About.How did nuclear weapons develop throughout the 20th century?
|
First Nuclear Weapon Explosion: |
Robert Oppenheimer: |
Physicists J. Robert OppenheimerAn American theoretical physicists and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Oppenheimer was the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and is among those who are credited with being "The father of the Atomic Bomb" for their role in the Manhattan Project, the WW2 undertaking that developed the first nuclear weapons.
|
Leo Szilard & Enrico FermiSzilard and Enrico worked together at Columbia in 1939-40, just after nuclear fission was discovered, ascertain the feasibility of a nuclear chain reaction, and then on the construction of the first nuclear reactor.
|
Crawford GreenwaltGreenwalt was an American Chemical Engineer. He was one of the managers of the Manhattan Project for DuPont. When the DuPont signed on to the Manhattan Project in late 1942, Greenwalt was sent to investigate the project. In Chicago, he witnessed Enrico Fermi's first Chain Reaction. Just two weeks later he was assigned to be the liaison between the physicists at the Chicago Met Lab and the engineers at Wilmington, Delaware. Crawford was to translate scientists theoretical ideas into workable blueprints for the production of plutonium.
|