Word: a-bomb
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...Spent 18 minutes with Mamie and members of his staff in a new, $750,000 White House air-raid shelter during a mock A-bomb raid. Afterward, Civil Defense officials reckoned that, had the raid been real, the President would have survived, although 120,000 Washingtonians in the neighborhood would have been casualties...
...Lewis Strauss, Joe I meant just one thing: the U.S. must get to work, on a "crash" basis, on building the "super." The super's vast explosive potentialities were based not on splitting atoms (as with the fission, or A-bomb), but in fusing atoms of one element to form another (e.g., hydrogen into helium) through in tense heat. AEC Physicist Edward Teller figured out in 1945 that a superbomb was theoretically possible. In 1947 he came within one step of working out the theoretical mechanics (at a seminar in Los Alamos attended by Dr. Klaus Fuchs...
...Chairman J. Robert Oppenheimer, as spokesman, advanced two principal reasons: 1) a thermonuclear bomb would divert personnel and raw material from the A-bomb program, and hence the U.S. was giving up a known, certain thing to try an uncertainty; and 2) the U.S. should try again to negotiate a disarmament program with the Russians. The report's key passage said, approximately: Not one of us thinks the thermonuclear bomb should be made. The President should tell the people that the bomb is fundamentally and ethically wrong...
...World War I (Silver Star for gallantry), then buckled down to a sucession of staff and training jobs. Modest, loyal, and a bug for detail, he moved to one tough assignment after another: chief of the Army's Operations and Plans Division (1943), boss of the 1948 A-bomb tests at Eniwetok, director of the Defense Department's weapons-evaluation system, Army Vice Chief of Staff. Yet he remained more anonymous than most Washington ghostwriters. "How is it, Ed," a friend once asked him, "that your name is never in the headlines?" "I guess I'm just...
...Greenglasses finally confessed their part in the treachery. So did Harry Gold, the courier who transmitted to Yakovlev the Greenglass A-bomb data (he also passed on information from Britain's Klaus Fuchs). There were other corroboratory witnesses. But the Rosenbergs denied all, though confession might have won them a lesser sentence, through the three weeks of their 1951 trial and through two subsequent years of appeal and judicial review. In prison, Ethel sang folk songs, and such melodies as the aria One Fine Day from Madame Butterfly and John Brown's Body (also the tune of Solidarity...