PHYS 199M Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Isotope Separation, Erich Bagge
18 Nov 2016
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Secrecy and government involvement: people began to worry about secrecy. People such as teller, szilard, and wigner felt the time had come for this, fermi was coming around to this view as well but was ambivalent. Bohr was greatly troubled by the idea of secrecy. He felt that it violated the very spirit of science and that in any event a bomb seemed very unlikely given the vast technical challenges needed to separate uranium isotopes. Fermi, while appreciating why secrecy was called for, was also intrinsically skeptical: in practice, still nothing resembling secrecy in the us. An article in the ny times of april 29, 1939 lays out the state of affairs. Some physicists believed the challenges of uranium isotope separation were. Difficult if not impossible : one thing the scientists agreed on: it was time to get the us government involved. Both fermi and szilard contacted the navy, both with no luck.
