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September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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The Frisch-Peierls memorandum: A seminal document of nuclear history
The Manhattan Project is usually considered to have been initiated with Albert Einstein’s letter to President Franklin Roosevelt in October 1939. However, a lesser-known document that was just as impactful on wartime nuclear history was the so-called Frisch-Peierls memorandum. Prepared by two refugee physicists at the University of Birmingham in Britain in early 1940, this manuscript was the first technical description of nuclear weapons and their military, strategic, and ethical implications to reach high-level government officials on either side of the Atlantic. The memorandum triggered the initiation of the British wartime nuclear program, which later merged with the Manhattan Engineer District.
Simon C. P. Wang, Delbert E. Day
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 17 | Number 3 | May 1990 | Pages 427-438
Technical Paper | ICF Target | doi.org/10.13182/FST90-A29218
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A technique is described for producing spherical gas bubbles in glass that can be used to make inertial confinement fusion (ICF) targets. A glass rod containing an irregularly shaped hole is heated to a temperature where the glass viscosity is low enough so that surface tension forms a bubble from the hole. Buoyancy forces drive the bubble upward in the glass rod as it becomes increasingly spherical. At the proper time, the rising bubble is decelerated and brought to a gradual stop by increasing the glass viscosity by slowly reducing the temperature. With the present technique, 3- to 6-mm-diam spherical bubbles with a distortion of 0.3% have been produced in Corning 7740 and Schott BK-7 glasses. Glass macroshells can be formed from the bubbles trapped in the glass by grinding the outside surface concentric with the highly spherical inner surface. These glass shells, which possess a high degree of geometrical perfection, should be adequate for ICF targets.