Editing Nuclear weapon design (section)

===Lawrence Berkeley===
{{Main|Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory}}
The first systematic exploration of nuclear weapon design concepts took place in mid-1942 at the [[University of California, Berkeley]]. Important early discoveries had been made at the adjacent [[Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory]], such as the 1940 cyclotron-made production and isolation of plutonium. A Berkeley professor, [[J. Robert Oppenheimer]], had just been hired to run the nation's secret bomb design effort. His first act was to convene the 1942 summer conference.{{Citation needed|date=June 2021}}

By the time he moved his operation to the new secret town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the spring of 1943, the accumulated wisdom on nuclear weapon design consisted of five lectures by Berkeley professor [[Robert Serber]], transcribed and distributed as the (classified but now fully declassified and widely available online as a PDF) [[Los Alamos Primer]].<ref name="Primer">{{cite book |last1=Server |first1=Robert |title=The Los Alamos Primer |publisher=University of California Press |location=Berkeley |isbn=978-0520075764 |edition=1st |date=1992}}</ref> The Primer addressed fission energy, [[neutron]] production and [[neutron capture|capture]], [[nuclear chain reaction]]s, [[critical mass]], tampers, predetonation, and three methods of assembling a bomb: gun assembly, implosion, and "autocatalytic methods", the one approach that turned out to be a dead end.{{Citation needed|date=June 2021}}