Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

388 WORLD WAR I! RESEARCH (1941-45)
calculation so far made indicated that "in any event the bomb will generate
enough energy to completely destroy itself."
The thought of may have seemed somewhat remote when
the lectures were first given, for in a final section of the primer that discussed
the mechanics of shooting that would bring the pieces of the bomb together
with the right velocity, forming a critical or spontaneously exploding mass,
it was admitted that "this is the part of the job about which we know the least
at present." Two years after its organization, Los Alamos had the answer.
By early 1944 fear of German success began to recede as the magni-
tude of the required research and industrial effort in this country became
evident. Germany no longer had such resoUrces.68 By the spring of 1945
Oak Ridge began producing U235 in significant amounts and Hanford was
shipping increasing quantities of plutonium to Los Alamos. The bomb, was
a near certainty, though no one yet knew how powerful it would be.
Only the emergency of war could have justified the cost, in excess
of $2 billion, of the manmade atomic explosion that occurred on the morning
of July 16, 1945. The detonation took place in a remote section of 'the
Alamogord.o Air Base, far to the south of Los Alamos. It was 10 weeks
after the suicide of Hitler and the war in Europe had ended.
THE RADIO PROXIMITY FUZE (NONROTATING TYPE)
In the shadow of the atomic bomb were two other spectacular devel-
opments of World War II, the airburst proximity fuze and radar. Neither
idea was new. A fuze that would explode a shell or bomb when directly
over its target, rather than on impact, had been sought since World War
I. The experimentation leading to radar began in Great Britain in 1919
and in this country, at the Naval Research Laboratory, in 1923.69 The
Bureau was to have little to do with radar, much to do with the proximity
fuze.
An artillery or antiaircraft shell, or bomb, rocket, or mortar round
with a VT (variable time) proximity fuze has from 5 to 20 times the effective-
As the defeat of Germany neared, a scientific mission somewhat ineptly named ALSOS
(the Greek word for "groves"), closely followed the advancing Allied columns and sped
through the laboratories and industrial plants of the occupied countries and across the
Rhine, to assess the progress the Germans had made in their development of the bomb.
Incredible was the discovery that nothing like a real effort had been made anywhere,
owing as much perhaps to the death or flight of Germany's first-rank scientists as to
Nazi ideology.
"In this country Dr. A. Hoyt Taylor, first superintendent of the radio division of the
Naval Research Laboratory established after World War I, is credited with discover-
ing the principle of radar by bouncing back a radio beam directed at a ship on the
Potomac. Baxter, p. 139.