World World 2 Facts: Did You Know These 29 Interesting Details?

Plutonium Code Named Copper To Protect From Prying Eyes

Mushroom cloud above Nagasaki after atomic bombing on August 9, 1945. Taken from the north west.

In the early 1940s, nuclear scientists in nearly all of the participating countries at war were hard at work developing new weapons of mass destruction. German scientists had already discovered the phenomenon of “fission” which, once the word got out, got the wheels spinning for American and English scientists and their soon to be discovered plutonium. In 1941 at the University of California at Berkley, chemist Glenn T. Seaborg and his colleagues officially created the plutonium-239 isotope, changing the nuclear weapons arena forever. This discovery had to be kept extremely secret due to the sheer power it possessed. Plutonium-239 could split more neutrons than uranium 235 and effectively created a more efficient atomic explosion, information the Axis would love to get ahold of. Therefore, it was given the code name “copper”. This caused some confusion when actual copper was needed, so real copper was to be referred to “honest-to-God copper”.