Joe Huffman got a chance to exchange e-mails with the last surviving scientist on the Manhattan Project. Very cool. This was the guy who developed the detonators. In order to create an implosion type device that uses a plutonium core (Fat Man), you need to create a very precisely orchestrated conventional explosion to compress the core. Conventional detonators weren’t up to the task, which is where Johnson came in.
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God bless that man for his service! His bombs saved a million American casualties and multi-millions of Japanese deaths, as well as WW III!