Word: agnew
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...matter, Wood has to think about the military, since the military, by making requests and assignments, gives direction to her work in "thermonuclear applications" (designing warheads). "The military wants XYZ bomb, and you give 'em the best you can." She tests a bomb's size and, like Agnew before her, measures yield. "If they [the military] say they want two megatons, I give 'em two; if they want 2,000, I give 'em 2,000." The measure of success is if a bomb tests satisfactorily in Nevada and then goes into stockpile. In that case Wood works with the engineer...
Wood enjoys the connection between her work and its military market because she sees a philosophical underpinning. The people at Los Alamos when Agnew was there were working toward something they knew was going to be used. The people at Los Alamos now work on things that are never supposed to be used. "And we don't want to use them. Nobody wants to see these guys used." Nor does she feel that there is something antilogical or frustrating in designing a weapon for the explicit purpose of not using it. The "in-point," she says, is in the test...
...Agnew favors the military-scientific partnership for another reason. War, he says, is "too important to be left to the young." By which he means that the existence of nuclear weapons is to be approved of because those weapons have put the politicians and generals of a nation, who arrange and orchestrate wars, at equal risk with the young people who do the actual fighting. Science has thus served as an equalizer between leaders and troops: "The young people who go around yelling 'Get rid of the Bomb!' ought to be careful, 'cause the politicians might...
...fact, GA Technologies looks a good deal like the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, of which Agnew was once the director, succeeding Norris Bradbury, who succeeded Los Alamos' first director, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "Oppie" of the story about the swiped films. The "Groves" is General Leslie Groves, military commander of the Manhattan Project. The films Groves was chasing were the only ones taken of the Hiroshima bomb at the moment it went off. Agnew's Great Artiste was one of the planes seen by the boys in Yoshitaka Kawamoto's schoolyard when assembly was held the morning...
...Agnew was only 24 when he went up in the Great Artiste, but he had already seen a lot of the new world of split atoms. As a physics student straight out of college, he was taken by his professor to work with the people at the University of Chicago under Enrico Fermi. At the age of 21, Agnew was one of 43 people to witness the world's first man-made nuclear chain reaction, in a squash court under the football field. A few years later he was testing yield-measuring devices at Wendover Air Base in Utah, where...