European Stars And Stripes (Newspaper) - September 7, 1945, Darmstadt, Hesse                                The mighty atom to cause a successful Chain scientists must arrange things so that the free neutrons Are slowed from their dizzying the neutrons can be caused to collide with Frozen Hydrogen atoms in the about the same weight As the neutrons but Active practically Stop the neutrons in their As one billiard Ball can be stopped dead by hitting the neutrons Are now shot at the and the Chain reaction out of the blast that tears the uranium atom in two come also Gamma rays radiations that sometimes tear elec trons off atoms and otherwise shatter creating further flying fragments and the Chain reaction is carried Forward by the swarms of neutrons released from Eacer atom that is rebounding Back and the Neu trons Are sufficiently slowed so process is and vast Energy is it is this Energy that created chaos in it is this same Energy which poses the possibility of a new the Era of atomic in which the vast energies of the harnessed As the atom bomb shows they can May give Mankind greater than it has Ever yank the army weekly september 1945 Hie atomic bomb sixteen hours ago an american air plane dropped one bomb on that bomb had More Power than tons of it is an atomic bomb a harnessing of the Basic Power of the that simple made by president Truman at August electrified the it came As the Climax of one of the most dramatic stories in the history of mans Long search for the secrets of the Story behind the atomic bomb is a Detec Tive Story with no Sherlock Holmes for a the number of scientists who took part in the search was without and when the first of the bombs hit Hiroshima it was a Victory for the whole no Sta performing special investigator could claim credit for the breath Earth shattering Brilliant deductions had been clue after clue tracked Down to climactic but although the individual findings of Many men share the credit for the almost incredible that Success was made possible primarily by the kind of leg work and Laboratory work in which a metropolitan police Force would take work and lab work entailing years of Drudgery As Well As ill opened activity As Well As false scents As Well As cosmic the dramatic Story opens with Lise Meit a woman scientist and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in in 1938 Meitner is bombarding uranium atoms with neutrons and then submitting the uranium to chemical to her she and her Otto Hahn and find the ele ment barium in the smashed remains of the they remember they had put in barium As a chemical Carrier to precipitate a powerful new radioactive substance present in the but when they try to separate the substance from the it cannot be there is one possible and Only the mysterious substance is itself radioactive barium that had been there before the other barium was put but where did the radioactive barium come from it was a scientific mystery of the first it was like finding Champagne flowing from your it just  and then hitlers racist theories came into the Meitner was a Hitler had Over ruled his own Nuernberg Antisemitic Laws in order to try to compel her to stay in but outraged by the new escaped Over the dutch Border and fled to stopping in Denmark on the with Meitner in her former colleagues refused to face the facts of their revolutionary they reported in a Ger Man scientific publication that they could not bring themselves to believe that the radioactive barium came from the Lise Meitner was More since the barium was not there to begin she it must have come from the that meant it was the result of the uranium atom being split into two nearly equal she lost no time in getting in touch with her Otto Robert who worked in the Copenhagen Laboratory of the famous danish Niels testing together for the radioactive they saw for the first the possibility of a Geyser of atomic in the first weeks of 1939 Frisch succeeded at his he split the uranium Frisch cabled the news to who was in the with John Bohr and Enrico both Nobel prize winners i repeated the Experiment at Columbia University and announced the news to an astounded scientific Fermi then revealed that five years be fore he had been firing atomic bullets and had been prevented from making the discovery of uranium splitting of the uranium atom in by a mischance in his tech is pretty Happy today about his when he came so close to Mak ing that fateful discovery he was in Mussolini had he succeeded before his exile the Axis might have had atomic bombs with which to be Gin the Axis was thwarted again and again by its own among the scientists who helped produce the atom bomb were two jewish physicists who were forced by the nazis to emigrate to England and a danish professor who was smuggled out of German occupied Copenhagen with atomic secrets which he carried with him to London and the nazis raided his Laboratory but found another near miss for the nazis came when the collapse of France was imminent Premier edouard Daladier had sent a secret French mis Sion out of Norway past German spies with heavy water for French among them Frederick Soninlaw of the great heavy water is invaluable in cer Tain methods of atomic fission and is difficult to the water arrived in France just be fore the capitulation and was carried to England on one of the last ships to leave Germany nevertheless continued work on the and Allied leaders were reports had the germans working feverishly to forge a weapon from the atoms in alarmed scientists seeded their efforts to solve the secret of atomic in the american born nuclear physicists were so unaccustomed to the idea of using their science for military purposes that they hardly realized what needed to be the Early efforts to restrict publication on atomic subjects and to obtain government support for further research were stimulated largely by a Small group of foreign physicists living in the up to 1940 information on research which was to Lead to americas greatest secret weapon was open to any one of the european physicists exile in the the great Albert had written in 1905 a simple equation which was to be the Back ground for All the research in atomic the equation was part of his relativity theory and indicated that which is a form of has mass just As much As a particle of what we usually think of As and that any particle of matter therefore is the astonishing thing about his equation was that it showed that if Only a tiny bit of matter should be the result would be enor Mous backed by Einstein and his a Little band of americans