Having a History of Explosives...

One of the oldest nitro-glycerin production facilities is located on the south shore area of Montreal.  The facility still uses its original Ford Model T truck bed to move the nitro from production to packaging.  The reason this antiquated vehicle and process is in use is simple - it hasn't blown up yet.  In the explosives industry there really isn't much incentive to change things once they work.  The Ford Model T truck bed has been in use all this time because its still there.  They have an adequate supply of tires and parts for the vehicle and it continues to work.  There must be something about the Model-T that the nitro likes.  Of course, there are other nitro production plants around the world that don't use a Model-T, and presumably few changes have been made to their production processes either, at least after they cleaned up from the previous attempt that didn't work.

My great uncle told me many stories about explosives production, but his greatest stories were about the power plant he worked at a place called Chalk River.  He also worked at a place called Camp-X on the northern shore of lake Ontario.  Camp-X is most famous as the training area that was used to train saboteurs for the mission to kill Adolf Eichmann.  Canadians don't really revel in the glory of these kinds of acts, but if ever there was a person that needed ridding from the face of the earth it was Adolf Eichmann, and I'm proud of the family connection.  Of course, my great uncle was a middle aged engineer at the time, I really can't see him having had an active part in the process of training these brave men who knew they weren't coming back.  But he was a 'excellent engineer' as one of his colleagues put it at his funeral some decades ago, and it was quite likely that he had a hand in the design and building of Camp-X.  He never showed me any drawings for that place, but I saw drawings aplenty for the town of Deep River which was built to house and isolate those working at Chalk River.  I still have the letters that my great uncle received from C.D. Howe after the war - up until 1960 that reiterate that he was never to divulge what he did during the war.

My uncle built a power plant at Chalk River that was based on the new technology of nuclear fission.  He was told never to talk about what he did, but he was just building a power plant, wasn't he?  As with all things, my great uncle was an expert at building things.  Telling stories is like building things.  Depending on what you tell you begin to build an image, and the constant reiteration of ideas creates an solid impression of someone and what they were about.  During the years we are talking about people's recollection of him was that he was not someone that you messed with.  He apparently used to rule the family with an iron hand, which was funny to me because he stood about two feet shorter than I am.  I have a hard time imagining him being bossy.  With me he was patient, even when I was being a pain - as children sometimes are.  We used to talk of many things, but mostly about explosives.  I had a great interest in all things war related - I still do.  By the age of four I could recite most of the technical specifications of every fighter plane used in World War II (I can't anymore...), right down to the number and calibers of the guns as well as their cyclic rates, the power ratings on the engines and their maneuverability.  We used to talk a lot about explosives, from the design of the nitro plant I mentioned above, to his designing the RDX cracking technology necessary to use RDX, to his description of being in a nitro plant one day when one of the vats blew up.  We talked about explosives a lot.  He knew the engineering detail of every question I ever asked.  I used to relay some of this info to my friends at high school, but technical detail and teenagers rarely mix.  We talked about explosives visit after visit when he was too old to mow his lawn anymore and needed help.  He was, of course, quite capable of engineering the lawn mower, which was of the push variety.  It was a breeze to move around the lawn and almost easier to use than a power mover.  The blades were so sharp the grass, even when it was thick, had no chance whatsoever.  He would pay me to mown his lawn, which would take about 10 minutes.  If I missed a spot I heard about it fast, but would run out and fix it.  Then we would talk about explosives and their manufacture, and about things related to the war.  Not once did he tell me what he did during the war in any specific terms (C.D. Howe may rest in peace), but we never ever talked about electrical power, and finally after all these years it has occurred to me to ask the question I'm guessing all his stories were directing me towards - why would you put an explosives designer/engineer in charge of a power plant?

