On Tue, 11 May 2010 18:08:21 GMT, (Derek Lyons)
wrote:

Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:

My father worked on the Manhattan Project as a very junior scientist,
and he never believed all the paranoia and propaganda about "Soviet
atom spies," to the point he wasn't entirely sure there WERE any. He
said that once you knew a bomb COULD be built, actually doing it just
wasn't that big a challenge, and certainly wasn't too much for the
Soviets to figure out. They weren't stupid.

(Yes, I know the Soviets really did steal the information, but when
Dad was talking about this forty-five years ago that wasn't yet
established beyond all reasonable doubt. American propaganda was
usually less blatantly false than what the other side produced, but it
still wasn't very trustworthy.)

Your father probably didn't realize what many people still don't
realize today - that even though the *science* of a bomb is fairly
straightforward, the *engineering* is anything but. The two are often
confused even though they are radically different things.

Since he was involved in engineering Fat Man, he SHOULD have realized
it, but I can't swear he did.

Dad's lab group was responsible for the shielding, so the infernal
thing could be made small enough to fit in a bomber without giving the
entire crew a fatal dose of ionizing radiation. Actually making it go
boom wasn't his department, but obviously his bunch needed to know the
basics so they'd know what it was they were shielding.




--
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