The poetics of plutonium

Nuclear physicist, John Wheeler looking back on the Manhattan Project in 1982:

"An observer from afar, looking upon the scene in 1944, would have been convinced that he was looking at one alchemist's dream inside another. It was preposterous enough to think that dead uranium, put into regularly-spaced crannies in tons of dead black graphite, would come alive. It was still more preposterous to imagine this life, this silent darting back and forth of invisible neutrons, as producing in the course of time not merely a few atoms of plutonium, but billions upon billions of them, the philosopher's dream of synthesizing a new element achieved in kilogram amounts."

Quoted in Sanger, Working on the Bomb, 148.