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Science Talk

The First Nuclear Arms Race: Churchill's Bomb, Part 2

Science Talk

Scientific American

Science

4.2644 Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2014

⏱️ 23 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Graham Farmelo is the award-winning author of the Dirac biography The Strangest Man. His latest book is Churchill’s Bomb: How the United States Overtook Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:28.9

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0:32.6

Steve Murski here with part two of our talk with Graham Farmelow, author of Churchill's bomb.

0:38.3

In terms of the effort to separate the uranium, I mean, it's a brute force kind of thing.

0:45.5

You just, if you just do it long enough and make the separation tubes big enough and use enough uranium, you can do it.

0:53.8

How long, I mean, the idea is that the uranium isotopes are a slightly different weight.

1:00.9

That's right.

1:01.1

And when you vaporize them, one will travel down the tube slightly further than the other.

1:09.5

And that's how you can separate them but how long were the tubes

1:13.2

that oh they were they were they were they were they were but this was a vast part it's not even

1:22.2

thinkable now because you'd see them from aerial satellites i mean they were building whole

1:26.6

towns to do this.

1:28.4

Just to separate out the uranium, I said. I know. And as you rightly say, it was, it was absolutely

1:32.9

brute force. And it was, and it was, well, as I said, I'm lost the words. It was to produce the

1:41.2

amount of fissile uranium and also plutonium.

1:46.9

America definitely took the lead on that, right?

1:50.1

Because it turned out you needed less of that stuff, that particular chemical element.

1:54.4

Americans were quickly took the lead in developing plutonium weapons

1:59.7

so that they could have enough

...

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