NUCLEAR WEAPONS: THE HISTORY OF WHAT HAPPENS IN A NUCLEAR REACTION

NUCLEAR WEAPONS:

THE HISTORY OF WHAT HAPPENS IN A NUCLEAR REACTION

The mysterious powers of nuclear reactions were evident enough to attract the attention of enlightenment scholars.  They just didn’t know what they were looking at because they couldn’t actually see what was happening.  But electricity was certainly an obvious phenomenon, as Benjamin Franklin demonstrated during his “Key-on-a-Kite” experiment in a thunderstorm [1752].  He was lionized as a scientist in Europe and was received as a scholar in France when he became our representative there during the American Revolution.

            Static electricity had long been observed.  Shocks from “electric” fish in the Nile were described thousands of years ago.  And magnets made from iron “Lodestones,” comprised of the naturally occurring mineral Magnetite [Fe₃O₄], were used in navigation.

In 1799, Italian Alessandro Volta developed the first battery.  Controlled experiments with electricity could then begin in earnest.  Glass tubes were evacuated, and electrical currents run through from one end to the other.  The resulting glow at the cathode end [negative terminal] was observed as early as 1859 and later called “Cathode Rays.”  And they could be deflected by magnets!  They would eventually be identified as negatively charged particles called, “Electrons.”  By 1904, Cathode Ray Tubes were created, creating, in turn, a revolution in radio, telephone, and television networks.

Other unidentified “Rays” were observed coming out of these early Cathode Tubes.  In 1895, German Wilhelm Rontgen discovered the “X-Ray” by chance, famously exposing the bone structure of his wife’s hand on a photographic plate.  X-Rays are a form of high energy electromagnetic radiation and are not composed of atomic particles.  Now we were beginning to understand what was going on in those subatomic spaces!

Soon thereafter, further investigations of invisible ray emanation from electrically charged cathode tubes uncovered “Alpha Particles” and “Beta Particles.”  Both of these “Rays” were deflected by magnets and were determined, therefore, to be charged particles of matter.  Alpha Particles are positively charged helium nuclei [two positively charged protons and two neutral neutrons]; Beta Particles are negatively charged electrons [or “Antielectrons,” called Positrons].

Soon enough, scientists began bombarding various minerals with these newly produced rays to study what happened to them.  So when Uranium was discovered in “Pitchblende” taken from a Czechoslovakian mine [Joachimsthal], it was examined by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898.  Marie successfully isolated the highly radioactive element, Radium, from the Uranium ore.  Radium is a product of the nuclear decay of Uranium and is “radioactive.” It breaks down spontaneously and releases radiation.  Marie Curie’s health then began to fail.  Exposure to radium radioactivity was the cause.

In 1903, Ernest Rutherford identified “Gamma Rays” as another high energy electromagnetic radiation released from Radium.

Remember the first illuminated dial on old wrist watches?  Documentaries, movies, and plays are written about the “Radium Girls” who painted the luminescent radium mixture onto the dials.  They were also exposed to radium’s radioactivity and suffered accordingly.

Only one thing was left to fully thrust us into the atomic age.  The discovery and identification of the Neutron.  That neutral particle [no electrical charge] acts like glue in the atomic nucleus and keeps positively charged protons from repelling each other and flying apart.  It was described by James Chadwick, who won the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work.  Enrico Fermi won the Nobel Prize in 1938 for irradiating radioactive elements with neutrons.  The work of Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Fritz Strassmann described “Nuclear Fission,” using the neutron bombardment of Uranium to create it.  The race was on!

            It was this last discovery that prodded Albert Einstein into action.  Having fled Germany to the United States in 1932, he sent American President Franklin Roosevelt his now famous letter in 1939, encouraging him to begin research on the energy-producing capabilities of such nuclear fission.  He later recanted his action, saying, “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would never have lifted a finger.”

            The process of creating a nuclear reaction is remarkably basic to the nature of matter.  Uranium, in the right isotopic concentration and pressure, can essentially blow itself up.  It is one of those hidden forces of nature just waiting to be detonated.  Hiding to maintain the illusion that Earth is a “Garden of Eden,” that rare biblical location chosen for our blissful beginning.  If so, why would such a place have been seeded with the elements of its own destruction, just waiting for us to discover and develop?

            Find them, bring them together, and boom!  Nature does its thing.  But if that is so, why hasn’t the Earth already blown itself up?

Herein lies the genius [or trickery] of the setup.  The elements of explodable [fissile] Uranium are cobbled up with other concealing elements, thinly spread out, and found in appreciable concentrations in only a few locations, all located far away from each other.

That’s how Adolf Hitler and Madame Curie figure further into the story.  Curie wanted to study this newly discovered element, Uranium, and so ordered up a large quantity from the only place it had been found.  In Czechoslovakia, in waste piles from the Silver Mines at Joachimsthal.

Curie went to work, physically isolating the radioactive element and physically exposing herself to radiation sickness.  She was rewarded in discovering that highly radioactive breakdown of Uranium, the element Radium.

