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The graveyards are full of indispensable men. -- Charles de Gaulle |
 Shortly after the end of WWII the US Air force established a group called AFOAT-ONE that flew regular air sampling flights around the periphery of the Soviet Union. I understand their mission was to pinpoint the site of plutonium production and more importantly the rate of production of Pu.The team used the ratio of 2 argon isotopes to monitor the rate which was very slow (verified by historian Richard Rhodes). It was already 1949 and although the Klaus Fuchs design was in their posession they lacked the thirty pounds of fuel required.
Meanwhile back in the US Los Alamos, having abandoned the inefficient gun-gadget designed a bomb core which used less Pu in the center surrounded by a shell of uranium-235 and by which the desired alpha was controlled by the Pu and which was a way to include U-235 in an implosion device. This geometry was termed as "composite". Many people outside the inner sanctum reasoned that composite referred to the presence in early models of a depleted uranium "tamper". Of a sudden and out of the blue the AFOAT-ONE mission was at an end and a new name and mission happened because the USSR had detonated their first nuclear bomb. Most everyone at the Lab presumed that the Russian bomb was a clone of the Trinity bomb fired in New Mexico 7/16/45. I thought so too until I attended a staff meeting in old Delta Building near the West end of the main tech area. The speaker was an Airforce officer who reported a couple of things that turned up in the air samples followeing the USSR event. This officer reported that the bomb was "composite" and not only was the ratio of the two fuels similar to the US Mark VI but that the ratios of the fission fragments were likewise. I have been frustrated for over 50 years because I wonder if I am the only one alive who even believes there was an AFOAT-TWO. Later the composite core was used in the US Mark-13 torpedo atom bomb. Any of you old-timers ever hear about AFOAT-TWO and its mission? Thanks, Galois |
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This Day in History
1838:
Mexico declares war on France.
1864: The once proud Confederate Army of Tennessee suffers a devastating defeat when its commander, General John Bell Hood, orders a frontal assault on strong Union positions around Franklin, Tennessee. The loss cost Hood six of his finest generals and nearly a third of his force. 1939: The Red Army crosses the Soviet-Finnish border with 465,000 men and 1,000 aircraft. Helsinki was bombed, and 61 Finns were killed in an air raid that steeled the Finns for resistance, not capitulation. 1942: During the Battle of Tassafaronga, the last major naval action in the Solomons, U.S. forces prevent the Japanese attempt to reprovision Japanese troops on Guadalcanal. Six U.S. ships are damaged during the action. 1945: Russian forces take Danzig in Poland and invade Austria. 1950: President Truman declares that the United States will use the A-bomb to get peace in Korea. 1950: Lieutenant General Edward Almond, X Corps commander, ordered X Corps to withdraw south to Hungnam. 1965: Following a visit to South Vietnam, Defense Secretary McNamara reports in a memorandum to President Lyndon B. Johnson that the South Vietnamese government of Nguyen Cao Ky "is surviving, but not acquiring wide support or generating actions." 1972: Defense Department sources say there will not be a full withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam until a final truce agreement is signed, and that such an agreement would not affect the 54,000 U.S. servicemen in Thailand or the 60,000 aboard 7th Fleet ships off the Vietnamese coast. |
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