A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology

2. The Physicists and the Bomb

Key to the provenance of nuclear technologies is physics. Physics was transformed by the Second World War. Physics had given the Allies radar and the atom bomb.¹ Before the Second World War physics had not been appreciated:

… industries had been peculiarly obtuse in not seeing any conceivable use for physicists. Young men in the 1930s, with doctorates and good research to their credit, considered themselves lucky to get decent jobs in schools.

(Snow [1981], p. 42)

In the 1920s and 1930s the first murmurings of the nuclear age came from solitary figures working in small academic groups on the European continent.² The only industrialization of nuclear properties concerned the use of radium in largely unscientific medical therapies and for luminous dials for clocks and aircraft instrumentation. Radium, a highly radioactive element, occurs naturally as the result of the radioactive decay of isotopes of thorium and uranium.³ One of these isotopes, uranium-235, is fissionable, i.e. can be split when hit by a neutron releasing large amounts of nuclear energy. “Collect enough uranium-235, and there was the chance of an immense explosion. There the pure science finished” (Snow [1981], p. 100). Uranium-235 fission also made possible the first self-sustaining nuclear reactor. Enrico Fermi’s 1942 Chicago Pile-1 also demonstrated production of the man-made, but stable, fissile isotope: plutonium-239.

The use of fission in the Second World War Manhattan Project, ...