The science behind Hitler’s atomic bomb
And the story of how the greatest act of WWII sabotage stopped it.
“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” -J. Robert Oppenheimer
In the 1930s, as Europe stood on the precipice of World War II, a slew of nature’s secrets were being revealed to scientists everywhere. The atomic nucleus was discovered to have multiple components — protons and neutrons — with different binding energies inside. Some atoms were naturally radioactive, either spitting out helium nuclei (α decay) or electrons (β decay) as they decayed into different, more stable elements, but others could have nuclear reactions induced in them by coaxing them into capturing neutrons. While the Sun took the lightest elements and fused them into heavier ones, releasing energy, the heaviest elements could be split apart, through the process of nuclear fission, into lighter ones, also releasing a tremendous amount of energy. When the first fissile element (Uranium-235) was discovered, it was immediately recognized that the reaction each Uranium atom undergoes gives off more than 100,000 times the energy of an equivalent mass of TNT exploding.
