There have been plenty of books and movies about how the Manhattan Project brought together scientists and engineers to create the nuclear bomb. Most of them don’t have a lot of technical substance, though. You know — military finds genius, genius recruits other geniuses, bomb! But if you want to hear the story of the engineering, [Brian Potter] tells it all. We mean, like, all of it.
If you’re looking for a quick three-minute read, you’ll want to give this a pass. Save it for a rainy afternoon when you can settle in. Even then, he skips past a lot of what is well known. Instead, he spends quite a bit of time discussing how the project addressed the technical challenges, like separating out U235.
Four methods were considered for that task. Creating sufficient amounts of plutonium was also a problem. Producing a pound of plutonium took 4,000 pounds of uranium. When you had enough material, there was the added problem of getting it together fast enough to explode instead of just having a radioactive fizzle.
There are some fascinating tidbits in the write-up. For example, building what would become the Oak Ridge facility required conductors for electromagnets. Copper, however, was in short supply. It was wartime, after all. So the program borrowed another good conductor, silver, from the Treasury Department. Presumably, they eventually returned it, but [Brian] doesn’t say.
There’s the old story that they weren’t entirely sure they wouldn’t ignite the entire atmosphere but, of course, they didn’t. Not that the nuclear program didn’t have its share of bad luck.
Actually, he does say:
They went so far as to tear up the floor boards and burn them to recover as much silver dust as possible. Whenever drilling happened to bolt parts together, someone would use a bit of paper to catch the filings. There was always someone standing nearby, watching to make sure no funny business happened.
We could use all kinds of Manhattan Projects (ie, bringing together the best scientists and the best engineers) to address other needs that are very, very long overdue. Like affordable housing, infrastructure upgrades, proper public transit and plenty more.
If we don’t do it now by ourselves, AI will, and it remains to be seen if it find us, humans, and our NEEDS worthy attention.
The Manhattan project had one advantage over the type of projects you are thinking.
A clear definition of what the solution will accomplish: Bomb go Boom! in a big way.
What is affordable housing? What infrastructure needs to be upgraded? What is proper public transit?
Most of the bigger problems we have are societal problems. You can’t simply experiment on people’s lives. The Manhattan project accomplished its goals by experimentation on a grand scale. To “fix” housing, you’d have to try a myriad of different solutions – with each attempted solution, you will change people’s lives for better or worse with no way of knowing beforehand which way it will go.
The same goes for public transportation. Optimal public transformation depends on a lot of factors, most of which have an enormous influence on how people live and structure their lives.
Worse; big projects to address ill defined problems end up binding the hands of experts who are already trying to solve the problem, by diverting the attention away to endless conferences and fundraisers and publicity campaigns in the lack of any meaningful direction to take. Such projects become projects of project management with the hope that if you manage it enough then the original problem becomes clear and solvable.
The effort starts to consume money and time just to keep the project organization moving along, and keeping the experts in line and involved even when it’s really doing nothing in terms of the original problem. This is not seen as a failure of the project; instead it encourages to re-double the efforts to raise more funding and awareness for the project under the idea that a grand enough project would eventually have to solve the problem.
So, it becomes an exercise of kicking the can down the road at a grand scale.
Affordable housing is easy, look at the UK. They had it and then broke it. So the solution is to fix what they broke. (I figure you’re American, the solution involves that scary socialism word so I welcome your ignorant comments as to why “We can’t do that!”. Don’t forget to ignore the post WWII GI stuff.)
Fusion is an idea, it’s been said that if it was properly funded we’d have it by now instead of “in 20 years time”. There’s your Manhattan Mk II, our very own helium factory.
I am an American, but I live in Germany. Socialism is fine. Don’t blindly bash people you don’t know.
The thing is that the US is different.
An affordable housing solution that works in New York City is not the same solution that works in a small town 40 miles from no damn where.
The UK has a population density of 279 people per square mile.
New York City has a population density of 29300 people per square mile.
I’ve lived places in the US where the whole county has a population of 7500 people and a population density of 15 per square mile.
The housing requirements and costs are tremendously different, as are the solutions for affordable housing.
Thing is, socialism isn’t necessarily what you were sold as socialism. For example, the welfare state was originally refused by the socialists because it represented “throwing a bone” to the poor by the rich and thus prevented total revolution to full dictatorship of the proletariat. The people alone, according to the original theory, can only rise to a trade union level of class consciousness, in a compromise with the owning classes, which meant that a revolution was necessary to bring about the true workers’ state.
