Word: abomb
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...also a vindication of some traditional strengths and precepts in the American character and experience: perseverance, organizational skill, the willingness to respond to competition-even the belief that the U.S. enjoys a special destiny in the world. Like the World War II Manhattan Project that created the Abomb, the space program exemplifies a particularly American genius...
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...
Hamstrung Program. The Germans solved the theoretical problems and designed the devices that eventually could have produced an Abomb. They even conducted crude H-bomb experiments. But their scientific skills were not equal to the problems of dictatorial politics. When they tried to persuade their government of the importance of nuclear energy, German physicists pointedly avoided using the word bomb; they were fearful that Hitler might order the immediate production of a nuclear weapon and hold them responsible if they failed to perfect one. Unconvinced of its military value, Nazi leaders gave their atomic energy program a relatively low priority...
...chairman of the Chiefs of Staff and builder of his country's nuclear force de frappe; when his military DC-6 crashed on takeoff from the Indian Ocean island of Réunion, killing 19 aboard, including his wife and daughter. Placed in charge of developing a French Abomb, Ailleret orchestrated the project that succeeded in detonating a low-yield plutonium device in the Sahara in 1960; as Chief of Staff, he planned the "all azimuths" strategy, in which France seeks the ability to deliver nuclear weapons to any point on earth...
...general, Lifton discovered, hibakusha hold themselves in lower esteem than do other Japanese. In telling of the hibakusha experience, the late Yōkō Ōta, Japan's best-known writer of "Abomb" literature (Town of Corpses, Human Rags), depreciated her work and herself with such statements as "Do I have the right to imagination? Can what I say about the dead ever be authentic?" A Japanese professor of English expressed the same idea with lines from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets: "They can tell you, being dead: the communication of the dead is tongued with...