ArchiveJune 2025

The American Assembly was a thinktank set up by President Eisenhower in 1950. Part of Columbia University, it staged a few “nuclear” events in the mid 50s. In October 1957, John Cockcroft came from England and delivered an address to one such conference. He called it “Nuclear Power in Britain” and it was his usual mixture of candidness, slipperiness, and factuality. What. . .

In this blog of fragments and jetsam, quite often I quote Len Owen, the number two engineer of the early British nuclear reactor effort. He is another of those lost souls of history, not quite famous enough to have biographies penned about him. The British archives contain his “project diary” from January 4, 1946 to January 17, 1950 (I have no idea if he kept diaries after 1950). The. . .