So unless you’re acutely aware of what ideologies and practices you are buying and selling under the auspice of “socialism”, you can be too easily taken over by those who would use your compliance to further other causes.
The philosophical underpinnings of socialism come from things like Romanticism and then Hegel, etc. which basically assume that a person is not even defined as a person until they actualize themselves through the society at large. In other words, You as an individual does not exist except as defined by everyone.
The problem becomes defining “everyone”, or the society, which is being represented not by each and every individual but by the elected or self-elected administration, which is not the same thing as the people in either case. This means that the actions defined as “socialism” or what defines you as a person does not actually stem of the people, but of the administration, in the name of the people but not of the people. It becomes a dictatorship of the socially powerful, who then become financially powerful, which replaces the owning class of capitalism as rulers.
So buying socialism and calling your policy socialism is selling something you might not want to have – if you understood what you’re really talking about. In the modern context, people who claim to be socialist are largely just moderate capitalists who want to hide behind the label, or confused individuals who don’t know what they’re talking about, or people who have ulterior motives and want to obfuscate what socialism means in order to take more than they demand.
Dude:
Socialism is an term older than Marxism.
Definitely included ‘the welfare state’, including religious and other charity.
The problem is the Fing Marxists/commies deliberately conflate ‘socialism’ with whatever the F they’re calling themselves this week.
Their drunken idiot founder having redefined ‘socialism’ in long winded founding rants.
Private definitions are a hallmarks of a cult.
True for commies or clams.
TLDR;
Socialism isn’t just another name for commies.
But because commies are such weasels, it is.
Also, yeah yeah, I know, “Communism isn’t socialism”. Guess what, paraphrasing Marx: “Communism is Socialism taken seriously.”
People who adopt socialism and reject communism despite largely just pick and choose whatever principles they find convenient out of “socialism” and ignore the logical consistency of the whole thing when it interferes with their own self-interests.
Rules for thee, not for me.
For some thinkers, and not for others. There wasn’t any unified theory and everybody just winged their own armchair philosophy without any intent to put it into practice. It was more about aristocratic thinkers grandstanding to be seen as philanthropists despite their social standing and their actual indifference to it. The early socialists were also pretty paternalistic and though of the poor as a class that needed management rather than self-administration. That was the main criticism by Marx.
When they started to implement socialism systematically, the welfare state was first implemented by Otto Von Bismarck as a compromise between the classes (state socialism), and the socialists/communists immediately rejected it because it watered down the call for total workers’ revolution. In other words, it’s wrong when you do it, and right when we do it.
Meanwhile, the “more successful” social model, depending on accounts, is the Nordic Model, which is based neither on capitalism or socialism, but on “corporatism” which takes the different factions of the society as collective groups with representation and puts them into mutual discussion and compromise about rules and regulations, such as general contracts over wages and labor hours etc.
Guess what that is modeled from? From the system of medieval guilds and later Italian Fascism, with modifications of universal suffrage and egalitarian democracy.
Not socialism.
Sorry, I meant earlier Italian Fascism – before Mussolini turned it into “Si Si Si”.
Dude:
The poor definitely need a ‘daddy’.
Almost by definition.
If they could manage their shit, they wouldn’t be poor for long.
At least in the USA and western Europe.
A dad comes with ‘asking for an allowance’.
Who do they think they are?
Jerry Brown? (lifelong trust fund snot-monkey)
That depends on whether the fault is in the system or in themselves. That is the whole debate.
It is demonstrably true that many poors stop being poor by getting their shit together.
Are there edge cases?
Sure.
Life is more poker than chess.
Some people get dealt really crap cards.
Many of them are tough as hell and do fine.
Some are born rich and never want for anything.
Soft as marshmallows, especially in the head.
When?
The UKs housing market is a mess and has been for all of living memory.
What % of urban housing units are council owned as of 2025?
How many died in fires in council owned and maintained high rise housing?
How many in the single worst incident?
What is generational dole?
Is ‘Shameless’ a documentary?
The UK is a lost cause.
Democracy failure mode: More than 50% on government tit, vote for ‘more tit’, repeat.
It’s over.
If your in the UK and not on tit the only decision left is where you’re moving to.
Everything is fine in the UK, and if you say differently you face prison
I DO have clear definition.
BTW, military’s Army Corps can (and SHOULD) help out with building average houses, or condos, for the average law-abiding tax-paying citizens who ALREADY paid their bills in full.