Granted, the new technology of fission was being developed for bombs - big bombs - bombs that could wipe out entire cities.  Did they know this at the time - yes they did.  Did they revel in the sheer destruction that they were helping to create, no, they did not.  It was a necessity.  Most people don't realize that it wasn't until late 1944 that it became clear that Germany was going to collapse.  Up until that time it was a desperate fight.  And it very nearly didn't go the way it needed to.  In every endeavour of this size there is a necessity of being lucky.  North American war industry was almost destroyed by German U-Boats - yes they were killing the convoys to England, but losing England, while bad wouldn't have been the end (as the landings in North Africa demonstrated).  One of the problems at the time was that the U-Boats were taking out all the Iron Ore that was being brought to North America from South American mines.  Until the discovery and development of the Steep Rock Mine in 1944, there really wasn't an adequate supply of iron ore for making all the tools needed to deal with the Germans.  We weren't lucky and we were losing.  The development of a war ending bomb was a priority of a kind that the generations that came later would never know.  Hitler was a monster, Adolf Eichmann wasn't just bad, he was a monster and Hitler's acknowledged successor.  These people were evil in a way that few have ever been.  Ethnic cleansing is not a new idea, but ethnic cleansing based on eugenics was.  Ethnic cleansing just because you need an enemy to motivate people is an unconscinable and pointless act of destruction.  Of course, the prosecution of the war was never about stopping the ethnic cleansing (or holocaust), it was about stopping Germany and its aggressive expansion and subjugation of peoples.  And as late as 1943 the war was decidedly going Hitler's way.  German industrial output didn't actually peak until late 1943, prior to that it wasn't even on a war footing - why? Because prior to mid 1942 Germany had no reason to even try - victory had followed victory to the point where they looked unstoppable.  They had expanded their empire from the Atlantic to the Volga, they covered some 20 million square miles.  They had to regauge 4000 miles of Russian built railroad tracks, just to get their supplies to the end of their new Empire.  Things were bad.

No one wants a war, and once its over no one wants to hear about a war, or even acknowledge that they were involved.  Wars are ugly, and many of the things that needed to be done to win were ugly too.  So, after the war, Canada's story is that we were building a power plant at Chalk River based on the new technology of fission that the Americans used to make a bomb.  Its a fine story, but is it true?  It is certainly plausible that DIL - Canada's primary defense contractor was contracted to exploit the new technology of fission into power - at the time the Steep Rock mines were the largest hydraulic mining efforts in the world and were sucking up almost all of Ontario's available power reserves.  These being only coal fired power plants because - yes, you guessed it, nuclear didn't exist yet, and hydro plants were more likely to be scrapped for their huge metal turbines for building ships than anything else.  Of course, its not a total mystery and I'm overplaying it a bit here.  My Great Uncle was an explosives engineer and had very little interest in electrical power.  One of the stories he relayed was a harmless recounting of his visit to Oak Ridge Tennessee where the American had built one of the largest factories in the world.  Its purpose, to separate U235 from U238.  The Americans had tried every technique known to work in separating one element from another.  The bulk of the separation at the time was being conducted by centrifuges.  For separating U235 from U238 this would be an agonizingly slow process due to the almost negligible weight difference between the two isotopes, but if you have enough centrifuges you can make headway.  One of the stories I heard was of how the Army Engineers (who apparently were not that bright) wanted to dump all the resulting U235 into a single bin - for those of you that don't speak nuclear, the problem isn't getting U235 to explode or fission, the problem is deciding when it should.  If you want u235 to blow up (fission) then all you have to do is dump it into one big bin and wait a billionth of a second.  Apparently Oppenheimer himslef was consulted on this matter and gently aimed the army engineers in another direction for storing the processed U235.

