Word: atom
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...week, "like the moon, the stars and all the planets had fallen on me." Within hours of his swearing in, he had to confront secrets and controversies that as Vice President he had never heard of. He learned that U.S. scientists were about to test something known as an atom bomb, that the Allies had already decided how Germany was to be divided up among them, that Joseph Stalin and Churchill were bitterly at odds about who would rule Poland. And he had to address the diplomats assembling in San Francisco to create an organization to be called the United...
Early on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, the Enola Gay, named for the pilot's mother, cut east to west across the rivers of Hiroshima, opened its hatches, and an atom bomb fell free. From that moment to this, nothing has ever been the same in the world. The people of Hiroshima, the course of World War II, subsequent wars, subsequent peace, the position of science, the role of the military, international politics, the nature of knowledge, art, culture, the conduct of lives: all changed. Other ages in history were characterized by heroes or by ideas. The atomic...
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...
...turned out, the Hiroshima bomb would be the only one of its type America ever built or used, uranium being that much more difficult to obtain than plutonium. One of the spurs to the American atom bomb effort had been a report in 1943 that Hitler had ordered uranium shipped out of mines in Belgium. It was also taken for granted that the gun-assembly method--one piece of purified uranium (uranium-235) fired into another at terrific speed--would work, so the Hiroshima bomb was never tested till the morning it was dropped...
...earth-shattering enormity is his presentation of other tragedies as predecessors. In addition to stories about the American destruction of Dresden, there is a transcript of an interview with a Hiroshima survivor, which Oskar plays for a school project, also reporting on the scientific dimensions of the atom bomb...