The Censored Chapter (1946)
An article of mine (“A Tale of Openness and Secrecy: The Philadelphia Story”) has recently been published in Physics Today. Even better, the article has been made available for free on the Physics...
View ArticleJames Conant’s Atomic Bomb Sketch? (1943)
I had fun with the little visual mystery I posted last Friday, so here’s another one I’ve been chewing over for awhile. Drawings of “official” atomic bomb designs are rare. (Where “official” means...
View ArticleWhat If Truman Hadn’t Ordered the H-bomb Crash Program?
The debate over the hydrogen bomb is one of my favorite Cold War episodes. I keep coming back to it, both on the blog and in my research. I’d posit that it is in many ways a lot more interesting than...
View ArticleBethe on SUNSHINE and Fallout (1954)
Project SUNSHINE definitely takes the prize for “most intentionally-misleading title of a government program.” The goal of SUNSHINE (co-sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission and RAND) was to figure...
View ArticleKing of the Wild Frontier
Of all of the many silly names for nuclear weapons system that have been given, Davy Crockett has got to be one of the odder ones, in my view.1 The “Davy Crockett” was a nuclear weapons system using...
View ArticleForbidden spheres
Spheres are special shapes for nuclear weapons designers. Most nuclear weapons have, somewhere in them, that spheres-within-spheres arrangement of the implosion nuclear weapon design. You don’t have to...
View ArticleSoviet drawings of an American bomb
The United States government is pretty gun-shy on publishing drawings of nuclear weapon designs, even very crude ones. When it comes to implosion bombs, this is about all that’s allowed to come out of...
View ArticleAdvertising for weapons designers
Advertising, annoying as it is in the present, is a great tool for looking at the past. You really do get a sense for what passed as acceptable, who people thought the ideal consumer was, and what kind...
View ArticleGeorge Gamow and the atomic bomb
George Gamow stands out as a colorful physicist among a generation of colorful physicists. He was a known wit, a friend to many of the “golden generation” of physicists, and — on top of all that — was...
View ArticleMore nuclear symbolism
Two small graphical things I wanted to share that came from feedback on a few recent posts. The first is an explanation, of sorts, of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority’s very unusual emblem: I...
View ArticleCastle Bravo revisited
No single nuclear weapons test did more to establish the grim realities of the thermonuclear age than Castle BRAVO. On March 1, 1954, it was the highest yield test in the United States’ highest-yield...
View ArticleJames Conant’s Atomic Bomb Sketch? (1943)
I had fun with the little visual mystery I posted last Friday, so here’s another one I’ve been chewing over for awhile. Drawings of “official” atomic bomb designs are rare. (Where “official” means...
View ArticleWhat If Truman Hadn’t Ordered the H-bomb Crash Program?
The debate over the hydrogen bomb is one of my favorite Cold War episodes. I keep coming back to it, both on the blog and in my research. I’d posit that it is in many ways a lot more interesting than...
View ArticleBethe on SUNSHINE and Fallout (1954)
Project SUNSHINE definitely takes the prize for “most intentionally-misleading title of a government program.” The goal of SUNSHINE (co-sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission and RAND) was to figure...
View ArticleKing of the Wild Frontier
Of all of the many silly names for nuclear weapons system that have been given, Davy Crockett has got to be one of the odder ones, in my view.1 The “Davy Crockett” was a nuclear weapons system using...
View ArticleForbidden spheres
Spheres are special shapes for nuclear weapons designers. Most nuclear weapons have, somewhere in them, that spheres-within-spheres arrangement of the implosion nuclear weapon design. You don’t have to...
View ArticleSoviet drawings of an American bomb
The United States government is pretty gun-shy on publishing drawings of nuclear weapon designs, even very crude ones. When it comes to implosion bombs, this is about all that’s allowed to come out of...
View ArticleAdvertising for weapons designers
Advertising, annoying as it is in the present, is a great tool for looking at the past. You really do get a sense for what passed as acceptable, who people thought the ideal consumer was, and what kind...
View ArticleGeorge Gamow and the atomic bomb
George Gamow stands out as a colorful physicist among a generation of colorful physicists. He was a known wit, a friend to many of the “golden generation” of physicists, and — on top of all that — was...
View ArticleMore nuclear symbolism
Two small graphical things I wanted to share that came from feedback on a few recent posts. The first is an explanation, of sorts, of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority’s very unusual emblem: I...
View Article
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