My interest is the “peaceful atom,” not nuclear weapons, but I’m eternally grateful for the deep nuke-related research of Alex Wellerstein. His recent newsletter, “The clouds of Hiroshima,” hammers home the obscene destruction wrought by the Americans to end World War II. In the newsletter, he dissects thirteen photos, from
In November 1957, staff at the Atomic Energy Commission, penned a report to the commissioners entitled “Status of Research and Development on Reactor Pressure Tubes.” If any decent-sized reactor was cooled by a gas, it needed to be held under pressure, either in a big ultra-strong pressure vessel or in
David Wargowski, a retired scientist who also makes visual art out of early nuclear weapons history, has just pointed me to a fascinating short TV segment of Edward Murrow’s See It Now show (check out Wargowski’s screening on X). It’s a quasi reenactment, on December 2, 1952, of the very
My book covers in some depth the (military) reactor fire at Windscale in rural England in October 1957. I won’t go into details here (you can read about it in Wikipedia or, better still, buy my book next year) but the hero of the day was undoubtedly Tom Tuohy, second-in-charge