The Los Alamos primer : the first lectures on how to build an atomic bomb
R. Serber (Author), Richard Rhodes (Editor, Writer of introduction)
In April 1943, at a new secret laboratory on a mesa in the high New Mexican desert, a crowd of the most brilliant young scientists in America heard five stunning lectures that summed up everything the world knew about how to build an atomic bomb. The lecturer was Robert Serber, a theoretical physicist and protege of J. Robert Oppenheimer; the laboratory was Los Alamos. Serber's lectures, assembled in note form and mimeographed, became the legendary LA-1, the Los Alamos Primer, the first document passed out to new recruits to the wartime enterprise, classified Secret Limited for twenty years after the Second World War and published here for the first time. Now contemporary readers can see just how much was known and how much remained to be learned when the Manhattan Project began. Would the "gadget," the atomic bomb, really work? How powerful would it be? Could it be made small enough and light enough to carry in a bomber? Could its explosive nuclear reaction be controlled? Working with Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the development of the atomic bomb, Professor Serber has annotated the Primer for the nonscientist. His preface, a lively informal memoir, vividly conveys the mingled excitement, uncertainty, and intensity the Manhattan Project scientists felt. Rhodes's introduction reviews the development of nuclear physics up to the day that Serber stood before his blackboard at Los Alamos and summarizes the work that followed. In this first published edition, the Los Alamos Primer finally emerges from the archives. No lectures anywhere have had greater historical consequences.--(Source of description unspecified.)
Print Book, English, 1992
University of California Press, Berkeley, 1992
Biography
xxxiii, 98 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780520075764, 0520075765
23693470
INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD RHODES PREFACE BY ROBERT SERBER The Los Alamos Primer 1 Object 2 Energy of Fission Process 3 Fast Neutron Chain Reaction 4 Fission Cross-sections 5 Neutron Spectrum 6 Neutron Number 7 Neutron Capture 8 Why Ordinary U Is Safe 9 Material49 10 Simplest Estimate of Minimum Size of Bomb ll Effect of Tam per 12 Damage 13 Efficiency 14 Effect of Tamper on Efficiency 15 Detonation 16 Probability of Predetonation 17 Fizzles 18 Detonating Source 19 Neutron Background 20 Shooting 21 Autocatalytic Methods 22 Conclusion ENDNOTES APPENDIX I: THE FRISCH-PEIERLS MEMORANDUM APPENDIX II: BIOG Index
Based on a set of 5 lectures given by R. Serber during the first two weeks of Apr. 1943 as an indoctrination course in connection with the starting of the Los Alamos Project