Word: fission
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...would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.” In other words, creating an amount of energy three to four times times the amount created during a nuclear fission reaction—a possibility realizable with the detonation of an atomic bomb—could produce such catastrophic results that the future might travel back in time to prevent such a thing from occurring...
...expert in nuclear fission who taught at Princeton and the University of Texas and authored five books, physicist John Wheeler--who coined the term black hole--was involved in many of the major scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century. As a member of the Manhattan Project, he collaborated with Albert Einstein and others to create the atom bomb. Unlike some colleagues who agonized over the weapon's awful power, he regretted only that it hadn't been used sooner. He often recalled a letter from his brother, who was later killed in World War II, that read simply, "Hurry...
...Little Boy" worked much like firing a gun. A small explosive propelled a uranium "bullet" down a 6-ft. (1.8-m) barrel into a uranium core, triggering nuclear fission. The bomb never hit the ground. To maximize the damage, a radar proximity fuse in the tail detonated the bomb 1,900 ft. (580 m) above Hiroshima...
...before Hiroshima, the possibility of nuclear weapons was hardly a secret. (At least two crew members of the Enola Gay guessed the nature of their cargo before Tibbets told them on the flight from Tinian.) The key theoretical and laboratory work on nuclear fission had been done and published by 1939, and since the community of physicists included Americans, Britons, Germans, French, Italians, Swedes, Russians, Hungarians and Japanese, no one country ever had a monopoly of nuclear know...
Experts were quick to allay any public concern that such an accident might set off the missile warheads. A nuclear device, unlike older conventional explosives, cannot be detonated simply by a physical shock. The fission and then fusion reactions that must occur to explode an H-bomb can take place only if the weapon is armed electronically, which cannot happen accidentally. The warheads in the damaged tube "were obviously blown apart in the force of the explosion," says Vice Admiral Powell Carter Jr., director of the Joint Staff. Whether their remnants burned up or sank to the bottom...