Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Building on major scientific breakthroughs made during the 1930s, the United Kingdom began the world's first nuclear weapons research project, codenamed Tube Alloys, in 1941, during World War II. The United States, in collaboration with the United Kingdom, initiated the Manhattan Project the following year to build a weapon using nuclear fission.
1998 – May – India tests five more nuclear weapons as part of Operation Shakti at the Pokhran test site. This was India's second round of nuclear weapons testing. 1998 – May – Pakistan detonates five high-enriched uranium nuclear weapons in the Chagai Hills. A sixth nuclear test, at Kharan, was a plutonium device.
March 2: John R. Dunning's team at Columbia University verifies Niels Bohr's hypothesis that uranium 235 is responsible for fission by slow neutrons. [10]March: University of Birmingham-based scientists Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls author the Frisch–Peierls memorandum, calculate that an atomic bomb might need as little as 1 pound (0.45 kg) of enriched uranium to work.
Hanford’s historic B Reactor, the world’s first full-scale nuclear reactor, went critical on Sept. 26, 1944. Wigner’s team had designed the Hanford reactors to house 1,600 process tubes.
The Manhattan Project was a research and development program undertaken during World War II to produce the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States in collaboration with the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project was directed by Major General Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The first atomic bomb test by the Soviet Union in August 1949 came earlier than Americans expected, and over the next several months, there was an intense debate within the U.S. government, military, and scientific communities over whether to proceed with the development of the far more powerful, nuclear fusion–based hydrogen bomb, then known ...
The world's first commercial nuclear power station, Calder Hall at Windscale, England was connected to the national power grid on 27 August 1956. In common with a number of other generation I reactors, the plant had the dual purpose of producing electricity and plutonium-239, the latter for the nascent nuclear weapons program in Britain. [26]
Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1) was the world's first artificial nuclear reactor.On 2 December 1942, the first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was initiated in CP-1 during an experiment led by Enrico Fermi.