Perception of fission in the US in the 1940's

[DrDu]

Not during extreme situations.

Ok, during war time, but besides invading Grandada and massive undercover actions of the CIA in Nicaragua Reagan was one of the few recent presidents who didn't start a personal war make people to troop the flag when popularity levels fell.
I think that NRC and DOE did have some adjudication but I still wonder why universities did not take legal action against it. On the other hand, we momentarily observe similarly willing cooperation of all major IT enterprises in the US with the NSA in the case of its prism program.

 

[SteamKing]

In the US, major universities are often the recipients of large government contracts, amounting to millions of US dollars in revenue on a yearly basis. They are not about to bite the hand which feeds them. Unless you want to spend all of your money, you better have a good case going against the government, because they have more money and more lawyers.

 

[DrDu]

I just got a copy of the NYT article:
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0D16FC3B54117A93C7A9178ED85F448485F9
It starts on the title page and is continued on all of page 51, so it is really an in depth article on the newest findings on fission research. The immediate trigger was the publication of some letters to the editor in physical reviews by Nier et al. in 1940 on the fission of U-235 which had been previously isolated in minute amounts.
The article explains the concepts of fission, nuclear chain reactions, slow and fast neutrons and gives estimates of the critical mass U-235. It stesses the possibility to use uranium in power plants and outlines the concept of a boiling water reactor. The amount of energy released in a nuclear explosion is also estimated and compared to the largest explosions with conventional explosives and it is also mentioned that the production of U-235 was also a project of highest priority among German scientists.

Thus I think it can be concluded that the possibility to build a nuclear bomb was not only known to a set of speciallists but also to the broad public in the US if scientifically interested as early as 1940.