Plutonium

By Jeremy Bernstein,

Book cover of Plutonium: A History of the World's Most Dangerous Element

Book description

When plutonium was first manufactured at Berkeley in the spring of 1941, there was so little of it that it was not visible to the naked eye. It took a year to accumulate enough so that one could actually see it. Now so much has been produced that we don't…

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Until 1939, plutonium, element number 93, was just a spot on the periodic table. Then, it became the core of the bomb tested at Alamogordo and of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. It is not what provided most of the “yield” of the first H bomb, but it played an essential role in that device.

The skilled science writer Jeremy Bernstein examines the chemistry, physics, and history of plutonium.

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