Quotes About Nuclear

How much the world lost that September is immeasurable. The complementarity of the bomb, its mingled promise and threat, would not be canceled by the decisions of heads of state; their frail authority extends not nearly so far. Nuclear fission and thermonuclear fusion are not acts of Parliament; they are levers embedded deeply in the physical world, discovered because it was possible to discover them, beyond the power of men to patent or to hoard.

We must be curious to learn how such a set of objects—hundreds of power plants, thousands of bombs, tens of thousands of people massed in national establishments—can be traced back to a few people sitting at laboratory benches discussing the peculiar behavior of one type of atom. Spencer R. Weart

another billion deaths in the months that followed from mass starvation—from a mere 1.5-megaton regional nuclear war.

when fission was discovered, within perhaps a week there was on the blackboard in Robert Oppenheimer's office a drawing—a very bad, an execrable drawing—of a bomb.

Anne Harrington de Santana, has discerned that nuclear weapons have acquired the status of fetish objects; like the coin of the realm in relation to commodities, our glittering warheads have become markers of national power: "Just as access to wealth in the form of money determines an individual's opportunities and place in a social hierarchy, access to power in the form of nuclear weapons determines a state's opportunities and place in the international order.

Each kilogram of heavy hydrogen equaled about 85,000 tons TNT equivalent.1622 Theoretically, 12 kilograms of liquid heavy hydrogen—26 pounds—ignited by one atomic bomb would explode with a force equivalent to 1 million tons of TNT.

Wigner told me of Hahn's discovery.1030 Hahn found that uranium breaks into two parts when it absorbs a neutron. . . . When I heard this I immediately saw that these fragments, being heavier than corresponds to their charge, must emit neutrons, and if enough neutrons are emitted . . . then it should be, of course, possible to sustain a chain reaction. All the things which H. G. Wells predicted appeared suddenly real to me.

They discussed the long, thorough theoretical paper by Niels Bohr and John Wheeler, "The mechanism of nuclear fission," that had been published in the September Physical Review and especially its conclusion, which Bohr and Wheeler had elaborated from Bohr's Sunday-morning graph work, that U235 was probably the isotope of uranium responsible for slow-neutron fission.1205

In each mere gram of uranium there are about 2.5 × 1021 atoms, an absurdly large number, 25 followed by twenty zeros: 2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Oppenheimer did not doubt that he would be remembered to some degree, and reviled, as the man who led the work of bringing to mankind for the first time in its history the means of its own destruction.2154 He cherished the complementary compensation of knowing that the hard riddle the bomb would pose had two answers, two outcomes, one of them transcendent.

One of Oppenheimer's students, the American theoretical physicist Philip Morrison, recalls that "when fission was discovered, within perhaps a week there was on the blackboard in Robert Oppenheimer's office a drawing—a very bad, an execrable drawing—of a bomb.

Personally I think there is no doubt that sub-atomic energy is available all around us, and that one day man will release and control its almost infinite power. We cannot prevent him from doing so and can only hope that he will not use it exclusively in blowing up his next door neighbor.

The pile as it waited in the dark cold of Chicago winter to be released to the breeding of neutrons and plutonium contained 771,000 pounds of graphite, 80,590 pounds of uranium oxide and 12,400 pounds of uranium metal. It cost about $1 million to produce and build. Its only visible moving parts were its various control rods.

Whatever scientists of one warring nation could conceive, the scientists of another warring nation might also conceive—and keep secret. That early in 1939 and early 1940, the nuclear arms race began.

Los Alamos. Young Robert Oppenheimer first approached it in the summer of 1922.

Thus in the first months of 1940 it was already clear to two intelligent observers that nuclear weapons would be weapons of mass destruction against which the only apparent defense would be the deterrent effect of mutual possession.

Later, I realized that reviewing the history of nuclear physics served another purpose as well: It gave the lie to the naive belief that the physicists could have come together when nuclear fission was discovered (in Nazi Germany!) and agreed to keep the discovery a secret, thereby sparing humankind the nuclear burden.

They were all working at the same cutting edge, trying to understand the strange results of a simple experiment bombarding uranium with neutrons.

This time," he told Weil, "take the control rod out twelve inches." Weil withdrew the cadmium rod. Fermi nodded and ZIP was winched out as well. "This is going to do it," Fermi told Compton. The director of the plutonium project had found a place for himself at Fermi's side. "Now it will become self-sustaining. The trace [on the recorder] will climb and continue to climb; it will not level off.

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. He would tell the technical council the next day that the pile achieved a k of 1.0006.1700 Its neutron intensity was then doubling every two minutes. Left uncontrolled for an hour and a half, that rate of increase would have carried it to a million kilowatts.

The hydrogen bomb was thus under development in the United States onward from July 1942.

Perhaps the greatest immediate danger which faces us is the probability that our 'demonstration' of atomic bombs will precipitate a race in the production of these devices between the United States and Russia.

Fermi sent them out again in the early 1930s, after the decision to go into nuclear physics: Segrè to work with Otto Stern in Hamburg, Amaldi to Leipzig to the laboratory of the physical chemist Peter Debye, Rasetti to Lise Meitner at the KWI.