46 new papers continue to unfold the story (and power) of the Gadget
The scientific focus of Chadwick’s lecture-paper project appealed to lab researchers like Susan Hanson, an inorganic chemist. “There’s a bunch of history of the Manhattan Project written by historians already,” she says. Not so much history written by scientists.
Trinity, after all, resulted in devastating drops on Japan and ushered in the atomic age, the Cold War, a couple thousand more nuclear tests, the supercomputed simulations and experiments that eventually replaced those tests, and the current world order that relies in large part on who has nuclear weapons and who doesn’t. If knowledge is power, knowledge of this sort of power is maybe even more dynamite.
The original radiochemistry team needed to collect samples of material in the crater Trinity left behind. From them, they could figure out what portion of the plutonium had split and how many fission products there were. “You couldn’t just walk in there and pick them up with your hands,” Hanson says. At least not if you liked your hands, or your life.
As part of the anniversary project, Hanson and colleagues worked to re-recalculate that yield, by dissolving 13 original samples of trinitite. New methods—a combination of nuanced techniques like inorganic separations chemistry and ultra-precise mass spectrometry—can pull out an element of interest, and then more precisely measure the isotopes within. Computer-aided analysis of those ratios gave a new quantification: 24.8 kilotons.
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