Items related to THE PEACHES PROTOCOL: How America Won World War II...

THE PEACHES PROTOCOL: How America Won World War II with 12 Observers, 200 Pounds of Copper, and 5,000 Tons of Canned Peaches — A Secret History of the ... Project (THE PROTOCOL FILES (Books 1–2)) - Softcover

Wang, Carl

 
9798187383436: THE PEACHES PROTOCOL: How America Won World War II with 12 Observers, 200 Pounds of Copper, and 5,000 Tons of Canned Peaches — A Secret History of the ... Project (THE PROTOCOL FILES (Books 1–2))

Synopsis

THE BOMB COST $2 BILLION. THE BELIEF COST $4.3 MILLION — AND IT WAS PAID IN PEACHES.

Leipzig, 1942. Seven people watch a dead reactor, and it whispers. Werner Heisenberg crosses out his own margin note — nonsense. Check. — and buries it in a safe. Berlin never asks what the note was worth.

Chicago, 1942. Forty-nine names stand in a squash court, and a pile that shouldn't go critical does. "The reactor is shy," Fermi says. "It likes an audience." Everyone laughs. One major writes it down.

Los Alamos, 1943. Two hundred mathematicians — 4F, flat-footed, bad-eyed — are fed 5,800 calories a day, sealed in copper rooms, and ordered to think faster. The requisition reads: 5 tons canned peaches, heavy syrup. Not in juice. Syrup.

Wendover, 1944. Twelve fat men learn to hold an equation for six hours while the world tries to shake it loose. They can make a bomb work. They can also — they learn on a salt flat, for the price of 46,800 gallons of avgas — make one refuse to fall.

Inside the file:

  • THE PEACH REQUISITION — approved, renamed "computational supplies," never questioned again
  • THE FIZZLE FLIGHT — the first proof the effect runs both ways
  • THE NULL PIT — $20 million of plutonium that forgot it was plutonium, because no one was watching
  • KOKURA — where twelve men held the clouds, and the clouds didn't care

Told in requisitions, ledgers, and margin notes — where every miracle has a line item and the line items have teeth — this is the secret history of how America really won: not with more physics, but with more want. Reality is a democracy. Votes are weighted by butter. And the butter had to be shipped eight thousand miles.

For readers of Ian Tregillis's Bitter Seeds, the found-document history of World War Z, and anyone who has ever wondered what the Manhattan Project ate: the second Protocol file is open. The peaches were real. The belief wasn't. That is the point.

Start with The Somme Protocol — or open here. The files don't care what order you read them in. The archivist does.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.