It might; I knew there was a third process but I’d forgotten what it was. All three processes, electromagnetic separation, centrifuge and gaseous diffusion, were considered feasible means of separation but the industrial plant necessary for each was simply out of reach of all other nations in the world. So we pursued all three, and built the massive plants for them.
To my knowledge, Oak Ridge did all the Uranium separation and had all three plants. But if building one plant was beyond the reach of the rest of the world, building three giant separation plants wasn’t enough for us. We decided to go yet another route to making an atom bomb, which required yet another giant industrial complex. The Hanford, Washington, facility did no uranium separation. Instead, they built graphite moderated reactors to make Plutonium, which can be chemically separated from the Uranium slugs. The only real difficulty there is that the process had to be done mechanically by remote control since Plutonium is highly toxic.
So not only did we decide to build a Uranium bomb, we decided to make a Plutonium bomb, too. The scientists were pretty sure the Uranium bomb would work, but it just took so long to get enough U235 for it. The actual detonation process for Pu239 was more complex, since it involved carefully timed explosive compression of a Plutonium sphere. That’s what the Los Alamos lab was created for.
I look back at “the American Century” and am saddened by what we have today. At the beginning of the century, we built the Panama Canal through jungles, mountains and swamps were everyone else had failed. In the middle of the century, during the greatest war mankind has ever waged, we took what were just arcane formulae on physicists’ blackboards and built atomic weapons. Near the end of the century, we put men on the moon and returned them to earth.
I look now at the BP tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico and wonder: Where has our competence gone? Where is American excellence? All around us, whether in the headlines in the paper or just dealing with the scheduling secretary at the doctor’s office, we are surrounded by incompetence. I just assume the person I am dealing with is incompetent at what they do now. I don’t even wonder why they are incompetent.
A big part of the problem is that BP is NOT American, it is British and Brown actually supported this “one world government” idea. That’s the whole reason that BP has been able to snooker the self-centered, elitist progressives. All BP had to do was brown nose the Democrat politicians and regulators, talk up their Progressive creds and they could get away with anything.
My husband went through this with BP in the eighties. He was the environmental advisor for ARCO Marine. He wrote the only oil spill contingency plan which was approved by the state of Alaska and in force at the time of the Valdez spill. The problem was that Alyeska had nothing to back up the plan, no booms, nothing. He tried to get BP to agree to preparing for a major spill. He told BP execs that their oil spill plans were nothing but a paper tiger and that statistics indicated that they were over due for a human error caused spill in Alaska. The BP exec sat in the meeting with a newspaper in front of his face and then answered that BP had no intention of spending money on oil spill protection in Alaska until the government forced them to do so. He said that BP had already spent more money than they wanted to on oil spill in the North Sea and unless the state of Alaska forced the issue, they had no intention of spending more money. So, my husband ran an oil spill drill with a scenario that closely approximated the actual Valdez spill which happened six months later. It made no difference to BP.
Well, for starters, WWII was a hugely successful effort, and so we tend to forget, or minimize, our own many setbacks and failures.
For another, of course it's highly risky to attempt predicting the future, especially from the perspective on 1940 (!), but perhaps I can go out on a limb and suggest we have not yet begun to hear the whole story on this Gulf oil rig accident. We don't know what caused it, we don't know why all the "fail-safes" failed, we don't know why none of the various attempted fixes have worked.
In short, it's still to soon to say (especially here in June of 1940), what may turn out to be all the lessons learned from some future oil disaster. ;-)
Can we even say for sure it will turn out to be a case of massively arrogant stupidity, or were there other as yet unexplained factors involved?
Of course here in June 1940, all this is impossible to predict. But I'm absolutely certain, once our descendents reach June 2010, in their hi-tech age it'll all be simple and straightfordward stuff... ;-)