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
Very early on in the theoretical research of making an atomic bomb, our understanding of nuclear processes was still incomplete. One of the Manhattan Project scientists (I believe it was Hans Bethe but I might be wrong) realized that they didn’t have enough understanding to 100% rule it out the possibility that the extreme pressures and temperatures from the nuclear explosion could start a runaway fusion process of the nitrogen in the atmosphere. Pretty quickly after that, they gained some more understanding and had the math to be able to calculate that it was actually 100% impossible. Oppenheimer portrays this with some more drama than actually occurred in real life.
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