As long as we have to pretend that there was a power plant involved in this work then the following story holds some amusement.  The only known way for slowing a nuclear reaction at the time was heavy water or D2O.  Instead of two hydrogen atoms, heavy water has two deuterium atoms (deuterium is a naturally occuring isotope of hydrogen that is stable, and sometimes it forms water - or heavy water as the case may be).  It is probably interesting to note (interesting to me anyway) that hydrogen bombs are fueled by deuterium and tritium.  Tritium being yet a heavier isotope of hydrogen than deuterium - I'm honestly not sure if ther is heavy heavy water (T2O) as I'm fairly sure that Tritium is unstable and decays (hence the need to steward all of the russian and american H-bombs)- but we dirgress.  We were talking about nuclear power plants and the fact that heavy water was the only way to slow the reaction.  Heavy water acts as a nuclear fission inhibitor because it can absorb or slow fast neutrons very efficiently (heavy water has a high collision cross section to fast neutrons).  Slowing the fast neutrons slows the reaction and controls the tendency to blow up.  Anyway, as the story goes, the British had the totality of the world's supply of heavy water, and fearing imminent invasion shipped it to Canada where it would be safe (they also shipped the cavity magnetron which was the focus of the MIT based radiation labs that perfected radar technology throughout the war).  As can be imagined, things were hectic at the time, what with the imminent invasion of Britain by the Germans, and somehow no one in Canada was told of the shipment and so, on the docks of Montreal sat the worlds supply of Heavy Water abandoned and unknown - except for probably the Germans.  Apparently the Heavy Water sat there for a number of days until it was realized what had happened, at which point there was a rather muted but extremely intense rescue made of the Heavy Water and its transport to the newly created site at Chalk River, where Canada was working on creating power from nuclear fission, in a project headed by an explosives designer/engineer.

To give a sense of the calibre of explosives engineer that my great uncle was, the two most abundant explosives of the war were nitro glycerin, which is used to make TNT, and explodes very nicely even on its own and RDX.  RDX is the active component of C4, plastique, torpex and most high explosives.  Its explosive power measured in the velocity of expansion of the gases resulting from its detonation is some 10,000 times faster than TNT.  As my great uncle desribed, when they were first working with it he set up an experiement with a piece of armor plate.  On one piece of plate a small quantity of TNT was applied, and on another piece of plate the same volume of RDX based explosive (most likely plastique) was applied.  They never found the piece of plate that the TNT was applied to as the explosion blew it far far away, however, the piece of plate that the RDX based explosive was attached to didn't move, but there was a hole blown right through the plate.  The explosion was so fast it simply streamed through the plate.  The modern day HEAT anti-tank round is based on this effect (and this chemical called RDX).  My great uncle's involvement with RDX was in the processing of the chemical.  Apparently when RDX is produced it is a liquid which hardens into a solid.  According to my great uncle walking up to the now solid RDX and breaking it with your hands or via some mechanical mechanism (I had a hammer in mind at the time of the telling of the story) is a really bad idea.  Cracking RDX required a stainless steel conveyor which would deform and crack the RDX safely so that it could then be included in mixtures.  In this way it would be cracked and then ground up to be included in plastique or the kind of explosives that are necessary to compress a non-critical mass of U235 to a critical mass and achieve a sustained chain reaction.

Atomic bombs are relatively simple.  The key idea is being able to control when they go off.  Part of the problem is that U235 is a source of very hard radiations which tends to mess with electronics and turns metals very hard and brittle.  In order to create a bomb that could be delivered to a target a way had to be found to create a non-critical mass of U235 and then make it critical via a trigger.  The idea was to create a sub-critical density of U235 wrap in in a very precise shaped charge and then set off the shaped charge to compress the sub-critical mass into a critical mass.  As the story above showed, an explosive like RDX was up to task of being the trigger whereas and explosive like TNT was more likely to spread things around inside the bomb casing.  RDX could deliver the punch necessary to compress the U235 metal to a very small volume and result in a density necessary to create a sustained shcain reaction.  Keep in mind that once fission is initiated in this way, we are talking about a billionth of a second for the chain reaction ot be over and done and the vast amounts of released energy are now racing out from the very small volume at the speed of light and at the speed of sound in whatever medium it was the bomb blew up in.  The theory of bomb building is really easy - compress U235 to a critical mass and you get a fission explosion - the yield can be estimated by a rather pedestrain set of calculations.  The same is true of Hydrogen Bombs - all they require is a deuterium and tritium rich shell that is suddenly bombarded by a hail of hot/fast neutrons expanding in a shape that exactly matches the configuration of the deuterium/tritium shell.  If you get this right then the results are very high yield explosions.  So, apparently yhis isn;t the secret part - because everyone knows these things - just read a Tom Clancy book like The Sum of All Fears.  However, the engineering of bombs is the real secret.  Doing these things is not so easy.  It requires a level of precision in manufacturing that is very hard to accomplish, and it requires a knowledge of metals and materials and electronics and timing that is unparalleled.  Getting one process right to a high level of precision is difficult, getting two processes that are dependent to this level of precision is not twice as difficult but the square of the difficulty.  Building a bomb takes more than a few of these processes.

