General Leslie R. Groves, the larger-than-life head of the Manhattan Project in World War II, doesn’t figure much in my book. He built the atom bomb and I’m not writing about the bomb. Inevitably, he crops up during my early story, but by and large I’m glad to leave him
Newspaper headlines and knee-jerk analysis of major historical events make for inaccurate history. Or to put it another way, spending too much time tracking the news is inefficient. Give a major event a year to settle down, or two years, or a decade, or a quarter century, and you have
In March 1954, Oliver Townsend from America’s nascent nuclear energy organization, the Atomic Industrial Forum, wrote to Walter Zinn, head of Argonne National Laboratory, asking him to attend a May meeting. Zinn responded: I do not like to make speeches. My reaction to speech-making is mostly based on the fact
In early 1955, Walter Zinn, head of Argonne National Laboratory, was a key player in the US push into nuclear energy. Engineers were moving into the domain of the physicists but even then, nearly a decade after the end of World War II, much was unclear about the behavior of
Winston Churchill’s role in the history of nuclear energy is both limited and significant. Britain’s subsidiary, but occasionally pivotal, role in the Manhattan Project’s successful atomic bomb quest occurred while he was leader. Never comfortable with technicalities, he delegated most of that work, but in the later years of WWII,
It’s not often I recommend something unreservedly but if you’re a non-WordPress-expert and want something beyond the generic themes (not that there’s anything wrong with them), the theme underlying this blogsite, Typology from Meks, is sweet. Choosing a WordPress theme is a minefield and amateurs like me struggle with both
British engineer Christopher Hinton commenced his diary entry for Tuesday, October 29, 1956 thus: “Israel has attacked Egypt . . . [hard to decipher] . . . that Suez Canal is kept open.” I am of course obsessively fascinated by Hinton, father of the British gas-cooled Magnox and AGR reactor
On June 24, 1940, John Cockcroft, who would be the British scientist with most responsibility for the early English reactors, met up with two French scientists, Hans von Halban and Leo Kowarski, who had just fled Nazi-conquered France. Kowarski in particular would be key to the very early days of
Thanks David Honeybone for alerting me to this Guardian article, announcing that John Bew’s Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee has won this year’s Orwell Prize. It’s odd that this should pop up in my field of view right now. For my project, Attlee presided over Britain over one of
Anyone examining the history of nuclear energy checks out India. I won’t discuss this in detail right now but there is no doubt that the nation’s turbulent formation in 1947 reverberates down the decades (for Pakistan as well). Hoping to capture some background feel for that period, this week I