Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:

Okay, I managed to completely confuse several different family
stories.

Dad was working on gaseous diffusion at the Nash building at Broadway
and 133rd Street in New York. The stuff about the casing/shielding
was me misremembering a couple of anecdotes my mother had told me
about the machinists on the Project. (She was a secretary on the
Project in '44 and '45.)

My apologies for the confusion.

No problem. But it does explain why he didn't understand the
engineering of the bomb - he probably wouldn't have known anything
about it. If you knew the details about the guts of the bomb, you
were almost certainly interned at Los Alamos. Somebody working on
diffusion probably wouldn't have been allowed into the bomb security
'compartment'.

Much came out about the bombs postwar, but it was still (essentially)
elementary school level stuff. It's not until the last ten or fifteen
years that anything really 'juicy' has been revealed - and recent work
indicates even that was largely misdirection. It's recently been
deduced, for example, that the 'official' description of Little Boy is
wrong.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL