Diana Preston - Before the Fallout

First published in the United States of America in 2005 by

Walker Publishing Company, Inc.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Walker & Company,M

104 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011

Title page spread Children of the Manhattan Project/Joseph Paplia Collection. Science Photo Library, London. CORBIS. Musee Curie, Paris. American Institute of Physics, Emilio Segrè Visual Archives. Hiroshima City Archives & Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Artists’ Rights Society, NY/Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid. What Little I Remember, by Otto Frisch (Cambridge University Press, 1979) Sketches by Otto Frisch. Norwegian Resistance Museum, Oslo. Norwegian Industrialworkers Museum, Vemork. Cal-Tech Photo Archives. The Sports Museum of New England, Boston. Boston Herald Library/Archives. Michael Preston.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

available upon request

eISBN: 978-0-802-71819-8

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In 1998 a Russian general revealed that the Soviet Union had previously developed a portable atomic bomb and that, by then, less than half of the more than 100 manufactured could be accounted for. Despite subsequent official Russian denials that any were missing and assurances that all would be destroyed by 2000, experts remain concerned.

Szilard personifies the complex character of many of the scientists. One of the brightest minds and sharpest and most liberal analysts of the moral dilemma, he had such an opinion of himself and aversion to physical labor that he employed others to do his experimental work and was thrown out of his residential apartment at the University of Chicago for habitually refusing to empty his bathwater or flush the toilet on the grounds that this was “maid’s work.”

The licence es sciences is comparable to a bachelor of science degree.

Piezoelectricity comes from the Greek piezein, meaning to “press tight.”

Fluorescent substances absorb light of one color or wavelength and in its place radiate light of another color. When the source of the light is turned off, that radiation ceases. With phosphorescent materials, the radiation continues after the light source has been removed.

The ancient Greeks had two theories about the nature of matter. Some, like Aristotle, believed matter was infinite and continuous and so could be infinitely subdivided. Others, like Democritus and Epicurus, thought that matter consisted of minute and indivisible particles.

Hans Geiger would later develop this device into the Geiger counter, still used in radiation laboratories.

The scientists used the military term bombard to describe how they placed a source of radioactivity near an experimental subject—for which they again used a military term, the target —to determine the effect of the radioactivity released upon the target.

His discoveries about the properties of light would eventually lead to the development of television.

The speed of light is 670 million miles per hour, and the huge factor obtained by squaring it means that just a single pound of matter, if wholly converted to energy, would be equivalent to burning over a million tons of coal.

The Dreyfus Affair was a notorious French miscarriage of justice in which anti-Semitism played a major part. Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of passing military secrets to Germany and imprisoned on Devil’s Island. His conviction was eventually overturned after a long campaign led by writer Emile Zola.

Hydrogen, the smallest atom with its one orbiting electron and a charge of one on the nucleus, occupies the first place, helium with its doubly charged nucleus and two, orbiting electrons is in place number two and so on until uranium with its ninety-two whizzing electrons.

The British army would withdraw, leaving the task to the Royal Air Force. However, the use of air-power alone would, in this instance, fail; many civilians were killed in ill-directed bombing raids or machine-gunned when mistaken for hostile forces, thus promoting increased resistance.

In the Second World War Saipan and Tinian, once captured by the Americans, would become major air bases for the U.S. assault on Japan.

Frederic Joliot was sensitive to suggestions that their choice, highly unusual at the time, reflected a desire to retain the fame of the Curie name or anv subordinate status for him.

Trinity is one of Cambridge’s most famous colleges and the one in which Lord Byron famously kept a bear in his rooms.

Drinking a few glasses of heavy water would not be lethal, but the replacement of more than one third of the hydrogen in the human body’s fluids by deuterium would be fatal.

Hiroshima was also a leading producer of the hair extensions used by many women to create the traditional and luxuriant bunkin takashimada hairstyle. By 1922, 70 percent of Japan’s hair extensions were manufactured in Hiroshima.

The discovery of the positron was the first clear indication that the universe consisted of antimatter as well as matter.

According to one story, when Kapitza finally returned to Cambridge thirty years later, in the 1960s, he was invited to dine at Trinity College. To his consternation he realized he had no academic gown to wear. The college butler came to the rescue, producing Kapitza’s original gown, unworn since 1934.

Despite Niels Bohr’s efforts to save him, Wertenstein would be killed by flying shrapnel as he tried to flee to Hungary across the Danube in 1944.

A substantial sum, then equivalent to £290,000 or $ 1.4 million.

Suffolk would die the following year, 1941, while defusing a bomb.

Ironically, Heisenberg refused to lend him any of his own uranium stockpile.

Fritz Strassmann is commemorated at the Holocaust center in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, as one of the “righteous gentiles” who came to the aid of persecuted Jews.

Danzig is now Gdansk in Poland.

At that time 350,000 marks was roughly equated to £17,000 or $82,000.

Vidkun Quisling was the origin of the word quisling to describe a person collaborating with an enemy occupier.

Harmon was replaced after four months because of a weakness for alcohol and difficulties in his relations with nonmilitary personnel. His successor was Lieutenant Colonel Whitney Ashbridge.

Passengers on the bomber spent the sixteen-hour flight in the bomb bay, lying in the freezing cold on a rough mattress resting on the bomb doors. They had to wear full flying gear, including oxygen mask, helmet, and parachute. It was impossible to read because the plane was blacked out. Sometimes people lost their head in the cold, noisy darkness. Oliphant recalled a man who, thrashing about in a panic, inflated his life jacket and passed out. As Oliphant struggled to help him, the rip cord of the man’s parachute caught on something, filling the bay with rippling silk.