Word: atomic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...other cases, such vitally important questions would be asked and answered continuously: in speeches, reports, official investigations and persistent probing by the press. Not so in the case of the AEC. All definite figures about its performance-from laboratories and uranium mines to finished atom bombs-are beyond the reach of the public. The men who possess the facts are forbidden on pain of death (Atomic Energy Act of 1946) to communicate them. For all the taxpayer knows, the AEC may be dropping his money down a bottomless hole...
...postwar work of the Los Alamos laboratory has increased the value of the U.S. stockpile of fissionable (atom-explosive) material many times. This can mean several things: 1) that the efficiency of the nuclear explosion has increased, giving more energy from the material; 2) that bombs powerful enough for most purposes can now be made with less material; 3) that the new bombs are much lighter, easier to deliver upon an enemy, with a lower rate of wasted bombs...
...when U.S. scientists were almost boycotting AEC laboratories. Part of their hostility was due to the very real hardships of wartime life at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. Probably more important was a widespread feeling of revulsion. The scientists had worked with fanatical fervor to build an atom bomb for use against the Axis powers. They succeeded beyond their expectations, and many of them were haunted for years by the horror of their success. In the words of their leader, Robert Oppenheimer, wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, "they had known sin." At any rate, many of them...
Most of the AEC men, including commissioners, are deeply concerned about the long-range effect of such secrecy. They realize that in. the blackness, sprinkled with atom bombs, that surrounds their expanding empire, all sorts of unhealthy and startling growths might sprout unobserved. They know well that they hold in their hands the most dread power in the world...
Cradled between the northern Rockies and the Cascades is a vast area-eastern Washington and parts of Montana, Idaho and Oregon-which natives like to call the Inland Empire. Bigger than New England, it is rich in wheat, minerals, apples, lumber, scenery-and atom-bomb works. The-chief bellringer and arbiter for the empire is the Spokane Spokesman-Review, a newspaper which President Truman in one of his cocky moods once paired with Bertie McCormick's Chicago Tribune as "worst" in the country...