LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Manhattan Project: Uranium
built 128 days ago
By the start of 1945 the Manhattan Project had 'turned the corner'. The uranium bombs seemed assured of success in a matter of months. The prospects for the plutonium bomb were looking up although meeting an August 1 deadline imposed by Groves was far from certain. However, allied military successes against Germany and Japan made it a horse race to see whether it would matter to the war effort.
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The Manhattan Project eventually produced four bombs. Little Boy, the code name for the uranium bomb, utilized explosives to crash pieces of uranium together to begin an explosive chain reaction. Fat Man, the code name for the plutonium bomb, was more difficult to design. It required a neutron-emitting source to initiate a chain reaction within a series of concentric nested spheres. The outermost shell was an explosive lens system surrounding a pusher/neutron absorber shell designed to reduce the effect of Taylor waves, the rapid drop in pressure that occurs behind a detonation front and could interfere with an implosion. The next nested sphere was a uranium tamper/reflector shell containing a plutonium pit and beryllium neutron initiator.
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As the Manhattan project progressed, Fermi and his crew worked on what was to be the first nuclear chain reaction. The reactor was called CP-1 or Chicago pile - 1. It was successful, and they were able to control the fission of uranium and (presumably) create plutonium (although the plutonium production was not measured at the time—only the neutron production, which was, for the time, very large).
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In "The Manhattan Project" (Black Dog & Leventhal), published last month, Norris writes about the Manhattan Project's Manhattan locations. He says the borough had at least 10 sites, all but one still standing. They include warehouses that held uranium, laboratories that split the atom, and the project's first headquarters — a skyscraper hidden in plain sight right across from City Hall.
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On June 3, after visiting the thermal diffusion uranium enrichment pilot plan at the Naval Research Laboratory, a team of Manhattan Project experts recommended that a plant be built to feed enriched material to the electromagnetic enrichment plant at Oak Ridge. On June 18 Groves contracted to have S-50, a liquid thermal diffusion uranium enrichment plant, built at Oak Ridge in no more than three months.
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