Can someone explain the feared runaway nuclear reaction that Oppenheimer presented Einstein in the film? The one where detonating a nuke would’ve exploded the whole world?
Wouldn’t that scenario require many orders of magnitude more energy than the output of the what the first (or current) nuclear weapons were capable of?
In: Physics
My undergraduate physics professor told a story about this. He said there was one guy whose job was to make sure that the runaway fusion reaction was impossible. He did this by performing the calculation many times until he was satisfied. When it came time for him to observe the first A-bomb test, it was *much* brighter than he had expected. On seeing the surprisingly bright light, his first thought was “Oh NO! I made a mistake!”.
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