Word: abomb
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Past v. Present. The second Abomb, code-named Fat Man, was a 20-kiloton plutonium weapon even more devastating than the crude uranium device that leveled Hiroshima Aug. 6. Lobbed through a hole in the heavy clouds that blanketed Nagasaki that day, it burst 1,850 ft. above the city with a mighty blue and yellow fireball and five successive shock waves that prompted a ten-year-old's description: "I thought an airplane must have crashed into...
...Laboratory since getting his doctorate in physics from the University of Illinois in 1944, Ogle has participated in every atomic test series since 1945, has witnessed more than 100 explosions in the Pacific and Nevada. He assisted in hydrodynamic experiments for the wartime Manhattan Project, which produced the first Abomb, celebrated the war's end by firing a shotgun into the air on Los Alamos' main street. After the war, he helped measure bomb yields at the Crossroads tests at Bikini in 1946, and at the Sandstone tests at Eniwetok atoll in 1948, directed technical operations during...
General Destruction. The still-theoretical neutron bomb will use a "pure-fusion" reaction, a third generation in nuclear explosions. In old-fashioned fission (Abomb) explosions, nuclei of uranium or plutonium split roughly in half, and the big, heavy fragments are shoved apart by powerful electrical forces. Almost at once they collide with other nuclei, with other materials in the bomb and with the surrounding air. The collisions slow the nuclei down and turn their original energy into heat. The result is a high-temperature fireball that sears its surroundings with heat radiation and expands so violently that it generates...
During their wartime race to build the world's first Abomb, U.S. scientists urgently needed one vital component: a chemical element that was fissionable (explosive) but not so radioactive that it would disintegrate before the big bang was touched off. The bomb builders found what they wanted at the University of California's famed Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, where Drs. Glenn Seaborg and Edwin McMillan had put together some synthetic plutonium, element 94. Until then, plutonium was no more than a lab curiosity, but it proved to be properly fissionable, and it was so slightly radioactive that only...
Insight & Farce. Bright but not brassy, Gregory's material ranges everywhere, from the possible ejects of President Kennedy's religion ("Four years of bingo") to the Israeli Abomb: "They want to find out if there's anything that will crack open a stale bagel." But the condition of the colored man is his main theme and night after night he plays it with grace...