Atomic Briton who brought home the bomb

• Autores: Fred Pearce
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3147, 2017, págs. 42-43
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • William Penney had become a world expert on shock waves when, in the summer of 1944, he was headhunted by the newly founded Manhattan Project in the US. It was putting serious money behind a top-secret project begun by the British, code-named Tube Alloys, aimed at using new discoveries about atomic chain reactions to create a "super-bomb," which would detonate with a force equivalent to thousands of tonnes of TNT. Penney's other task at the project's secret base in Los Alamos NM was to model the outgoing shock waves from the atomic explosion itself, to maximize the destruction from the blast. He was the key scientist on the Pentagon target committee that decided which Japanese cities to bomb.