Chapter 15 "Different Animals" Summary

General Leslie Groves acquires 59,000 acres of Appalachian semi-wilderness in eastern Tennessee on which the Army's Oak Ridge facility will be built the futuristic factories needed to separate U235 from U238 to build the atomic bomb. The Army first must build a town, highways, and install adequate communications. The entire reservation, fenced with barbed wire and controlled through seven guarded gates, is named the "Clinton Engineer Works," nicknamed "Dogpatch." General Groves plans to build electromagnetic isotope separation plants and a gaseous-diffusion plant there to produce plutonium. Ernest Lawrence's electromagnetic isotope separation method using a cyclotron is farthest along but too slow for the Army's needs.

At Berkeley, Fermi is separating isotopes by gaseous diffusion through an enormous interconnected assemblage of pipes and pumps. General Groves begins building a plant at Oak Ridge without knowing what to build. He...