
Don’t Worry – It Can’t Happen (1940) [pdf] - monort
https://www.gwern.net/docs/xrisks/1940-sciam-harrington-nuclearweapons-dontworryitcanthappen.pdf
======
smacktoward
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13904384](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13904384)

I'll just say now what I said then
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13905409](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13905409)):

 _This is not as silly an article as it may appear to be in hindsight. When it
appeared (in May 1940:[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dont-worry-
it-can...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dont-worry-it-cant-
happen/)), most scientific authorities, including such non-idiots as Niels
Bohr, believed that, while an atomic chain reaction was theoretically
possible, the only way an it could be achieved was by bringing together a
quantity of nuclear fuel so large as to make the effort impractical._

 _The first proof that this was not in fact the case came in the Frisch-
Peierls memorandum
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisch%E2%80%93Peierls_memoran...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisch%E2%80%93Peierls_memorandum)),
which had been written two months before Harrington's article appeared, but
which was highly classified and thus out of reach of pop-science journalists.
Frisch and Peierls' figures indicated that a critical mass could be achieved
with just one kilogram of uranium-235; this turned out to be an underestimate,
but not so much as to invalidate their fundamental point, which was that
criticality could be achieved with a mass of fuel small enough to be delivered
by a 1940s-era airplane._

 _This came as news to the brightest lights in the world of physics, up to and
including Albert Einstein, so it 's probably unfair to expect a contemporary
writer for Scientific American to be further ahead in the science than they
were._

~~~
CamperBob2
Another interesting comment from that discussion was [flagged] and [dead]:

    
    
       The entire idea that atomic bombs were ever 
       manufactured, let alone used, is absolutely 
       ludicrous. There have never been any atomic 
       bombs deployed any more than men have walked 
       in the moon. Just more pish-posh propaganda 
       from the government.
    

Whether that poster was joking or not, it doesn't seem unlikely that at some
point we will start seeing "bomb deniers" emerge, just like the Apollo deniers
and vaccine-deniers that already infest our discourse.

Relatively few people, certainly among those under the age of 50, have ever
seen a nuclear blast in person. As time goes by, these weapons will seem less
like game-changing, world-ending tools of the Apocalypse and more like, well,
bigger bombs.

~~~
jjoonathan
If only ignoring the dangling sword could prevent it from falling!

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yetihehe
> The extra neutrons are perhaps so speeded up by the heat that they cease to
> be efficient atom-busters. Thus the reaction poohs out as the temperature
> rises.

One can wonder, was it disinformation or just that they didn't know good
neutron reflectors which could be used for making viable bombs?

~~~
ridewinter
Allied scientists discovered that highly pure graphite could be used as a
neutron moderator, I’m not sure of the timing compared to this article.
Fortunately the German scientists never figured this out, and continued to
attempt to use heavy water, never succeeding partially due to Allied sabotage
in Norway. Heavy Water Wars is a great TV series about the sabotage!

~~~
mark212
The Heroes of Telemark is even better! Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris, what
could be better?

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jacobush
Worry

~~~
rossdavidh
I was thinking, this is either a really subtle pun, or a typo.