So, my great uncle was an explosives engineer without parallel that understood in precise detail the kinds of explosives that were necessary to initiate fission.  There is no evidence that bombs were built at Chalk River, and I have no reason to suspect that they were.  Chalk River was likely exactly what it was purported to be - an experimental power plant based on the new technology of fission.  As a consequence it was a national and wartime secret.  But, there are a lot of things you can do at a nuclear power plant while the thing is making power.  Nuclear engineering is a very different dicpline.  If a nitro glycerin processing vat blows up the explosion can be directed upwards by placing thick walls of sand and soil around the vat.  The force tends to blow these walls outward, but the bulk of the explosion is directed upwards.  If the 'vat' was a nuclear core in a power plant and went wrong the heat of the reaction would turn the the walls into a rapidly expanding liquid and the core itslef would melt into the earth until it hit the water table whereupon a heat explosion of great magnitude would result.  No fission bomb, but the 100 hundred or so tons of hard radioactive nuclear core would then spread itself all over the surrounding contryside.  Not a desirable result.  The problem is that the hard radiation is omni present.  I met one of the grad students that worked at Chalk River during the war.  He eventually secured a job teaching physics at McGill University and was one of my first teachers of mechanics.  I notices - as everyone probably did - that his hand were knarled, but he had found a way to hold chalk and write out Newton's Equations for year after year of new physics students.  I once visited him in his office and saw a pciture on the wall.  It was picture that my great uncle had given me of the ZEEP reactor (Canada's first working graphite reactor core).  I commented on it and he brightened a little.  I asked if he knew of my uncle - he recognized the name but commented that he was far too junior on that project to be anywhere near the likes of my great uncle.  I still have the picture.  My ex professor's hands were testament to the lack of understanding that we had when we experiemented with hard radiation and the first nuclear reactors.  My great uncle bore no such scars and he lived to the age of 87, an age where apparently everything can fail at once.  The materials engineering experience and experience of electronics and timing circuitry in the presence of hard radiation fields represents an experiement in what it takes to make a stable bomb.  Circuitry in a bomb casing is subjected to the hardest radiation imaginable (outside the radiation that results when the bomb goes off).

It was war.  Canada had a lot of secrets and secret programs - like Cmap-X and the Steep Rock mines, and Chalk River and visits to the US in the middle of the night...  One of my father's favourite stories involved my great uncle during the early 1940s - probably around 1941.  There was a dinner party at my great uncle's house where he lived with my great aunt (neither ever married and remained resolutely single until their dying days).  As I mentioned before my great uncle was mildly controlling and expected a level of decorum - he wore a dinner jacket to all thje dinners (and lunches) I ever attended with him (even if I was the only guest).  During the dinner, one of the guests apparently got up the nerve to ask where my uncle went when the limousines would pick him up in the middle of the night.  My father, who as he admits had been reading too many Buck Rogers comics books blurted out that my great uncle was " building the Atomic bomb at a place called X".  Years later, after the war, my dad came upon my uncle in his study and my great uncle asked him how he had known.  My father, taken aback a little admitted that he had been reading comic books and had just made it up, as kids do.  A funny story.  An insight in to why an explosives designer/engineer was in charge of building a power plant for a defense contractor during a desperate struggle against a hideous enemy.

My great uncle and I used to talk about explosives, bombs and nuclear power plants.  He talked a bit about visits to the US and the site at Oak Ridge Tennessee, which must have been something quite impressive.  I never heard the word Manhattan project or the like.  I never asked about nuclear weapons.  We talked about explosives and he talked from the perspective of one of DIL's most impressive engineers and left an impression that he had built his career and his reputation building explosives.  And having a hisotry of explosives experience and know-how, he was put in charge of building Canada's first nuclear power plant...