Robert Serber 
The Los Alamos Primer [EPUB ebook] 
The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb, Updated with a New Introduction by Richard Rhodes

More than seventy years ago, American forces exploded the first atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing great physical and human destruction. The young scientists at Los Alamos who developed the bombs, which were nicknamed Little Boy and Fat Man, were introduced to the basic principles and goals of the project in March 1943, at a crash course in new weapons technology. The lecturer was physicist Robert Serber, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s protégé, and the scientists learned that their job was to design and build the world’s first atomic bombs. Notes on Serber’s lectures were gathered into a mimeographed document titled
The
Los Alamos Primer, which was supplied to all incoming scientific staff. The
Primer remained classified for decades after the war.


Published for the first time in 1992, the
Primer offers contemporary readers a better understanding of the origins of nuclear weapons. Serber’s preface vividly conveys the mingled excitement, uncertainty, and intensity felt by the Manhattan Project scientists. This edition includes an updated introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Richard Rhodes.


A seminal publication on a turning point in human history,
The Los Alamos Primer reveals just how much was known and how terrifyingly much was unknown midway through the Manhattan Project. No other seminar anywhere has had greater historical consequences.

 

Table of Content

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 Material 49

10 Simplest Estimate of Minimum Size of Bomb

11 Effect of Tamper

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

About the author

Robert Serber (March 14, 1909 – June 1, 1997) was an American physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project. Serber's lectures explaining the basic principles and goals of the project were printed and supplied to all incoming scientific staff, and became known as The Los Alamos Primer. The New York Times called him “the intellectual midwife at the birth of the atomic bomb.” Richard Rhodes won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for The Making of the Atomic Bomb. He subsequently published three further volumes of nuclear history: Dark Sun, Arsenals of Folly, and The Twilight of the Bombs.