INRE ultra-centrifuges…
Warren K. Lewis is the MIT professor whose opinion determined the practicality and the method for ‘hex’ enrichment.
It was his top-secret calculations, as the nation’s foremost chemical engineer that established the Oak Ridge scheme.
Even while under construction the numbers were re-crunched ( Kenneth David Nichols ) and the process flow was adjusted. Calculations that would take but seconds on a MacBook took a massive team months. The scene looked like Lemmon’s job in “Apartment.”
Both the Americans and the Germans rejected the ultra-centrifuge out of hand. In their respective wartime economies the time-line to perfection for such — completely out of reach.
Germany went with heavy water because Norway was the established global producer for researchers already — and they occupied Norway. America went with gambits based upon silver or nickel grids/meshes and humongous power consumption — we’d just built the TVA and BPA.
That Nazi Germany didn’t see the graphite pile converter as a viable gambit must have been due to the neutron poisons found in European coals and their lack of natural gas. We were using massive amounts of Nat Gas to create tire black for our rubber industry. Shunting over some to create virtually pure carbon bricks was no problem.
The big cruncher was the high-tech alloy tubes needed by the graphite pile: that’s where Met Lab really came through.
Subsequently, W. Averell Harriman, Leftist and traitor, made sure that these very tubes and blocks were shipped to Stalin under the rubric of Lendlease Aid!
Somewhere out on the web, Russians have published this list of materials — at the very bottom of an immense list detailing just how much aid America gave the USSR. It’s a mind-boggling amount. We also gave Stalin the neutron shim — and quite certainly, the blue prints for Hanford style converters.
Oppenheimer’s crew is celebrated in Moscow. Their records show that they were getting the keys to the globe for no dollar cost at all.
Like my Chinese fools, noted above, they maintained a staggering innocence with regard to the monster that Stalinism was.
We still see that in colleges across the land even now: Hitler all bad — Uncle Joe: a workable strategic partner!
