Weapons encyclopedia pdf

Books Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip. Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. Weapons : an international encyclopedia from B. Item Preview. EMBED for wordpress.

Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Publication date Topics gun , caliber , rifle , missile , guns , weapons , missiles , sword , artillery , grenade , machine gun , small arms , machine guns , civil war , american civil , high explosive , submachine gun , nuclear weapons , british army , depth charges , Weapons , Wapens krijgskunde , Armes Publisher New York : St.

There are no reviews yet. Uranium appears in nature primarily in two isotopes: uranium and uranium When the nucleus ofuranium absorbs a neutron, it undergoes nuclear fission, releasing energy and, on average, 2. Because uranium releases more neutrons than it absorbs, it can support a chain reaction and so is describedas fissile. Uranium, on the other hand, is not fissile as it does not normally undergo fission when it absorbs aneutron. Physicists on both sides were well aware of the possibility of utilizingnuclear fission as a weapon, but no one was quite sure how it could be done.

In August , concerned thatGermany might have its own project to develop fission-based weapons, Albert Einstein signed a letter to U. President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning him of the threat. Organized research first began in Britain as part of the Tube Alloys project. The Maud Committee was set upfollowing the work of Frisch and Rudolf Peierls who calculated uranium's critical mass and found it to bemuch smaller than previously thought which meant that a deliverable bomb should be possible.

The blastfrom such an explosion would destroy life in a wide area. The size of this area is difficult to estimate, but it willprobably cover the centre of a big city. In late , fearful of its seizure by theGermans, he shipped the mine's entire stockpile of ore to a warehouse on Staten Island. For 18 months British research outpaced the American but by mid, it became apparent that the industrialeffort required was beyond Britain's already stretched wartime economy.

Two of hisfirst acts were to obtain authorization to assign the highest priority AAA rating on necessary procurements, andto put in train the purchase of all 1, tons of the Shinkolobwe ore. With a scientific team led by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan projectbrought together some of the top scientific minds of the day, including manyexiles from Europe, with the production power of American industry for thegoal of producing fission-based explosive devices before Germany.

Britainand the U. The U. Scientific development was centralized in asecret laboratory at Los Alamos. For a fission weapon to operate, there must be sufficient fissile material tosupport a chain reaction, a critical mass.

To separate the fissile uraniumisotope from the non-fissile uranium, two methods were developedwhich took advantage of the fact that uranium has a slightly greateratomic mass: electromagnetic separation and gaseous diffusion.

Anothersecret site was erected at rural Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for the large-scaleproduction and purification of the rare isotope, which required considerableinvestment.

At the time, K, one of the Oak Ridge facilities, was theworld's largest factory under one roof. The Oak Ridge site employed tens of thousands of people at its peak,most of whom had no idea what they were working on. Although uranium cannot be used for the initial stage of an atomic bomb, when it absorbs a neutron, itbecomes uranium which decays into neptunium, and finally the relatively stable plutonium, anelement that does not exist naturally on Earth, but is fissile like uranium After Fermi achieved the world's.

Proportions of uranium blue and uranium red foundnaturally versus grades that areenriched by separating the twoisotopes atom-by-atom usingvarious methods that all re. See Full Reader. Post on Dec 21 views.

Category: Documents 18 download. Tags: nuclear weapons wikipedia nuclear age14 nuclear fireball atomic weapons powerful fusion weapons ownatomic bomb project world war ii5 combined fission. RobertOppenheimer led the Alliedscientific effort at Los Alamos.