A speck of matter god did not welcome into creation

In his definitive history of the atomic bomb, Richard Rhodes describes scientists looking at “a speck of matter that God had not welcomed into creation”—plutonium, humanity’s first large-scale synthetic element.

Almost all atoms composing our world—including those in human bodies—are primordial, existing since Earth’s formation 4.5 billion years ago, making plutonium and other synthetic elements fundamentally different.

Building on early 1900s discoveries that atoms could transmute, Enrico Fermi hypothesized in the 1930s that under the right conditions, scientists could create entirely new types of atoms that had never existed before.

For well over a century, the periodic table ended at element 92 (uranium)—representing nature’s heaviest naturally occurring element and an apparent boundary to elemental existence.

While U-235 could build a devastatingly powerful bomb, separating sufficient U-235 from natural uranium required an enormous industrial effort—Niels Bohr commented you’d have to “turn the entire United States into a factory.”

Racing to beat the Germans, US program leaders charged 30-year-old chemist Glenn Seaborg with creating a new element (plutonium) at scale, telling recruits “nothing will be as important to the future of the world as your work on this project right now.”

In summer 1942, Seaborg’s team bombarded uranium samples in the Berkeley cyclotron with neutrons, knowing from earlier research that a small portion would undergo beta decay twice, transmuting into element 94 (plutonium).

On August 20, 1942, Cunningham and Warner observed a metallic pinkish substance precipitate from their hydrofluoric acid solution—the first time humans had ever seen element 94 (plutonium).

Edward McMillan proposed naming element 94 after the newly discovered planet Pluto, following the pattern established with uranium (Uranus) and neptunium (Neptune).

Within couple years of first visible plutonium (August 1942), Manhattan Project scaled production to bomb quantities, culminating in Trinity test (July 16, 1945) that released plutonium-239 into Earth’s atmosphere.