Thirty years later, Hitler was informed of this magic ore, Uranium, and the possible release of its massive storehouse of energy.  But Hitler would never fully pursue atomic weapons in earnest.  He was concentrating in producing conventional armament.  And many, if not most, of the physicists who tried to explain the possibilities of nuclear weapons, were Jewish.  He would not rely on their assistance.  Regardless, many of them had already fled, and most of them to here in the United States.  So when Albert Einstein, an Austrian Jew, wrote to President Roosevelt, the President listened.

            But if it is so natural to create a nuclear explosion, why wasn’t everyone doing it?  Creating an “Atom Bomb,”that is.  In fact, it is quite difficult.  You must first find enough Uranium, sprinkled within which are found rare forms of the Uranium atom carrying fewer neutrons in the nucleus.  Normally, Uranium is composed of 92 protons and 146 neutrons in its nucleus.  The neutrons allow the protons to “stick” together.  The number of electrons matches the number of protons, 92, to balance out the negative and positive charges within the nucleus.

99.3% of naturally occurring Uranium is in this form.  We call it “U-238,” 92 protons and 146 neutrons.  This form of Uranium is not “fissile” and will not sustain a nuclear explosion based on a chain reaction.

0.7% of naturally occurring Uranium exists with a lower number of neutrons [143], which makes it unstable and eager to change into something different.  This Uranium, with fewer neutrons, is called “U-235,” 92 protons and 143 neutrons.  In significant concentrations, U-235 can sustain the chain reaction needed to create a nuclear explosion.  It is the only “fissile” isotope of Uranium [atoms that vary in neutron number but maintaining the same number of protons] naturally occurring.  So, U-235 is the key.  Finding and concentrating it is the difficulty!

            Once enough U-235 is sufficiently concentrated, a nuclear reaction can be created by bombarding that concentration with Neutrons.  For each such U-235 Uranium nucleus hit by a Neutron, a split occurs [Fission], creating two halves of an atom racing away from each other at one-thirtieth of the speed of light.  In addition, as many as two additional neurons will be released.  If enough of the “fissile” Uranium-235 is packed in closely together, those new neutrons will collide with more Uranium atoms, which will then split and, in turn, release even more new neutrons.  As these further collide with the concentrated Uranium-235, a chain reaction will occur.  In a span of less than one second, eighty multiplications will occur, exploding a trillion atoms of Uranium!

            That seems far too simple an explanation for the creation of such awesome energy.  It is.  But the first problem faced in releasing such atomic destruction is not in exploding it.  American scientists did not even field test the first Atomic Bomb it dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.  They didn’t have enough of the Uranium-235 isotope which had been concentrated at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  They were just convinced it would work.

            Uranium [with 92 protons] is the heaviest element now found in nature.  Plutonium may have once been the heaviest [with 94 protons] and was present when our world was formed four billion years ago.  But its half-life [the time to radioactively decay half of it to something different] is much shorter than the age of the Earth, and so it essentially removed itself.  That we use Plutonium now in our bombs is because we learned how to create it again in Uranium based nuclear reactors.

            That was accomplished in the Hanford, Washington facility, part of the World War II Manhattan Project.  The second bomb dropped on Japan in World War II was based on Plutonium created there.   That one, however, first required testing.  For it included a “Gadget” which used conventional explosives to collapse a core of Plutonium and explode it through a chain reaction of nuclear fission.  This would become the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan on August 9, 1945

            In May of 1945, President Truman authorized Henry Stimson, his 76-year-old Secretary of War, to establish a secret “interim committee” to advise him on the use of nuclear weapons.  It was composed of prominent national advisors and government officials.  A Scientific Advisory Committee included four Manhattan Project physicists:  Enrico Fermi, Arthur H. Compton, Ernest O. Lawrence, and J. Robert Oppenheimer [Director of the secret laboratory at Los Alamos assembling the bombs].

United States Admiral William D. Leahy, President Truman’s Chief of Staff, said that “The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.”  In his later memoir, he stated that the United States “… had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”  He was both wrong and right.

            It turns out, however, that learning how to “split” atoms [Fission] was just the beginning of our ambitions.  Humans aspire to the majestic power generated by our magnificently mysterious and gloriously exploding Sun.  I guess it is just part of human nature to want more than what we have already gotten.

But the nuclear engine powering the sun involves “Fusion,” the driving together of two smaller hydrogen atoms to form a larger helium atom.  The energy released is fantastic.  Truly God-like power.  And yet, we were able to touch upon those conditions when we next created a thermonuclear weapon called the “Hydrogen Bomb.”

Hydrogen Bombs are much more powerful.  They use a uranium- or plutonium-based nuclear explosion [an atom bomb] focused on a concentrated core of hydrogen isotopes and other surrounding materials, including plutonium or uranium, and creating a much larger, sun-like explosion, through Nuclear Fusion within!  This is a complex reactive structure, requiring much testing.

It has been more than 80 years since the first atomic bomb was exploded in anger.  Let us hope that it never happens again!

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