Word: abomb
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...James V. Forrestal, a Secretary of the Navy under Franklin D. Roosevelt, Strauss was appointed to the AEC in 1946. During a dispute in the scientific community, Strauss backed the development of the hydrogen bomb when it was opposed by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the Abomb. Strauss prevailed, and in dramatic loyalty hearings in 1954, Oppenheimer lost his security clearance. When President Eisenhower nominated Strauss to be Secretary of Commerce in 1959, the Senate voted 49-46 against his confirmation largely because of a politically controversial contract, negotiated during his chairmanship, for privately financed electricity to be used...
...infant during World War II, his father later participated in development of the hydrogen bomb.) For the scientists in McMahon's New Mexico, the creation of the Bomb involves a minimum of moral anguish and soul searching. There is the war. There is the threat of a Nazi Abomb. There is intoxication with the new vistas of accomplishment to be born of the energy they are both creating and taming. Overriding all is the challenge to their talent and the catalyst of such an assemblage of genius supported by resources made available in unprecedented quantity...
...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...