"Как самому сделать атомную бомбу" - читать интересную книгу автора

this dilemma.

A massive enrichment laboratory/plant was constructed at Oak Ridge,
Tennessee. H.C. Urey, along with his associates and colleagues at Columbia
University, devised a system that worked on the principle of gaseous
diffusion. Following this process, Ernest O. Lawrence (inventor of the
Cyclotron) at the University of California in Berkeley implemented a process
involving magnetic separation of the two isotopes.

Following the first two processes, a gas centrifuge was used to further
separate the lighter U-235 from the heavier non-fissionable U-238 by their
mass. Once all of these procedures had been completed, all that needed to be
done was to put to the test the entire concept behind atomic fission. [For
more information on these procedures of refining Uranium, see Section 3.]

Over the course of six years, ranging from 1939 to 1945, more than 2
billion dollars were spent on the Manhattan Project. The formulas for
refining Uranium and putting together a working bomb were created and seen to
their logical ends by some of the greatest minds of our time. Among these
people who unleashed the power of the atomic bomb was J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer was the major force behind the Manhattan Project. He
literally ran the show and saw to it that all of the great minds working on
this project made their brainstorms work. He oversaw the entire project from
its conception to its completion.

Finally the day came when all at Los Alamos would find out whether or not
The Gadget (code-named as such during its development) was either going to be
the colossal dud of the century or perhaps end the war. It all came down to
a fateful morning of midsummer, 1945.

At 5:29:45 (Mountain War Time) on July 16th, 1945, in a white blaze that
stretched from the basin of the Jemez Mountains in northern New Mexico to the
still-dark skies, The Gadget ushered in the Atomic Age. The light of the
explosion then turned orange as the atomic fireball began shooting upwards at
360 feet per second, reddening and pulsing as it cooled. The characteristic
mushroom cloud of radioactive vapor materialized at 30,000 feet. Beneath the
cloud, all that remained of the soil at the blast site were fragments of jade
green radioactive glass. ...All of this caused by the heat of the reaction.

The brilliant light from the detonation pierced the early morning skies
with such intensity that residents from a faraway neighboring community would
swear that the sun came up twice that day. Even more astonishing is that a
blind girl saw the flash 120 miles away.

Upon witnessing the explosion, reactions among the people who created
it were mixed. Isidor Rabi felt that the equilibrium in nature had been
upset -- as if humankind had become a threat to the world it inhabited.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, though ecstatic about the success of the project,
quoted a remembered fragment from Bhagavad Gita. "I am become Death," he