#Manhattan Project

[usnatarchives]

Honoring Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu: The First Lady of Physics 🥼⚙🔭

As we celebrate Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, let’s take a moment to appreciate Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu, a physicist who made considerable contributions to nuclear physics and worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II.

Early Life and Education

Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu was born on May 31, 1912, in a small town near Shanghai, China. Her father was big on education, especially for girls, which was uncommon at the time. Wu went to National Central University in Nanjing to study physics and later moved to the United States for further studies. She got her Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1940.

https://catalog.archives.gov/id/28883982

Big Contributions to Physics

During World War II, Wu joined the Manhattan Project. She helped develop the atomic bomb by figuring out how to enrich uranium and study radioactive isotopes. Her most famous work was in 1956, when she proved that the law of parity conservation doesn’t hold in weak nuclear interactions. This was an important advancement for physics and earned her colleagues, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang, the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957. Sadly, Wu didn’t get the Nobel recognition even though her experiment was crucial.

Legacy and Recognition

Dr. Wu’s work earned her the nickname "The First Lady of Physics." She received many awards, including the Comstock Prize in Physics and the National Medal of Science in 1990. Besides her scientific work, Wu was a big advocate for women in science and education, encouraging young women to pursue STEM careers. During her career Dr. Wu also taught at Princeton and Columbia Universities. She received the National Medal of Science from President Ford on October 18, 1976, “for her ingenious experiments that led to new and surprising understanding of the decay of the radioactive nucleus.“

Explore More About Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu

To learn more about Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu’s life and work, check out these resources from the National Archives:

The Manhattan Project

Women in STEM

Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

As we celebrate Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, let’s remember Dr. Wu’s contributions and how she paved the way for future scientists. Her story is a reminder of the importance of perseverance and the pursuit of knowledge.

[history-metamorphosis]

A detail I feel is NOT talked about enough in the BOCW fandom it's about a specific detail of Perseus

The game presents us like he was one of the Soviet spies in the Manhattan Project BUT

while the codename Perseus (and others like Mlad, Pers, Youngster, FOGEL and Mr. X) indeed was used, it wasn't the codename of a person, but of a character.

Perseus was made to protect one of their spies, Theodore Hall (who was the youngest scientist of the Manhattan Project, being only 18 years old), and probably others as well.

Chikov admitted openly in 1996 that he and other KGB officers he worked with had combined Mlad and another spy code-named “Pers” into a single spy, Perseus. “The main goal was to make the story unclear, so when the intelligence of other countries began to analyze this, it would not reveal the forms and methods of the work of Soviet intelligence”

source: Nuclear Secrets - The Perseus Papers

Theodore Hall and Perseus had some similarities like:

Both visited their parents in New York at the same time, with Perseus being recruited by the GRU there after the visit.

Same codenames (Mlad and Youngster)

And something really cool they made with Black Ops Cold War Perseus is that both the real life Perseus and the COD one aren't just one person.

The real life one was just a character made by the Soviets to spread misinformation and protect their Manhattan Project spies while the BOCW one is a whole spy network/an ideal like Viktor "Stitch" Kuzmin says in the Season 6 Outro

"Perseus was never one man, it's an ideal, bigger than any of us."

I really feel it should be talked about more often like Bell with Pavlov dogs experiment or Adler with Alfred Adler and that whole superiority/inferiority complex to be honest.

also part of the fake Perseus story is that he participated in the Spanish Civil War if anyone wants to use in their BOCW AU or something like that

[aphroditeslover11]

Today I discovered a mid-century photographer called Philippe Halsman who photographed the famous people of his era, from Richard Nixon to Marilyn Monroe. At the end of his sessions he would ask the person to jump into the air for a picture, believing that this would cause them to drop their pretenses and public persona, leaving him with a picture of the real person as they made their leap. He called this ‘jumpology’.

This is the photo he took of Robert Oppenheimer in 1958, possibly the most free and unreserved image of him that I’ve ever seen.

[slowburningechoes]

Robert Sean Leonard (credited as Robert Leonard) as “Max” in The Manhattan Project (1985)

What a baby!

[thefearandnow]

So with Oppenheimer coming out tomorrow, I feel a certain level of responsibility to share some important resources for people to understand more about the context of the Manhattan Project. Because for my family, it’s not just a piece of history but an ongoing struggle that’s colonized and irradiated generations of New Mexicans’ lives and altered our identity forever. Not only has the legacy of the Manhattan Project continued to harm and displace Indigenous and Hispanic people but it’s only getting bigger: Biden recently tasked the Los Alamos National Lab facility to create 30 more plutonium pits (the core of a nuclear warhead) by 2026. So this is a list of articles, podcasts and books to check out to hear the real stories of the local people living with this unique legacy that’s often overlooked. 

This is simply the latest mainstream interest in the Oppenheimer story and it always ALWAYS silences the trauma of the brown people the US government took advantage of to make their death star. I might see the movie, I honestly might not. I’m not trying to judge anyone for seeing what I’m sure will be an entertaining piece of art. I just want y’all to leave the theater knowing that this story goes beyond what’s on the screen and touches real people’s lives: people whose whole families died of multiple cancers from radiation from the Trinity test, people who’s ancestral lands were poisoned, people who never came back from their job because of deadly work conditions. This is our story too.

