Beyond "Oppenheimer"

Some reading for those who found the events of the film "Oppenheimer" interesting:

The Manhattan Project (and Before)

This is a concise timeline of the Manhattan project, from the initial atomic bomb patent (!) to the test of the Gadget. Beyond the science and the scientists at Los Alamos, the Manhattan Project was an incredible feat of engineering involving 129,000 workers at its peak, requiring the development of the first industrial-scale processes for the enrichment of uranium, generation of plutonium in nuclear reactors, and extraction and processing of enough fissile material required to build the bombs, all in less than 3 years! In wartime delays are much harder to stomach (compare with the case of ITER today).

The Taming of Plutonium: Pu Metallurgy and the Manhattan Project

This arXiv preprint outlines one of the unanticipated challenges arising during the Manhattan Project, that "plutonium would prove to be the most complex
element on the periodic table." At ambient pressure, plutonium exhibits six distinct solid allotropes (crystalline structures), more than any other element! The differing densities of the allotropes greatly complicated the processing of the plutonium into a bomb core, requiring the development of a suitable alloy to stabilize the plutonium into a single phase.

Trinity, by K. T. Bainbridge

A technical report outlining the organization of the first nuclear weapon test, practical challenges that emerged, and the data that was obtained.

Los Alamos and ‘‘Los Arzamas’’

A brief comparison between the American and Soviet nuclear weapons programs, the latter headed by Yulii Khariton who was sometimes called the Soviet Oppenheimer by his colleagues. But unlike Oppenheimer he remained the scientific director of the institute for more than 40 years.