Yes, Public Housing in the US is a disaster controlled by emerged cartels. I am not saying we should be repeating these, I am saying we should be learning from, say, public housing in Vienna, Austria. Average rental there goes for around $600 a month. Not shoddy bunch of houses in the middle of nowhere, a condo in a high rise, with public swimming pool, stores, kindergartens and hospitals. $600 a month. Public transportation, too.
I am not clear why engineers and sane thinking people get all the flak intended for the morons who destroyed things in the past. Coops in the US used to be a large economy driving thing, and those were simple, SIMPLE to open and run. I drive pass few coop-built houses on regular basis, so I know these. They were modest by today’s standards, but affordable back then. Not McMansions, but good enough to live in.
I’ve heard UK stories aplenty, and local builder-tie-ins are not much better. They are literally cartels forcing exorbitant prices for unclear merit. Again how do I know this? By having friends who are contractors.
Regardless, US is permanently stuck in the late 1980s, celebrating the accomplishments long past. We still cannot move forward into the 21 century, because our economy seem to be permanently stuck in the bronze-age mentality still, while entire world is mostly pass the alloy-age.
As I said, it is either us or AI, and I see that AI will win while we are stuck discussing minutiae.
L.O.L.
To quote a lot of folks I’ve known “Which part of Texas are you from son?”
You understand condo’s and coop’s mean you own certain parts of the property, right? “Coop” = cooperative, “Condo” = condominium. You actually buy or get a mortgage to obtain ownership of a share of the building or your unit as a part of the building.
“Coop” and “Condo” are not the same thing as “apartment” or “flat” or “high rise”.
$600 for high rises with pools and all … yeah, there’s this thing they have now …. I think Adam Smith invented it. It’s called the market.
Unless you’re thinking of Cabrini Green or Starrett city, you are literally talking about socialism or communism because any developer who could build a livable,
safe complex and charge $600 a month would because 50% of the US population would move there in a hot minute.
The issue isn’t technology or engineers or research, it’s just how capitalism works.
The US is stuck in the 80’s? Geez, have you seen what San Francisco or Miami or NYC look like and cost? Yeah, I member the 80’s, the US is stuck, but not in the 80’s.
The US is fundamentally grappling with the fact that something like 30% to 50% of the employable population either have no significant marketable skills needed for the global economy or are at a barely manageable theshhold of skills and earnings with constantly threats of a “race to the bottom” for income as offshoring and automation and now AI rewrite what is needed to achieve “the American Dream.”
This is what ALL the drama is about (orange man). It’s why middle aged white men without college educations have a rapidly increasing mortality rate while for the rest of the WORLD mortality is going down (except in regions of war).
Someone changed all the rules of the game and either no one told a whole bunch of the players or they didn’t listen. Which is glib. The rules changed and the institutions intended to protect them either failed out of fecklessness or had previously been stripped or shut down in the name of cost cutting.
Your “manhattan project” is basically South Park’s “underwear, something something profit.”
Good points, and thank you for pointing out the obvious while leaving important parts out.
Coops provided their own starting capital. That IS the definition of the coop, cooperative initiative. Whether commercial banks like it or not (they hate it) is irrelevant. Point is, pooling resources together. Not just finances, EVERYTHING, skills, expertise, know-how. A lot of coops I heard about where literally built from ground up by the people who knew how to build their own houses.
“…$600 for high rises with pools and all … yeah, there’s this thing they have now …. I think Adam Smith invented it. It’s called the market….” no, and DO find a youtube video. I am not making this up. It is not the market, it is public housing for those left out of the market. Very simple. Maybe people do NOT want to be part of the rat race and opt out.
I do not own any property (long story, unrelated to this thread, been renting the same unit for the last 20 years, not coop). I also do not want to own any property where I live, too many parasites riding my back for free.
Market supposed to weed out the meek and non-function, and it is not doing its job in the US. Time to introduce some proper competition, and public housing financed by coops could be just such a thing. Pooling resources. Cooperating. Useless/destructive competition can wait.
“…The issue isn’t technology or engineers or research, it’s just how capitalism works…” I know how wit works, and I just described the cooperative capitalism that can compete with the outsourced financing. There are other “capitalisms” out there, btw, and one version taught in high school is one of many. “Capital” can be many things, too. Human Capital, ie, expertise, is another one – the one that NAFTA shipped offshore in the 1990s.
“…This is what ALL the drama is about (orange man)…” I do not vote for clowns. Their words generated at random might as well be AI-generated for all I care. Actually, now that I think of it, we should elect AI-generated pre and vice-prez and be over with.
