Comment by pfdietz
3 hours ago
The atomic bomb certainly had a cursory dependence on special relativity. E = mc^2, you know.
Klystrons were used in WW2, and the beam current of a klystron scales as the beam voltage to the 3/2 power (due to space charge limits). Modern klystrons operate with relativistic electron beams, but I don't know if any of the WW2 ones did.
Is there any part of the theory or design or implementation of the atomic bomb that depends on E = m*c^2? Or is it: "if you could theoretically weigh the end-products, you would get a slightly smaller answer than the before-products". Seems like it would have been known that there was a lot of electrical potential energy stored in the nucleus (after the discovery of the proton).