The first and best place to learn more about this history and how to support those still resisting is to follow Tewa Women United. They’ve assembled an incredible list of resources from the people who’ve been fighting this fight the longest.

https://tewawomenunited.org/2023/07/oppenheimer-and-the-other-side-of-the-story

The writer Alicia Inez Guzman is currently writing a series about the nuclear industrial complex in New Mexico, its history and cultural impacts being felt today.

https://searchlightnm.org/my-nuclear-family/

https://searchlightnm.org/the-abcs-of-a-nuclear-education/

https://searchlightnm.org/plutonium-by-degrees/

Danielle Prokop at Source NM is an excellent reporter (and friend) who has been covering activists fighting for Downwinder status from the federal government. They’re hoping that the success of Oppenheimer will bring new attention to their cause.

https://sourcenm.com/2023/07/19/anger-hope-for-nm-downwinders/

https://sourcenm.com/2022/01/27/new-mexico-downwinders-demand-recognition-justice/

One often ignored side of the Manhattan Project story that’s personal for me is that the government illegally seized the land that the lab facilities eventually were built on. Before 1942, it was homesteading land for ranchers for more than 30 families (my grandpa’s side of the family was one). But when the location was decided, the government evicted the residents, bought their land for peanuts and used their cattle for target practice. Descendants of the homesteaders later sued and eventually did get compensated for their treatment (though many say it was far below what they were owed)

https://www.hcn.org/issues/175/5654

Myrriah Gomez is an incredible scholar in this field, working as a historian, cultural anthropologist and activist using a framework of “nuclear colonialism” to foreground the Manhattan Project. Her book Nuclear Nuevo Mexico is an amazing collection of oral stories and archival record that positions New Mexico’s era of nuclear colonialism in the context of its Spanish and American eras of colonialism. A must read for anyone who’s made it this far.

https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/nuclear-nuevo-mexico

There isn’t a ton of podcasts about this (yet 👀) but recently the Washington Post’s podcast Field Trip did an episode about White Sands National Monument. The story is a beautifully written and sound designed piece that spotlights the Downwinder activists and also a discovery of Indigenous living in the Trinity test area going back thousands of years. I was blown away by it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/field-trip/white-sands-national-park/

[humanoidhistory]

Camera bunker at Trinity Site, New Mexico, where the world's first nuclear weapon was detonated. (Library of Congress)

[scipunk]

Oppenheimer (2023)

[prsk-suggestions]

Project sekai game suggestion: Oppenheimer collaboration. Call that Project Manhattan

[un-ionizetheradlab]

FINALLY found the meme I've been looking for...

@nuklearis-sutotok

[lindahall]

J. Robert Oppenheimer – Scientist of the Day

J. Robert Oppenheimer, an American theoretical physicist, was born Apr. 22, 1904. Oppenheimer was a gifted mathematician who came of age during...

learn more

[aphroditeslover11]

Possibly my favourite photograph of Oppie that I have found to date, at home with his son and taken for an edition of Life Magazine in 1949 by Alfred Eisenstaedt, of which he was on the front cover. He just seems so normal here, interacting with his son like any father would, it’s very humanising. Pictures like this are what remind us that historical figures were real people, not just mystical figures of the past that we find in textbooks.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project knew from the start that this place was not all that isolated and was far from uninhabited. There were, in fact, dozens of families within 20 miles, largely poor families of ranchers and farmers, many Hispanic and Indigenous, who unwittingly went about their daily lives in the first fallout of the atomic age. Now, those who were infants and children downwind of the detonation of the “Gadget”—a code name for the plutonium bomb used in the Trinity test—are nearing the end of a decades-long battle to be recognized and compensated for generations of illness they trace to exposure from radioactive fallout.

[...]

The reactions of Manhattan Project observers at the Trinity site are well documented. “Words haven’t been invented to describe it,” physicist Val Fitch said of the enormous fireball. General Thomas Farrell said the awesome roar “warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous.” “A few people laughed, a few people cried,” Oppenheimer recalled years later. “I remembered a line from the Hindu scripture . . . Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Physicist Kenneth Bainbridge said, “Now we are all sons of bitches.” Less documented are the reactions of the many New Mexicans who lived near Trinity. They had no warning, no context for the star-level explosion that shook their homes and startled them awake that morning. Worse, in the weeks after the test, they were never advised that their land, crops, livestock, and water may have been irradiated. A 2010 report to the CDC used archives at Los Alamos National Laboratory to re-examine the extent to which New Mexicans were unknowingly exposed to radioactive contamination from Trinity. Its findings revealed a shambolic and sometimes cynical effort to track the Gadget’s fallout that windy morning using “crude” and “ineffective” measures. Spotlights were deployed to try to follow the 230 tons of sand and ash falling from the mushroom cloud as it dispersed over southern New Mexico. Film badges designed to detect and measure radiation had been sent to nearby post offices before the test, but because of the Manhattan Project’s secret nature, there was little explanation on how the badges were meant to be used or why, and so they were deployed incorrectly or not at all. Some soldiers assigned to chase and monitor the radioactive cloud couldn’t relay their findings to headquarters in Albuquerque because they were not equipped with long-distance radios; other monitors attempted to gather fallout samples with domestic Filter Queen brand vacuum cleaners. (These samples were later lost or destroyed.) At least one monitor left the area after his superior declared tracking fallout a “waste of time,” while another soldier misplaced his respirator and took the official but scientifically misguided precaution of breathing through a slice of bread.

[cowgirl-ish]

posted these on pinterest but felt like sharing them here too

if anyone wants to yap about oppenheimer w me my discord is @/doggone.cowgirl

[anonymous-badger-238]

pick a best friend

You know that meme where they show you different outfits and you think of names of the people who would wear them and talk about their personalities?

I have no idea how true this is but pick a Rad Lab "boy"