

I believe it was called Trinitite, spelling might be wrong.  Always had hopes of going out there and finding a chunk. Was told they have the site fenced off now?

Went right past Rocky Flats on my way from Broomfield to Golden back in 2002. Didn't know they had a Cold War museum. Bet there's some cool stuff in it.  Ah well, the Coors brewery was a lot of fun anyhow.   

~ Todd  'KAQ

I think you're right, Todd, that rings the proverbial bell.

If you cruise around central NM, those little rock and geology shops have pieces of the stuff available. I heard that it has been found many miles from ground zero, all over the place. One old timer told me that the locals weren't forewarned about the blast that day and what they saw fron as far away as Almagordo and Roswell would probably make an interesting story if a Ken Burns type wanted to do a documentary.
A roadside cafe I stopped at a few years ago had some yellowed newspaper clippings from the 1940s...They sure kept everyone in the dark about what happened there and all kinds of rumors circulated. That's probably when the UFO stories started. I mean, what other explanation could an uninformed person have for what they saw? Some swore thay saw a second sunset happen that day.

Apparently, the DOD has guided tours to the Trinity site once or twice a year to see the effects of a nuke close-up, that's something that I want to look into sometime.
Otherwise the area is completely closed off to visitors and patrolled by some rather humorless and well-armed GIs if you go 4-wheeling around there.

I've got some interesting family connections to the area going back to the early 50s and we still have relations working at Los Alamos. ;-)

-Bill

[WA1GFZ]

I think Sandia Labs has a museum where you can check out the old nukes. Those old under ground tests left some big craters.
I remember the days of the above ground tests and my Mother telling us to not eat snow, we lived in Ct.

[John K5PRO]

The melted green sand rocks are Trinitite. They were found at ground zero and close around that, where the sand was melted. The blast was on a 100 foot tower above it. Most of it was cleaned up years ago and buried, but tiny chunks still exist out there. It is on the north edge of the White Sands Missle Range, off the Stallion Gate on highway 380. You can stop at the Owl Cafe in San Antonio, right off I-25 and see old clippings and signatures from the folks working there in the summer of 1945.

A few weeks ago a special 60th commemorative tour of the site was held. I didn't go but friends went. It was too hot in NM to want to be out there in the desert midday! Otherwise, there is a tour of the site every April and October. The Atomic Museum in Albuquerque at the old REI store site in Old Town has the schedule. I went one time, but there isn't much to see. Jumbo, the steel canister that was made to contain the blast in case it fizzled, is still there. It was never used for the "gadget" as the scientists had more confidence that the thing would light off, which it did.

[Bill, KD0HG]

Thanks for the info, John...I couldn't remember where that cafe was, other than the newspaper clippings and what I ate...A cheeseburger with chilies and fries ;-) We were heading from Bosque de Apache to Carlsbad that day we stopped there, IIRC.

..

[KE1GF]

Pretty Interesting stuff, back in the spring of 2001 I was looking at the pictures outside the nuclear reactor facility at school. Somebody saw me through the window of the very heavy door and invited me in.

I was told that they would be starting up the 50KW unit as a student was working towards certification. I said that I had nothing better to do than go home and do my diffeqs homework and I stepped in. They made record of me entering and gave me a rem counter to wear.

I never realized the signifigance of what I was about to observe.

I observed the very stressed out student and two certified reactor operators, one a professor of WPI and one a graduate student of MIT; as they closely watched the insturmentation of the control panel as the trainee went through the daunting task of pulling out the control blades of the core. And, yes, several times the computer "SCRAM"ED (Safty Control Rod AxeMan) the reactor and the rods fell back into place. Finally near nerveous brakedown the poor trainee got a clean start and the reactor came up to power.

Well, the rest was just plain cool, other than watching the tortureous task that the trainee went through. The team turned off the lights over the concrete pool of deionized water which containted the core and from the catwalk, with my very own 2 eyes only maybe 10 or 15 feet over the reactor I first observed cerenkov radiation.



Anyway the rest was pretty fun, the nukeies showed me some geiger counters and tried to talk me into changing my major.

Well it was lots of fun to say the least. I'm glad I'm still just a plain jane old scientist of computation, execpt I have been known to glow in the dark once in a while. Not really though, that facility is so lead sheilded that a day out on the beach would expose me to more radiation then actually being 10 feet away from a core operating.

I remember one day when I was up in the machine language lab, they tested the radiation alarms. We quickly grabbed our $1k worth of books in our backpacks and proceded to haul ass like no tomorrow out of the place.

A few years later a ham, (nuclear enginner at raytheon) that lives in town and I reminisced of our experiences at that facility. I thanked him greatly since I was flat broke as a young JN and he gave me some RAM to get my 386 up and running with unix, which bascially changed the direction of my life.

-Bill 'GF

[Bill, KD0HG]

Thanks for the excellent writeup, Bill.

-hg

[wa1knx]

thats cool bill, I'd like to see that.   I saw trinity site several years ago, and I
picked up a handful of trinitite.  I  have it in a glass jar, it is still hot.
my geiger counter ticks away when I put the probe in the jar.  The
crater from the blast is huge, but more like a depression than a
meteor crater. the steel shield that wasn't used is still there. worth
the trip to see it. its open twice a year.

[KE1GF]

thats cool bill, I'd like to see that.   I saw trinity site several years ago, and I
picked up a handful of trinitite.  I  have it in a glass jar, it is still hot.
my geiger counter ticks away when I put the probe in the jar.  The
crater from the blast is huge, but more like a depression than a
meteor crater. the steel shield that wasn't used is still there. worth
the trip to see it. its open twice a year.

Yeah Dino, I remember you saying QSO a while back that you had a chunk of that trinitite. I don't remember off the
top of my head if I mentioned to you that I observed a small experimental light-water fired up. Anyway I'm on the books there,
and probably other places now too...

I like nuke power, it's cheap, efficient, and resonably clean... (I'm probably going to start a flame war with this one, but it is...)

We're getting to the point now that we consider heat to be pollution, so excess heat does get disgarded into the environment.

It's funny, as you watch on BBC or CNN about how we're asking N. Korea to make light-water reactors (they supposedly have a few bombs)
and they laught at us, they're more interested in using graphite bricks and water,  instead of pure water, to make electricity and as a byproduct (like spam)
a more fissionable material.

History repeats itself again, we threw away designs like that way back in the 50's

Maybe when everybody gets poised with their bombs we can all get along? ah, yes, mutually assured destruction.

-Bill 'GF
May we be blessed with daylight tomorrow, amen.