I do not agree that “…The US is fundamentally grappling with the fact that something like 30% to 50% of the employable population either have no significant marketable skills needed for the global economy ..” yes it does, and US potential at large is being regularly squandered on meaningless s**t of no particular merit. We have the potential. We have the able-bodied (and reasonably well-educated) population. Whether it is being wasted is a different story. NAFTA is one of those stories.
Case in point – Japan was insourcing people just like US did later. It was running the risk of being overwhelmed by cheap workers. What did it do? Read the Nintendo manual – ANY manual, and notice the names. Pretty much ALL of them will be japanese. Why? Japan passed a law that insourced/foreign workers cannot be paid less than twice the salary of locals. It became cheaper to train and hire its own. Yep.
Funny you mention capitalism, because 100% capitalism is dead on arrival without the “trickle-down economy” or social programs. Similarly, any 100% socialism is dead on arrival without elements of capitalism or free trade (or social programs). The two are about as unattainable as pure communism (mind you, The Amish had communism since, like, ever – and it works for them, btw, no money, etc, just at the parrish level, not nation-wide).
“…barely manageable theshhold of skills…” comes from chasing ever running away jobs that pay well. Rat race. It doesn’t mean the populace is dumb, it means there is no definite target to run after. Direct result that’s quite predictable – why chase after a dream that can disappear in few years. “Gypsy economy” we truly are, btw.
Someone changed all the rules of the game – emerged cartels are nothing new, and our anti-trust laws suppoed to prevent them from emerging, but they failed.
I served in the military and hurting with words doesn’t impress me. Try snowflakes.
Fascinating.
I truly did NOT intend to derail the topic into socialism-vs-capitalism magabagoo, so apologies for the unintended consequences of my actions.
Regardless, some scientists (like Albert Einstein – and others) turned down offer to work for the military. I am pretty sure there were plenty of engineers who did the same, too. Not because they were traitors, but because they knew exactly well how it will go and didn’t want to have any part of it.
That’s why I said we need Manhattan Project for the civil purposes.
Please don’t mix me with the tree huggers, and I do know what I am talking about. Do your homework first, reply with useful information.
AI won’t figure it out for the same reason humans can’t: they’re both strictly programmed to ignore vital pieces of the problems and thus can’t find working solutions.
The design of the implosion bomb, the top picture, is ironic to me seeing as Americans have never embraced soccer.
Yes at that time a “foot ball” might have been one thing that got attention of the hush hush police.
Really it’s all that cardio that we object to, not the phenomena of tesselation
I guess that’s the influence of the British scientists working on the Manhattan Project ;)
(jk)
I have one of the world’s largest private collections of trinitite and trinitite-related literature. I’m the original author of the Trinitite FAQ in my link.
I’m quite jealous.
Very very hard to get these days. I’m told counterfeit Trinitite shows up on eBay occasionally. I’d settle for some Chernobylite but the post office might object. I can’t even get Tritium via Alibaba any more. I scored a bunch of rice grains worth but seem to have misplaced them, which would worrying if I had kids or planned to.
I was lucky enough to meet a number of the original Manhattan project scientists, including Bernie Feld and Phillip Morrison.
Brilliant but very haunted very angry men.
I’m not afraid to ask… it is the consequences of asking that I’m worried about.
In his article, “An Engineering History of the Manhattan Project,” Brian Potter discusses some of the physical and engineering methods used in the Manhattan Project to develop the uranium and plutonium fission bombs.
However, there is also a story to tell about the development of plutonium chemistry needed to separate and then purify plutonium sufficiently to make a fission bomb possible. Various plutonium methods were developed, first at the University of California, Berkeley, where Glenn Seaborg and his group initially produced, isolated, and identified plutonium as a new element following neptunium on the periodic table. Later, the bismuth-phosphate precipitation chemistry was developed by Glenn Seaborg and other scientists at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory in Jones Laboratory, not far from Stagg Field stadium, where Enrico Fermi built the first man-made, self-sustaining nuclear reactor. The bismuth-phosphate chemistry was modified for use at Hanford, Washington, to separate the plutonium from uranium and the highly radioactive fission products in irradiated reactor fuel elements.
However the plutonium products sent to Los Alamos still had impurities which would interfere with using the plutonium in a working fission bomb. At Los Alamos, additional plutonium purification chemistry was developed by Arthur Wahl, who as Seaborg’s graduate student at Berkeley had first separated and identified the new element of plutonium. Following this chemical purification, the plutonium could then be converted into plutonium metal, which was then used in the Fat Man fission bomb.
Hysterias about “proliferation” hinders what could allow civilization to voyage beyond our world or even beyond our universe.