Word: atomically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Deep in the heart of Texas is a man who has become even more of a martyr than the heroes of the Alamo. He is Major Claude Eatherly, who, according to ban-the-bomb legend, led the atomic raid on Hiroshima, repented what he had done and, racked by guilt, turned to a life of petty crime to punish himself. Between times, he discoursed on the total sin of the atom bomb. Wrote Edmund Wilson: "He seems to have been unique among bombers in having paused to take account of his responsibility and in attempting to do something to expiate...
...clock face was intended to scare the world. Its hands, spanning the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, were originally set at an ominous eight minutes before midnight. After the Russians exploded their first H-bomb, Bulletin time read two minutes before the hour of doom. Today the clock is still on Bulletin's cover, but it has shrunk to an inconspicuous size, and registers a relatively unfrightening 11:48. The minutes that, in the editors' view the world has gained, measure a strange triumph for the magazine. Now that there is less concern about Armageddon...
There, scientists were well on their way, in wartime's secret Manhattan Project, to devising the world's first atomic bomb. Rabinowitch, whose impressive reputation had preceded his arrival in the U.S., was asked to join them. Like many of his colleagues, he was appalled at the project's goal. Soon after the war ended in the holocausts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he and 200 other scientists formed a committee called The Atomic Scientists of Chicago. They felt deeply guilty about their role in unleashing the atom, and they longed for atonement. In 1945 the committee spawned...
...existence, begging office space from the University of Chicago, money from foundations, handouts from subscribers, art work from a physicist's wife, and articles from the leading scientists of the world. Its admonitory pages bristled with urgent crusades: for disarmament and against military control of the atom, for world government and against overclassification of military secrets. From the start the young magazine boasted authors whose names were international currency: Einstein, Szilard, Oppenheimer, Teller, Urey, Beadle...
...National Observer found enough similarities between De Gaulle's France and Mao's China ("both potential nuclear powers . . . neither signatories to the limited atom test ban treaty") to support its contention that these two buddies just had to get together. "A risky flirtation with utterly inhuman revolutionaries," editorialized the Columbia, S.C., State. The Chicago Sun-Times predicted that one bad move would lead to something worse. "To welcome a government, its hands dripping with the blood of its neighbors, into the United Nations is a refutation of that organization's ideals. And to those nations that have...