Tuesday’s New York Times contains a William J. Broad article, “New video shows largest hydrogen bomb ever exploded,” explaining that Russia’s Rosatom has released a previously secret video of exactly that. In October 1961 the Soviet Union set off Tsar Bombya in remote Novaya Zemlya, an explosion almost unthinkably stupendous
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists can always be relied upon to explore unfolding events. On August 21, Cheryl Rofer reported (in an article titled “Radiation detections in northern Europe: what we do and don’t know“) on three minor, puzzling radiation releases detected over the last three years, the latest in
Still trying to understand David Ben-Gurion’s, Israel’s first prime minister. I thought I knew enough but I don’t, so I’m working through two biographies. One is, of course, Israeli historian/journalist Tom Segev’s masterful book from a couple of years ago (see my review of it here, as a book rather
Gaining a level of understanding of a historical personage’s motivations is tough for me. I’m tempted to acquire every available biography and pore over them, but that’s an impractical strategy, so I make do with a few books or articles or whatever. A key founder of Israel and its first
It’s fun to catch a glimpse of times and individuals’ attitudes from archival research. Many of the world’s reactors descend from initial work done at the Argonne Laboratory over the late 1940s and 1950s (and onwards). An enormously talented group of scientists and engineers found their way there. During the
An enjoyable research moment is when historical actors, who you thought were apart, intersect. Albert Wattenberg was a physicist who helped out during the Manhattan Project but then mostly went into academia postwar. Harold Lichtenberger was a key lieutenant of Walter Zinn in designing and building key prototype reactors after
Enrico Fermi “invented” (although that’s the wrong term, discovered might be better, but that’s not quite right either) reactors by starting up a tiny “pile” in Chicago in 1942. He died in 1954 (aged only 53) and was experimenting with neutrons (the initiators of nuclear fission) from the early 1930s,
Researching Argonne National Laboratory, from which sprang most of the key reactor designs after WWII and into the early 1950s, the following 1992 interview with a Manhattan Project physicist, Albert Wattenberg, piqued my interest: Some people in the U.S. Army wanted to set the National Laboratory up at Baraboo, Wisconsin,
In writing up Japan’s early nuclear power history, I’ve needed to sum up the nation’s World War II efforts to manufacture a nuclear weapon (the main aspirants of course being U.S.A., Germany, and U.S.S.R.). It turns out Japan got almost nowhere towards a nuke, and what it did during the
News broadcasts should be ignored by historians, at least when they think of themselves as historians, because the news froths with such exuberance that it’s mostly wrong. So when I read a few days ago about a forest fire near the Chernobyl sarcophagus, I glanced at the report (it was