Word: abomb
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...late 1930s, as a professor at Penn State, Simons found that passing fluorine through an arc of carbon gas produced a few drops of clear liquid fluorocarbon, but his discovery had no obvious use. A few years later, when scientists could not find enough fissionable uranium to build the Abomb, Simons rescued the jar of fluorocarbon from a filing cabinet. The resulting chemical reactions yielded highly fissionable uranium 235. By the mid-1950s more than 800 new compounds containing fluorocarbons had been developed...
...damage was not always purely physical. For years after the war, the Japanese conscience was troubled by "Abomb orphans." Some languished in foster homes. Others drifted aimlessly across the countryside and became delinquent...