The Atomic Heritage Foundation (AHF), founded by Cynthia Kelly in 2002,
is a nonprofit organization in Washington, DC, dedicated to the
preservation and interpretation of the Manhattan Project and the Atomic
Age and its legacy. The Foundation's goal is to provide the public not
only a better understanding of the past but also a basis for addressing
scientific, technical, political, social and ethical issues of the 21st
century.
If you are a New Mexico teacher interested in attending this year's workshop, to be held in Santa Fe and Los Alamos from June 14-17, please fill out the attached application form and return it to
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Manhattan Project Comes to Life in Animated Feature Musical "Bomb Squad"
Director Ben Hillman brings the Manhattan Project to life in the new animated/feature musical Bomb Squad, which traces the making of the atomic bomb from Marie Curie's laboratory through World War II. In addition to the famous scientists and politicians, materials such as plutonium and heavy water are also given singing roles. Visit the film's website here to watch a trailer.
The Atomic Heritage Foundation
910 17th Street, NW
Suite 408
Washington, DC 20006
202-293-0045 info@atomicheritage.org
Atomic Story of the Week
I went to Chicago with another man, a chemist, and the two of us found our way to the University of Chicago and to the Metallurgical Laboratory, which everybody called the Met Lab. We showed our credentials and we got taken to an office where there was a Dupont representative named Dr. Walter Dew. And he sat the two of us down and he said, “Have you made any guesses as to what this is all about?” And of course we’d been doing a lot of guessing but we said “No.” He said “Well, it’s about atomic energy. We are going to use atomic energy to make a bomb.”
He opened a drawer and he pulled out a couple little cubes of metal and threw them on the table and said, “Do you know what this is?” I picked one of them up and it felt very heavy so I said “Oh, I don’t know. It’s very dense.” He said, “Well, that’s uranium. We’re going to make a pile with uranium and graphite, and in this pile we’re going to make a new element called plutonium, and with this plutonium we’re going to make a bomb. Our part of it is to make the plutonium and other people are going to make the bomb. One way to think of it is that you would have people like slices of an orange and all these orange slices would go together and make a bomb.”
HARRY KAMACK, HANFORD
Did You Know?
“In every investigation, in every extension of knowledge, we’re involved in action. And in every action we’re involved in choice. And in every choice we’re involved in a kind of loss, the loss of what we didn’t do. We find this in the simplest situations.... Meaning is always obtained at the cost of leaving things out.... In practical terms this means, of course, that our knowledge is always finite and never all encompassing.... This makes the world of ours an open world, a world without end. ” (J. Robert Oppenheimer; quote provided by Ashutosh Jogalekar of India)
