Quote:
Originally Posted by IROC
I think Oak Ridge had about 75k people at its height.
I drive past the Graphite Reactor every day. 
Also, on topic, I read the book "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes years ago (very good book, BTW) and it gets into this subject. The community of scientists working in this field at the time was pretty close-knit (kind of like it is now in the neutron scattering world I work in) and once it started becoming clear that nuclear reactions could be used to release a lot of energy (bombs), some folks decided to get out of Germany (Leo Szilard comes to mind). It seems that the very people capable of developing nuclear weapons at the time had no desire to let Germany be the country to develop them. |
It was used as a text book in my Nuke classes