The Manhattan Project - The Development of the Atomic Bomb - With Kit Chapman 

Now this is a quality presentation. Well thought out, backed up with facts and addressing the various issues in plain language that the layman can understand. Well worth watching.

Still employed here at Hanford cleaning up the wastes from production of plutonium.

By the way the Hanford area was directly produced by natural forces of climate change, floods from zlake Missoula (Pleistocene glaciers and all that). Climates change, imagine that.

Kit is the whole package - good information, able to present it to regular people, keeping it interesting, and having people come away with important historical knowledge. Taking on such a controversial subject with such aplomb is an amazing skill. Thanks Kit and Woody.

Great presentation, but must admit near the end am surprised the moon landing project was not brought up as an excellent example of a massive collaborative scientific and engineering project...which also happily was to the benefit of mankind rather than a weapon.

A truly outstanding subject and Kit brings a unique perspective to it and he articulates himself well especially for simpletons like me. Cheers Ak, NZ

Physic’s on WW2TV. Did not see this one coming.

Just catching up with this, another superb presentation.

Great presenter. Kit gave a clear explanation that was easliy understandable. 👍

The hilarious part about the 2 billion dollar bill is from 1941 to 1946 thats pretty much a blank cheque to buy whatever the hell you want , these days in military procurement that wouldn't even buy you the stationary.

Fantastic presentation by Kit. Thank you. Kit has a great ability to make very complicated subjects understandable and interesting. Learned a lot today

Another outstanding presentation. Picking up on Paul's comments on global warming, I'd suggest that Manhattan solved that too. We should go for nuclear power bigly.

Great show Woody!

Part of my learning about the Manhattan Project was visiting Wendover a few times. One of these days I'll need to visit the Trinity site. Now these places are accessible to the public and a fuller story is possible. On my desk as I write this are a reprint of the Henry de Wolf Smyth report released 1 September 1945 and with the long title, "Atomic Energy for Military Purposes; the Official Report on the Development of the Atomic Bomb Under the Auspices of the United States Government, 1940-1945," and Richard B. Frank's "Downfall," and a 2007 book by Robert and Ameilia Krauss titled "The 509th Remembered: A History of the 509th Composite Group as told by the Veterans that Dropped the Atomic Bombs on Japan." There were two scales of the Manhattan Project--the macro scale of a global effort and the "put together in a garage" nature of the atomic bombs assembled for Trinity and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Without the B-29, the atomic bomb would have needed a delivery system in order to be more than a scientific experiment. The B-29 program cost 3 billion dollars and for a while Paul Tibbets was in charge of turning the troubled B-29 into a war-winning weapon, building the infrastructure to support the bomber (including setting up a school for instructors), and then Tibbets was voluntold to head the 509th. You covered the 2 billion dollar bomb program quite well in just an hour. There were people from all over the world--Britain gave the US all of its research and top people to make the bomb a reality (and the USA held onto the bomb after the war and didn't share it well). Don't forget the rest of the $288 billion dollar war--if Japan could simply drive and fly around the USA without interference, they could have found and stopped the atomic bomb program. Counting civilians, the War and Navy Departments had some 22 million people directly employed plus contracts with twice that number of people. Even Oppenheimer had to eat sometime. Spam! What a delicacy. This was an interesting presentation. Thank you.

This was an excellent presentation. I even learned a couple of things that I never knew about the subject, and it is one of the things I studied for my thesis in US History. 💯💯✌✌

Fabulous show. I found it interesting that the Uranium bomb was not the one tested at Trinity.

I believe that the fellow who went on to found Kentucky Fried Chicken worked in a kitchen in one of these facilities.

What a treat today, Paul. Kit is fantastic. Hope we see him as regular as possible. I was running on no sleep but had a great time. This and the other show with Kit - b2b, later, after I get some sleep. Great book notes!

Looks like I've got some viewing material for the next few days thanks to these two-a-day streams. :)

This has been amazing presentation. Kit Chapman explained this so well. Great work Paul.

Worked at Oak Ridge Nat’l Lab (X-10) for 10 years; absolutely fascinating history. Have more stories than space permits here.

My father-in-law was a 20 yr old junior Lt driving an LST from Hawaii to Saipan as part of the Japan invasion fleet when the US dropped The Bomb. I honor that wise decision.

We need a long in depth video about the demon core. Everything on yt kinda sucks and doesn't dig deep into the subject. It's very interesting. Also maybe a video on tickling the dragons tail. Very interesting subject. Thanks and keep up the amazing work

Great show. - thanks Paul and Kit

My Father worked part time on research at Walter Reed while finishing his Zoology degree at George Washington University in Washington DC. He was hired to study the health of Manhattan Project workers. He worked at Oak Ridge and Hanford. He never wanted to leave Washington State after living there. I don't either. During the Cold War, when Brezhnev and Ford were presidents, I was a guest scientist aboard Russian fishing vessels off the Washington Coast . There was a huge map of the Pacific under a clear plastic top of the briefing table behind the Bridge and next to the radio room of the fleet factory mothership. All of the labels on the map were in Russian language. There were only three cities shown in Washington State on the map, the goal of the map was to show ocean features, including depths in contour, but the names of those cities were Seattle (the largest city and a port), Spokane which is a long way from the ocean and Hanford. No one lives at Hanford, by design workers live in the tri cities of Pasco, Richland and Kennewick and commute to the Hanford Reservation, but many Russians, even fishermen, knew the history of Hanford.

