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The Revolution Becomes a European War Howe’s triumph at Germantown and his seizure of Philadelphia gave satisfaction to the British government, but these events did not lift the depression that had set in when information about Burgoyne’s capture arrived. The term inevitably attached to that event was “disaster.” Just how disastrous the loss of Burgoyne’s army was could not be known immediately, and for several months there was hope in the cabinet that its worst consequence could be avoided. What the cabinet feared was the entrance of France into the war on the side of the American colonies. French action against Britain would transform a rebellion within the empire into a worldwide conflict whose spread would necessarily result in the dispersion of British forces—and almost inevitably the establishment of American independence. Since 1763 the French had husbanded their outrage and dreamed of revenge against the British for the defeat they suffered in the Seven Years War. Not surprisingly, the upheavals in the British colonies alerted the French government to the possibility of splintering the British empire. Choiseul, the foreign minister of Louis XV, recognizing that much of Britain’s strength lay in her colonies and trade with them, watched the rising American disaffection with hope that war would occur. Choiseul, however, also had other problems to think about, for example, how he was going to rebuild French naval and military power. This problem existed because of another—a treasury depleted by the Seven Years War. The agents he sent to America in the 1760s sent back opinions that rebellion would occur, but not immediately, an assessment Choiseul accepted without question.1
The Glorious Cause
Robert Middlekauff
Fermi ordered all but one of the cadmium rods again unlocked and removed. He asked Weil to set the last rod at one of the earlier morning settings and compared pile intensity to the earlier reading. When the measurements checked he directed Weil to remove the rod to the last setting before lunch, about seven feet out. The closer k approached 1.0, the slower the rate of change of pile intensity. Fermi made another calculation. The pile was nearly critical. He asked that ZIP be slid in. That adjustment brought the neutron count down. “This time,” he told Weil, “take the control rod out twelve inches.” Weil withdrew the cadmium rod. Fermi nodded and ZIP was winched out as well. “This is going to do it,” Fermi told Compton. The director of the plutonium project had found a place for himself at Fermi’s side. “Now it will become self-sustaining. The trace [on the recorder] will climb and continue to climb; it will not level off.”1698 Herbert Anderson was an eyewitness: At first you could hear the sound of the neutron counter, clickety-clack, clickety-clack. Then the clicks came more and more rapidly, and after a while they began to merge into a roar; the counter couldn’t follow anymore. That was the moment to switch to the chart recorder. But when the switch was made, everyone watched in the sudden silence the mounting deflection of the recorder’s pen. It was an awesome silence. Everyone realized the significance of that switch; we were in the high intensity regime and the counters were unable to cope with the situation anymore. Again and again, the scale of the recorder had to be changed to accommodate the neutron intensity which was increasing more and more rapidly. Suddenly Fermi raised his hand. “The pile has gone critical,” he announced. No one present had any doubt about it.1699 Fermi allowed himself a grin. He would tell the technical council the next day that the pile achieved a k of 1.0006.1700 Its neutron intensity was then doubling every two minutes. Left uncontrolled for an hour and a half, that rate of increase would have carried it to a million kilowatts. Long before so extreme a runaway it would have killed anyone left in the room and melted down. “Then everyone began to wonder why he didn’t shut the pile off,” Anderson continues.1701 “But Fermi was completely calm. He waited another minute, then another, and then when it seemed that the anxiety was too much to bear, he ordered ‘ZIP in!’ ” It was 3:53 P.M. Fermi had run the pile for 4.5 minutes at one-half watt and brought to fruition all the years of discovery and experiment. Men had controlled the release of energy from the atomic nucleus. The chain reaction was moonshine no more. Eugene Wigner reports how they felt: Nothing very spectacular had happened. Nothing had moved and the pile itself had given no sound. Nevertheless, when the rods were pushed back in and the clicking died down, we suddenly experienced a let-down feeling, for all of us understood the language of the counter.…
Making of the Atomic Bomb
Richard Rhodes
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