Word: atomically
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This is the burden of Richard Rhodes' excellent book about the visionaries whose pure science was alloyed with the tainted art of politics. Bits and pieces of the atom bomb story are well known, especially the dramatic race to Trinity by J. Robert Oppenheimer and his brainy cohort at Los Alamos, N. Mex. In Rhodes' comprehensive view, the blinding flash of that achievement climaxes decades of brilliant ideas, technological innovations and the contributions of incandescent personalities. "Had astronomers been watching," he writes, "they could have seen ((the explosion)) reflected from the moon, literal moonshine." But moments after the artificial sunburst...
Fighting phantoms Truman dropped two Atom Bombs...
America grew a little larger last week. The Northern Marianas, a group of Western Pacific islands (one of the best known: Tinian, where the Enola Gay took off for its atom-bomb run to Hiroshima in 1945), officially became a commonwealth of the U.S., and its 17,000 residents became U.S. citizens...
...reason for concern is that without ozone, life on earth would be impossible. Ozone is oxygen but in an unusual form. Most oxygen comes in two- atom molecules, but external energy -- in this case, the sun's ultraviolet radiation -- can split some of them apart. The single oxygen atoms tend to attach themselves to the remaining molecules, forming an oxygen-atom triplet. The result: a layer, from six to 30 miles up, of ozone-enriched air. Once formed, an ozone molecule is a good absorber of ultraviolet. But when CFCs rise to the ozone layer, sunlight decomposes them, releasing...
McCloy began as a poor boy from Philadelphia and rose to head the World Bank. He was a master at bringing consensus out of chaos, sometimes with grim results. The decision not to warn Japan about the atom bomb, for example, was made without a full discussion of the consequences. McCloy, then Assistant Secretary of War, shaped a vague "declaration" to Japan that was agreeable to other U.S. officials but that did nothing to avert the use of the Bomb. Bohlen, a career man in the Foreign Service, was instrumental in getting the views of his lifelong friend and fellow...