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To demonstrate, or not to demonstrate?
As the atomic bomb was becoming a technological reality, there were many scientists on the Manhattan Project who found themselves wondering about both the ethics and politics of a surprise, unwarned...
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H-bomb headaches
Once again, the US government has gotten itself into a bad situation over the supposed secret of the hydrogen bomb. As The New York Times reported earlier this week, the Department of Energy (DOE)...
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Were there alternatives to the atomic bombings?
As we rapidly approach the 70th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there have been all sorts of articles, tributes, memorials, and so forth expressed both in print and online. I’ve...
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Neglected Niigata
Last week I gave a talk at a conference on “Nuclear Legacies” at Princeton University on Kyoto and Kokura, the two most prominent “spared” targets for the atomic bomb in 1945. The paper grew out of...
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When did the Allies know there wasn’t a German bomb?
Fears of a German nuclear weapons program were the initial motivating concerns behind pushes in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein in the United States, and...
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The curious death of Oppenheimer’s mistress
The most recent episode of Manhattan, 209, is the penultimate episode for Season 2. There were many aspects that pleased me a lot, in part because I saw my own fingerprints on them: the discussion...
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Historical thoughts on Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen
When I meet new, educated-but-not-academic people for the first time, and the subject of what I study for a living comes up, I almost invariably get two questions. The first is almost always some...
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Silhouettes of the bomb
You might think of the explosive part of a nuclear weapon as the “weapon” or “bomb,” but in the technical literature it has its own kind of amusingly euphemistic name: the “physics package.” This is...
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Cleansing thermonuclear fire
What would it take to turn the world into one big fusion reaction, wiping it clean of life and turning it into a barren rock? Asking for a friend. Graphic from the 1946 film, “One World Or None,”...
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In Memoriam: John Coster-Mullen (1946-2021)
I received word recently that John Coster-Mullen passed away in the early hours of Saturday, April 24, 2021. He was 74 years old.1 He had been suffering from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a...
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