Two of the greatest contributors to nuclear energy, in different eras, were the Italian genius, Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), and the American chemist, Glenn Seaborg (1912-1999). Fermi designed and built the first reactor, Seaborg discovered plutonium and, more pertinently, chaired the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission for a decade from 1961. I
One of the fascinating aspects of writing a nuclear book is that one cannot explore everything. Take, for example, Pugwash, introduced here by historian Toshihiro Higuchi: Another impetus for transnational activism among scientists for a test ban came from an international conference in July 1957 held in Pugwash, a small
I’m no expert on how multilateral or United Nations agreements/treaties are typically negotiated. Nor, in researching the genesis of the International Atomic Energy Agency, was I especially focused on the intricacies of the negotiation strategies/tactics. When you know little about a subject, you accept everything you read as “normal.” So
French nuclear chemist Bertrand Goldschmidt never got over his bitterness at France’s rejection by the major Western powers after World War II, the nation having to start almost completely afresh as it clawed its way to nuclear energy and, in 1960, nuclear weapons. The term proliferation didn’t really gain currency
Another weird and wonderful slice of life from Alexander Borovoi, describing his witnessing of the attempt of a Soviet robot to examine the deep, highly radioactive innards of the wreck of Reactor No. 4. (One of the frustrating aspects of this book is the lack of specific details such as,
I’ve only recently stumbled across a Russian book written in 1996 but not translated (at least in easily available form) until 2017. A Moscow engineer at the famous Kurchatov Institute, Alexander Borovoi began commuting to Chernobyl soon after the 1986 calamity, part of the huge team struggling to contain the
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
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,
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
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