『The Manhattan Project: Race to the Atomic Bomb』のカバーアート

The Manhattan Project: Race to the Atomic Bomb

The Manhattan Project: Race to the Atomic Bomb

著者： YesOui
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The three-year race to build the atomic bomb, from Einstein's 1939 letter to Truman's decision at Potsdam. Oppenheimer at Los Alamos with 130,000 people spread across 30 sites in total secrecy. Fermi's Chicago Pile-1 going critical under a squash court. The plutonium problem and the implosion breakthrough. Trinity in the New Mexico desert. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The spies inside — Fuchs, Hall, Greenglass. The moral aftermath and the men who built it wondering what they'd done. — a daily series with new episodes every day.© 2026 YesOui.ai 世界 社会科学
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  • Chain Reactions & Hidden Cities: How the Manhattan Project Was Built

    Chain Reactions & Hidden Cities: How the Manhattan Project Was Built
    2026/08/11
    (00:00:00) Chain Reactions & Hidden Cities: How the Manhattan Project Was Built
    (00:01:35) Building the Secret World
    (00:03:23) Fermi Under the Squash Court
    (00:04:54) The Plutonium Problem
    (00:06:30) Spies in the Desert
    (00:08:03) Trinity
    (00:09:58) Hiroshima and Nagasaki
    (00:11:30) The Moral Aftermath

    Before Hiroshima, before Trinity, before the implosion device was even a confirmed theory, the Manhattan Project had to become something almost impossible to imagine: a fully functioning secret world. One hundred thirty thousand workers. Thirty sites across the country. And almost none of them told what they were actually building.

    This episode follows the early architecture of the project — from Einstein's 1939 letter and Leo Szilard's urgent push to get Roosevelt's attention, to Oppenheimer personally recruiting the country's top physicists and asking them to vanish into the New Mexico mountains. Los Alamos was a city, not just a laboratory. Families lived there, children went to school there, and a few hundred yards away scientists were redesigning the laws of war.

    At the University of Chicago, Enrico Fermi achieved the experiment that made everything else possible. Under the west stands of Stagg Field — in a converted squash court — his team assembled Chicago Pile-1 and, on 2 December 1942, achieved the world's first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. No explosion. No flash. Just numbers climbing on instruments, and a bottle of Chianti shared from paper cups.

    Then came the plutonium problem. The B Reactor at Hanford was producing weapons-grade material, but it behaved unexpectedly — a contaminant called plutonium-240 threatened to pre-detonate any gun-type design. The solution would require an entirely new concept: implosion. The project's greatest engineering challenge had only just begun.

    This episode includes AI-generated content.
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    15 分
  • Klaus Fuchs, Ted Hall & the Secrets That Left Los Alamos

    Klaus Fuchs, Ted Hall & the Secrets That Left Los Alamos
    2026/08/10
    (00:00:00) Klaus Fuchs, Ted Hall & the Secrets That Left Los Alamos
    (00:00:39) The World Inside the Fence
    (00:02:01) Klaus Fuchs
    (00:04:02) Ted Hall
    (00:05:22) David Greenglass
    (00:06:44) What They Actually Gave Away
    (00:07:54) The Paradox of the Believers
    (00:10:03) The Reckoning
    (00:11:25) What It Left Behind

    The Manhattan Project was the most tightly guarded secret in American history — 130,000 workers, thirty sites, a two-billion-dollar budget. And yet, before a single atomic bomb reached its target, the Soviet Union already knew how to build one. Not because codes were cracked, but because people inside the project chose to tell them.

    This episode goes inside the breach. It begins at Los Alamos itself — a city behind a fence with no public address, where brilliant scientists raised families, played chess, and hiked the New Mexico desert while working on a weapon that could end civilisation. That strange duality of ordinary life and extraordinary pressure, it turns out, was exactly the environment in which ideology quietly spread.

    Klaus Fuchs arrives in August 1944 — a British-German theoretical physicist cleared by both governments, quietly communist, and already in contact with Soviet handler Harry Gold. Working directly on implosion calculations, Fuchs passed the core principles of the Fat Man bomb's design, its precise geometry, and detailed Trinity test data to Moscow. He knew exactly what mattered because he understood the physics.

    Ted Hall was nineteen years old — Harvard-educated, self-recruited, and convinced that an American atomic monopoly would be more dangerous than sharing the secret. He acted independently of Fuchs, and the Soviets received redundant confirmation from two sources who never knew each other existed.

    David Greenglass was a machinist, not a physicist — but he had hands-on access to the implosion lens molds, and his sketches, passed through Julius Rosenberg's network, gave Soviet engineers the physical picture that theory alone couldn't supply.

    Three men. Three different paths to the same act. And one consequence: the Cold War arms race began not at Hiroshima, but in the hallways of Los Alamos.

    This episode includes AI-generated content.
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    13 分
  • The Weight of What They Built: Conscience, Creation & the Bomb

    The Weight of What They Built: Conscience, Creation & the Bomb
    2026/08/09
    (00:00:00) The Weight of What They Built: Conscience, Creation & the Bomb
    (00:00:44) The Letter That Started Everything
    (00:02:28) Building the Machine
    (00:04:33) Chicago and the First Chain Reaction
    (00:05:49) The Plutonium Problem
    (00:07:20) Trinity
    (00:08:37) Szilard's Petition
    (00:09:54) Hiroshima and Nagasaki
    (00:11:03) The Spies Inside
    (00:12:24) The Aftermath and Einstein's Regret

    What the Manhattan Project left behind wasn't just two destroyed cities — it was a question every scientist who touched the program had to answer for the rest of their lives. This episode traces the full arc of the three-year race to build the atomic bomb, from the moment Leo Szilard convinced Albert Einstein to sign a letter to President Roosevelt in August 1939, to the moral collapse that followed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

    We follow General Leslie Groves as he assembles an industrial machine spanning 30 sites and 130,000 workers — most of whom never knew what they were building. We go inside Los Alamos, the secret city carved from the New Mexico desert, where J. Robert Oppenheimer held the entire scientific programme in his head while recruiting the world's brightest physicists to a location that didn't appear on any map.

    We witness Enrico Fermi's Chicago Pile-1 go critical beneath a squash court at the University of Chicago on December 2, 1942 — the proof of concept that transformed Los Alamos from theory into an engineering race. And we confront the plutonium problem: the brutal physics that demanded an entirely new approach to bomb design, driving the implosion breakthrough that made Trinity possible.

    Finally, we turn to the men and women who built it — Szilard's doomed petition, Oppenheimer's haunted press conference, the spies inside the project, and a generation of scientists who changed the architecture of war and then spent the rest of their lives wondering if they should have.

    This episode includes AI-generated content.
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    15 分
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