Manhattan Project Atomic Bomb

More discussion about this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...

Nukes have also been a very well-known concept, then have been theoretically invented in 1939 and by 1941, it was well-proven that one can be made. If anything in nukes was a black swan event it was the isotope mix of reactor-produced plutonium which made detonation of plutonium bomb without a fizzle incredibly difficult - something which no one had an idea before it happened and it almost doomed the project - in 1941, making the bomb looked a lot easier than it proved to be.It was also well-

It's not a new thing:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1r...

Thats the thinking that lead to the development of the nuclear bomb.

Not 2 weeks before, but the parent comment applies if you switch out "two weeks" with "a couple years", right?https://www.atomicarchive.com/history/manhattan-project/p1s2...

Obligatory Nuclear Secrecy reference: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/04/02/do-we-want-another...

It is very likely: the atomic bomb was initially built to defeat Nazi Germany, and the Manhattan program was started before Pearl Harbour. When you read The Atomic Bomb book, many scientists who worked on the bomb justified their effort by defeating the Nazis, and many had to escape from Europe.Once it became clear Nazi were about to be defeated, there were discussions from the scientists about sharing the knowledge w/ all countries. But at that point, the scientists had long lost contro

Hitler wasn't on track to 'get the bomb' before the end of the war.So it wasn't an America or Germany situation, in fact nobody on the planet was close to 'getting the bomb' in 1942. Though not for lack of trying. The Manhattan project was a stupendous effort compared to anything else done to move science forward by brute force up to that that. And short of the space race nothing like it has been seen since until the current effort to bring AI into the world and

I think this also has to be considered in the context of an ongoing cataclysmic war encompassing the world where whole cities were being destroyed and of course they were developing a weapon to destroy them faster. Today, WWII is that long ago thing that lasted for a few years and then it was over. Soon the veterans and the Holocaust survivors will all be dead. To anyone then, a lot of things probably didn't seem as important. A lot of people reacted to the atomic bomb once it was public as

Maybe think about the invention of nuclear weapons/energy rather than airplanes since that matches the type of concern. You can just choose not to take an airplane.If there was no manhattan project and work towards that goal had been done in the open over a long period of time, I don't think people with safety concerns would be laughed out of the building.In fact I think we got kinda lucky that it turns out to be so expensive to build nukes that only nation states can do it, and