Historian Peter Kuznick, in a 2011 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article, dug up a fact new to me: Murray and Rep. Sidney Yates (Democrat of Illinois) suggested locating the first electricity-producing nuclear power plant in Hiroshima. In early 1955, Yates introduced legislation to build a 60,000-kilowatt generating plant there that would ‘make the atom an instrument for kilowatts rather than. . .
Arzamas-16 was the Soviet Union’s hidden, ultra top secret nuclear weapons laboratory, modelled on America’s Los Alamos. Nuclear physicist Veniamin Tsukerman worked there for nearly half a century, and he and his wife wrote a memoir in 1984 that was translated and published in the West in 1999. Igor Kurchatov, the father of the Soviet bomb and its peacetime reactors, was extraordinary. . .
I’ve written quite a few times in this blog about the unique character of Admiral Hyman Rickover. Amazingly effective, he could not be said to be a nice person and nearly everyone not under his thumb by virtue of service in the U.S. Navy feared and loathed him. I have so much evidence for this situation that some of it won’t find its way into the book. Take, for example, this short. . .
The second head of Britain’s reactor production organization, Risley, was Len Owen, who had been the valued but often argumentative deputy to Christopher Hinton. Hinton exited the field in August 1957 and that month Owen chaired what was called the Production Executive Committee, a large meeting that regularly went over the nuts and bolts of ongoing work. My attention was caught by the. . .