Shangri La (CV 38) - Naval Cruise Book

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covery of radioactive properties in uranium in l896. Working with tons of pitchblende from mines in Joachimsthal, Czechoslovakia, Pierre and Madame Curie followed up Bequerel's experiments with the discovery and subsequent isolation of radium in the early part of the Twentieth Century. Experiments by these early physicists proved uranium to be the parent of several unstable elements which transformed over varying periods of time into a final stable iso- tope of lead. In l905 Professor Albert Einstein stated his theory of relativity, or the principle of the equivalence of mass and energy CE:mc2j. Simply stated., the amount of energy obtainable when mass disappears is the mass X the velocity of light squared Cczj , or, the amount of energy in one pound of iissionable uranium QU-2355 is equivalent to 8,000 tons of trinitrotoluene CTNTD. However, his theory was not truly verified in scientific circles until l932 when a series of experi- ments by the French physicists Joliet and Mme. Irene Curie-'Joliet Produced artificial radioactivity. The energy of the particles involved in these nuclear reac- tions conformed strictly to the law-energy released in this transmutation was exactly equivalent to loss of mass. The new science of nuclear physics attracted many of the world's finest phy- sicists and in 1939 experiments by Drs. Hahn and Metner, interpreted by Bohr, proved that the fission of uranium released a tremendous amount of energy. Obviously this was of tremendous military significance if the process could be . , ., . . .vgyiocsq Xe-5 X 5 El gf li l , Il 52 El is ll 22 I if x il ll Q 'I Winter F tolics. ir ,....J

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'i x S 2 K fx E F -4 4, Mount Rainier -- Recreation Trip - December, 1945. OPERATION CROSSROADS After a War in which sea and air power Were the controlling factors in the success of any operation, it Was inevitable that the question of fleet vulnerability to the atomic bomb should be settled before disarmament was completed. The Joint Chiefs of Staf directed Admiral W. H. P. Blandy to form Joint Task Force One, composed of Army, Navy, and civilian scientists, for the pur- pose of testing the atomic bomb against naval vessels and military ground equip- ment. Admiral Blandy is the Navy's foremost expert on ordnance, having served as Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, which provides the Navy with guns and mounts, armor, projectiles, bombs, fire control and optical equipment, torpedoes, mines, depth charges, etc. Admiral Blandy named the project Operation Crossroads, because it was apparent that Warfare, perhaps civilization itself, had been brought to a turning point by this revolutionary Weapon. The theory of atomic energy dates back to Antoine Henri Bequerel's dis-

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l . ll v K Y l l V N l .L-- l.. Ski Party. made to occur on a large scale. The basic knowledge existed, but the know-how did not. Prior to the outbreak of war physicists exchanged papers on nuclear physics in a spirit of scientific collaboration. Germany's march into the Lowland countries served to put the lid of security on all American, French and United Kingdom nuclear advancements and the all-important race for the atomic bomb commenced. The Navy Department became interested in the project in the spring of 1940 after a conference with Einstein, Wigner, Pegram and several other nuclear sci- entists. The late President Roosevelt appointed a committee which resulted in the organization known as the Uranium Committee, under the National Defense Research Committee, and arranged for transfer of funds for experimentation. Experiments to date pointed to the probability of four Hssionable elements capable of the self-sustaining chain reaction necessary for an efficient bomb: Uranium QU-2359, obtained from the fission of 140 times more Uranium-238 in the natural state, protoactinium, discarded because of its rarity in nature: thorium, obtainable from monazite sands, was by-passed because of the require- ment of very high-energy neutrons for fission. The story of the creation of plutonium, an element which does not appear in nature but is a true trans- uranic element obtained from the Hssion of uranium, is one of the most romantic stories connected with the atomic bomb development. Plutonium was chosen