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Episode 534: The Manhattan Project Part II - A Numbers Game

Last Podcast On The Left

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Neil Bohr: A Physicist's Guide to Nuclear Energy

Dirty bombs made areas of effect deadly and uninhabitable all the same. There was no evidence for German dirty bombs, but nevertheless Manhattan Project officials had secret nuclear defense systems installed in quite a few major American cities. They almost deployed teams of soldiers with Geiger counters on D day in a scuttle plan called Operation Peppermint. At one point Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi enthusiastically discussed using the isotope strontium 90 to poison Germany's food and water supplies in a preemptive strike. And also I didn't know that Mo Berg tried to kill Werner Heisenberg. Well, we'll get to that next episode.

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