Word: a-bomb
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...Strangelove. Perhaps a timely warning in view of China's recent misbehavior, Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick's 1964 black comedy about dropping the A-bomb, returns this weekend. Kubrick creates an absurd and violent society (some say something like our own), peopled by the likes of General Jack D. Ripper, who gives the bombs-away order and then seals himself off, refusing to release the recall code. Meanwhile, the Russians have cooked up a Doomsday Machine to destroy the world in case someone drops an atomic bomb in their territory. It was going to be announced later that week...
...blame. In April of 1951, Federal Judge Irving Kaufman looked down at the defendants. "Plain, deliberate, contemplated murder is dwarfed in magnitude by comparison with the crime you have committed," he told Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. "I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb... has already caused the Communist aggression in Korea ... and who knows but that millions more of innocent' people may pay the price of your treason...
Nuclear arms production began 32 years ago when an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped a 15-kiloton atomic device on Hiroshima. Prior to this, the largest bomb developed had been the "blockbuster," so named because it was capable of devastating an entire city block. The Hiroshima bomb had a destructive force equivalent to 1300-2000 blockbusters and the one A-bomb virtually pulverized a city of more than 300,000 inhabitants. When President Truman heard the news, he said: "This is the greatest thing in history...
...with docudramas on Lee Harvey Oswald. Because people are more apt to spot a poor job of makeup than a perversion of the facts, historians worry about television's lopsided history lessons. Last year's Truman at Potsdam made out that his primary motive in dropping the A-bomb on Japan was not to end the war. In Truman's "own" words: "It is not Japan I'm trying to scare, but Russia...
Invisible Springs. Compared with the difficulties of controlling fusion, producing energy from nuclear fission is relatively simple. In fission-which occurs in A-bomb explosions and powers today's nuclear plants-a speeding neutron is used to split the atomic nucleus of a heavy element like uranium into the nuclei of one or more lighter elements. In the process, more neutrons are given off. But the mass of the resulting nuclei and neutrons is somewhat less than the mass of the original nucleus; the missing matter-as predicted by the famed Einstein equation E=mc2-has been converted into...