and exiles from Axi dominated to president Roosevelt to interest him in the possibilities of atomic the convinced that much might come from atom appointed a committee to look into the up to the end of 1941 the total expenditures on atomic re search were although the amount of work done on the problem by scientists All Over the country was shortly before Pearl Harbor the president wrote prime minister Churchill suggesting that any efforts toward the development of an atomic bomb should be coordinated or even jointly con ducted by the and great that december the National Academy of sciences issued a report supporting the efforts already made in the atomic Field and expressing optimism about the information received from the British was even More and the the prime minister and their advisors decided that the Tim had to push the the atom bomb began to take it was decided to build production plants on a vast scale in the since great Britain was already up to her neck in War production and was in Range of German bombers and open to sea Britain would therefore furnish her scientists to the and Canada would furnish indispensable raw there were Many questions for the scientists to they had to select a material to give the bomb explosive they had several forms of uranium to select uranium there were three of 235 and plus the artificial element that can be created from of the scientists knew that Only 235 and plutonium could be in a ton of uranium Ore there Are Only 14 pounds of and these Are intricately mixed with the other it would have taken More than 191 years to obtain a single Gram of 235 and More than years to obtain a single under methods then worst of was one of the rarest elements in the it was found in pitch which exists Only in Canada and Africa in any the project and its problems were put under the direction of a group of to ranking and foreign scientists working in the newly formed office of scientific research and development its Vannevar noted electrical was detailed to report directly to the the military value of the experiments became obvious to and the major part of the work was transferred to the War practically the same scientific staff continued with Leslie former Deputy chief of construction in the War department and a Veteran Engineer corps in from Here work on the atomic bomb be came top in wartime where practically every project was the atomic work became the bes protected secret of the information on atom research was so compartmentalized that each person connected with it knew Only what he or she had to know to carry out a particular a special intelligence organization was set up Independent of g2 to control the Security Side of the even the Fri was barred from the various installations throughout the except where its operatives had special permission to Congress had to Content itself with no More than an Assurance from the army that the appropriated for atom research was absolutely essential to National Mere mention of atomic work on the floor of Congress might have been a Tipoff to the nazis and once the whole House appropriations com Mittee became sceptical of the since Progress was not so rapid As had been one of the congressmen called the project too fantastic and threatened to Tell the House what he knew and demand More that threat brought chief of staff George Marshall before the committee in a hurried secret session the committee heeded his plea to keep silent the nazis and the japs actually did have agents in the with specific instructions to get information on the if and on the nazi spies were directed to make Contact with key personnel at any atomic work plants and to determine the Type of protective devices the Fri Learned through a foreign Power what the spies were up to and stopped to make doubly sure that there would be no leak of about news radio magazines and Book asked by the office of censorship not to publish or broadcast anything about new or secret military weapons or Exon the they kept but the army really got in a Tizzy when Superman gave a preview of the one episode showed Little professor Duste challenging Superman to a charge from a Superman withstood the and the professor was so embarrassed by his failure to kill the big Guy that he the machine must be out of what followed is still a military at the request of the office of the artists who create the strip promptly discontinued reference to atomic strictest secrecy was maintained throughout the whole which was set up As a new District of the corps of engineers and officially designated the Manhattan More than workers were recruited throughout the country for work in the various laboratories and plants in which the atomic investigations were carried prospective employees could be told Only that the work for which they were being selected was most Many of the men who were finally chosen were unaware of the purpose of their jobs even after they had been employed for some although there was still some question As to which of the several theoretically possible meth ods of producing explosive atomic material was the army decided to go ahead with the construction of Large scale biggest army construction program of All of the tremendous pressure of two plants were started at the Clinton Engineer works near and a third at the Hanford Engineer near secrecy was contracts were placed with no parts were ordered in Many cases without the manufacturers knowing what they were to be used the Clinton site was selected for its Large size isolated and for safety against possible unknown the Hanford was on a government at the Clinton reservation a go merriment  City named Oak Ridge was the settlement contains houses and Dormi Heaters and today it has a population of largest in ten at Hanford another City was called it has a population of near Santa a special most secret of All the secret was built to Deal with the hundreds of technical problems involved in putting together an effective in this largest and most Complete physical Laboratory in the Robert brains behind the bomb headed a staff of technicians who worked Day and night forging the weapon that gave the final blow to All Over the country thousands of Large and Small manufacturing plants and universities and schools carried on research and worked to develop special materials and processes for the and All of them worked under a Blanket of it was due to these hundreds of organizations and thousands of workers that a study which would ordinarily have taken 20 years was completed in just the atomic age was ushered in on july