Word: a-bomb
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...there was a disgraceful episode involving bogus medicine. A case of transparent quackery, Dianetics organizations were marketing a "Special Anti-Radiation Compound" (also good for incipient cancer) at the height of the A-bomb scare of the 50's. The tablets, called Dianazene, were seized by the Food and Drug Administration and found to contain only vitamins and minerals-certainly not a sufficient defense against cancer or radioactivity. Apparently, however, little came of the affair and Dianazene hasn't been heard of again...
Davis, a University of Illinois English professor, tries to weave the story of the A-bomb around the friendship and eventual falling out of America's two most influential wartime scientists-Ernest Lawrence, who won a Nobel Prize for his invention of the cyclotron, and Julius Robert Oppenheimer, who headed the team of scientists that developed the bomb. The literary device does not quite work. Oppenheimer, after death as in life, dominates the scene; he provides the point, but Lawrence does not emerge as a man big enough to supply the counterpoint. Still...
Death Wish. Other names usually mentioned only as footnotes in stories about the A-bomb suddenly acquire personality in Lawrence and Oppenheimer. While wiser and more experienced scientists at a Los Alamos meeting discussed a gun-and-bullet technique for igniting the Abomb, tall, bony Seth Neddermeyer sat quietly, visualizing uranium spheres squeezed like oranges. Finally, he spoke up haltingly for the principle of implosion, understanding it instinctively but expressing it so clumsily that he made little impression on anyone-except Oppenheimer, who encouraged him to devise what finally became an efficient triggering mechanism for nuclear weapons...
High Quality. The first big break for the firm was the commission to build Oak Ridge, Tenn., the A-bomb town that was constructed in complete secrecy, eventually grew to a population of 75,000. In its wake came jobs to design a hotel, airbases in Morocco, and three towns in Okinawa. Having achieved a reputation for bigness, S.O.M. earned a name for high-quality design with Manhattan's Lever House. Lever has since been copied so often?and so badly?that it has lost much of its impact. But 16 years ago, it astonished and delighted...
...Phoenix, which under an earlier pacifist owner had sailed pre-test voyages into American and Russian A-bomb testing zones in the Pacific, also sailed to North Vietnam in March...