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Los Alamos Primer The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb

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ISBN-10: 0520075765

ISBN-13: 9780520075764

Edition: 1992

Authors: Robert Serber, Richard Rhodes, Richard Rhodes

List price: $47.95
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The classified lectures that galvanized the Manhattan Project scientists--with annotations for the nonspecialist reader and an introduction by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. In March 1943 a group of young scientists, sequestered on a mesa near Santa Fe, attended a crash course in the new atomic physics. The lecturer was Robert Serber, J. Robert Oppenheimer's proteacute;geacute;, and they learned that their job was to invent the world's first atomic bomb. Serber's lecture notes, nicknamed the "Los Alamos Primer," were mimeographed and passed from hand to hand, remaining classified for many years. They are published here for the first time, and now contemporary readers can see just how…    
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Book details

List price: $47.95
Copyright year: 1992
Publisher: University of California Press
Publication date: 3/2/1992
Binding: Hardcover
Pages: 138
Size: 0.67" wide x 0.96" long x 0.06" tall
Weight: 1.210

Richard Lee Rhodes is a writer. He was born in Kansas City, Kansas on July 4, 1937. Rhodes received a B.A. from Yale University in 1959. Rhodes has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He began writing articles and essays that appeared in Harper's, Reader's Digest, Esquire, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone. Rhodes first book, The Island Ground, was published in 1970. He has written more than two dozen books. Rhodes' book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and the National Book Critics Circle…    

Introduction
Preface
The Los Alamos Primer
Object
Energy of Fission Process
Fast Neutron Chain Reaction
Fission Cross-sections
Neutron Spectrum
Neutron Number
Neutron Capture
Why Ordinary U Is Safe
Material 49
Simplest Estimate of Minimum Size of Bomb
Effect of Tamper
Damage
Efficiency
Effect of Tamper on Efficiency
Detonation
Probability of Predetonation
Fizzles
Detonating Source
Neutron Background
Shooting
Autocatalytic Methods
Conclusion
Endnotes
Appendix I: The Frisch-Peierls Memorandum
Appendix II: Biographical Notes
Index