Longing for the Bomb

Abstract

This concluding chapter addresses the longing of residents of Oak Ridge for the days when the city was a muddy frontier at the beginning of the Atomic Age. Such a longing was shaped by positive memories of working for a secret atomic bomb project, but it was also colored with nostalgia for an imagined golden age of mid-twentieth-century America. In addition, this sentiment not only describes an opinion about the past; it also betrays a vision of contemporary America as a nation divided and in decline; a nation that has lost, or is in the act of losing, its purpose and character.

About Roy Glauber

“…During his time in Los Alamos (1943–46) as one of the youngest staff scientists of the Manhattan Project, Glauber worked on neutron diffusion, key to finding the critical mass of fissionable nuclei. This work was done within the group of Robert Serber, “the intellectual midwife at the birth of the atomic bomb,” 2 and is summarized in three lengthy secret papers, still partly classified. Among the unclassified results are analytic solutions to the generalized Milne equation for diffusion found by Glauber 3…”