Courtesy US Govt. Defense Threat Reduction Agency
Scientists had already discovered that atomic nuclei, made up of neutrons and protons, release a tremendous amount of energy if they are broken apart. The open question was whether someone could create a hugely powerful bomb by setting up a sustained chain reaction—one in which neutrons from broken nuclei would continue to hit and split other nuclei in an expanding cascade.
“And,” Lamb said, “that brings us to the Chicago connection. A committee was set up to figure out how to proceed and where. The chair of that committee was Arthur Holly Compton, professor of physics at the University of Chicago. He more or less single-handedly decided the experiment should be done near Chicago.”
Stagg Field at University of Chicago, where the first man-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction occurred on December 2, 1942They recruited laborers from the south side, including high school students, and began building the pile in mid-November. “These neighborhood people played a vital role in assembling the pile,” Lamb said. “They did it in two weeks, working around the clock.”
The other thing that happened was that Oppenheimer picked a remote mesa he knew from attending a New Mexico boys’ school as the site for the full-scale development of the bomb.
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