Howdy folks. Great presentation by Dr Chapman on how nuclear physics and engineering came together in building the A Bomb. Don’t miss it.

55:42 wearing sunglasses is the ill-fated Canadian physicist Louis Slotin mentioned by Kit. Post WW2, he became gradually disillusioned with the Manhatten Project especially with the upcoming Operation Crossroads tests in Bikini Atoll. He was still valuable to the project as he wrote before his accident & death "I am one of the few people left here who are experienced bomb putter-togetherers". It was good fortune and testament to good overall safey procedures that only two employees (Slotin & Harry Daghlian) died of radiation poisoning in the entire projects history.

"We knew the world would not be the same . A few people laughed , a few cried , most people were silent . I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture , the Bhagavad-Gita ; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince to do his duty and , to impress him , takes on his multi-armed form and says "Now I am become Death , the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that , one way or another" -J. Robert Oppenheimer We've been lucky so far only two have been dropped in anger .

Hot take: If the USA didnt have Manhatten project, and redirected the resources into the war instead, the war would be months shorter.

I’ll bet after they laughed and rejected Fermi’s paper, the folks at “Nature” later felt like big dumb dopes….

Great stuff as usual. You can still see the fused glass at the Trinity site when you fly over it.

Brilliant presentation. Kit really knows his stuff and explains it so well. I really enjoyed this!

Fantastic! Bring Kit back soon

Tom Dowd very famous recording engineer on many well known records was a technician on the Manhattan project..................😮

I'm going to watch the film tonight. Great talk and I hope they get the film as interesting as this Blog.

Speaking with my chemistry professor's hat on, one of the things that tends to get lost in the history of the Manhattan project is that the "household names", as Paul has it at the start, are physicists precisely because the physics wasn't actually that complicated, and thus quickly declassified; whereas the chemistry and, above all, the engineering - the actual difficult stuff - was kept secret - and most of it still is even to this day. 'The "secret"' of the bomb was very quickly revealed to the US public after the war not just because it wasn't secret, in the sense of being hidden (Soviet spies!), but also because it wasn't that important: the physics is necessary to know, in building a nuclear weapon, but it isn't *sufficient*. For that, you need all sorts of very complicated materials engineering techniques: the development of equipment that could withstand the corrosive gaseous UF6 required, for example; boron-depleted graphite, for another. The effort that went in to the engineering was the vast majority of the Manhattan project, and those who were involved are essentially unknown. The physics research that front-loaded the project was *relatively* cheap; what came after was where the real money went. You'll note that Kit Chapman (rightly) refers to Seaborg as a "scientist" rather than pigeon-holing him as a chemist; pretty well much all the other science names mentioned here were very much definitely "physicists", however. Physic(ist)s got all the glory from the Manhattan project; later, of course, they also got all the opprobrium, so it sort of balances out.

Well done, fellows!

Wonderful presentation!

Another great video

That guy was good. Everything i didn't realise i needed to know about The Manhattan Project. Plus a mini physics refresher thrown in!

Great presentation by Kit. I always love to see science explained clearly and enthusiastically to the layman. I studied it for 4 years in college as a biologist. Hard work but fascinating. The scale and the cost of the Manhatten Project is still mind boggling. And to think all the mathematics by these legendary Nobel Prize scientists had to be done on paper, blackboard or in their head. No computers back then for them. Across the Pond, unbeknownst to them, another top secret war program in Bletchley Park was creating Colossus, the world's first computer.

Brilliant presentation! Really showed us the scale of the project.

Theses were the big govt. Sites there were many many small private companies that were involved in the industry...... closest to where I live are Silvania in Westbury, L.I.N.Y produced produced plutonium products also Wolf and Alport in Brooklyn ,N.Y. refined mozanite extracted radioactive minerals ...............😮

So to get things done, you have to rely on the government bc the private sector is useless.

This was another gem that I had to watch after the fact due to my work schedule, but it was a very well documented, and to the point presentation by Dr. Chapman. His last name recalled to my mind that my late paternal Grandfather, David J. LaVigne. a former U.S. Navy Machinist's Mate, who served in the Navy from 1927 to 1937 who went to work for the Chapman Valve Manufacturing Company in the 1940s. It was located on 203 Hampshire St. in Indian Orchard, MA, across the Chicopee River from my hometown of Ludlow. He worked on the production line and was later promoted to inspector. Chapman Valve made Uranium Rods and industrial valves for the Manhattan Project. I recall him telling me of the many trips he made to Oak Ridge, TN to inspect the installation of valves and equipment provided by the company. Later, during the cold war, he inspected many installations on early U.S. Navy Nuclear submarines at he Submarine Base in Groton, CT as well. Perhaps his knowledge of nuclear energy is why he became a committee member for the town of Ludlow's Civil Defense Department. They were responsible for insuring warning of impending nuclear attacks and for identifying shelters for the population during the Cold War in the 1950s and 60s. I wish I had questioned him more now. (I still remember the warning sirens blaring every day at noon as they were tested each day for many years.) Thanks for another terrific presentation Paul. This series about the atomic bombs for the last few days has been fantastic.

6:24 I know it was their ideology but this is where Nazism really falls down as being ridiculously self defeating , like why would you deprive your country of this much talent ? I just don't understand it , the nationalism I can kind of understand like im damn proud of Australia despite some obvious and glaring faults , but the racial part I just don't get .......... maybe its because I live in an actual multicultural country and can see the obvious success of multiculturalism ......... at the least its good because you dont need to travel to experience other cultures and cuisines