Word: atomically
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...intelligent questions. I also wanted to seek his advice on how I could help others to learn about the nuclear arms issue. By this time I had learned a little more about him. I knew that he was a professor of chemistry emeritus. He had helped to build the atom bomb and in 1959 became the science adviser to President Eisenhower. Later he left Washington, becoming active in the arms control movement and now was devoting full time to his duties as chairman of the Council for a Livable World...
Kistiakowsky: No I didn't, but a lot of people did. I kept saying on all possible occasions that they are really a very poor country which is technically way behind. They have some spectaculars. They have the atom bomb. Now they have launched the Sputnik. But everything else is pathetically weak...
This first-hand view of the atom's destructive power--and his own role in unleashing that power--deepened Kistiakowsky's sense of the imperative need for peace in the nuclear age. "After working so long on those weapons," he said many years later, "I came to the conclusion that the time had come to control them." As a science advisor to Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, Kistiakowsky earned a reputation within the highest circles of government as one of disarmament's most eloquent and distinguished spokesmen...
GOVERNMENT AGENCIES assigned a particular task often pursue it with a single-mindedness, an inertia, that precludes any kind of dissent. In his new book. The Cult of the Atom, Daniel Ford shows that this bureaucratic blindness is now here more apparent than in the case of the Atomic Energy Commission. Set up in 1946, the A.E.C. took on the task of overseeing and encouraging the development of the American nuclear power industry...
...tremendous confidence in the potential of the "peaceful atom" prevailed after World War II Proponents foresaw an "Age of Plenty" in which weather would be atomically controlled, cars would travel for years on small pellets of uranium, and the moon would be only a short distance away via atomic powered vehicles. One of the chairmen of the Commission even forecast that electricity would probably be "too cheap to meter" The A.E.C. has spent the last three decades trying to fulfill these high hopes, but, as Ford shows, the intentions have gone dangerously astray...