Word: atomically
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...YEAR-OLD member of the 98th Division, I was among many who made a beach landing close to the city of Wakayama, Japan. From there we were transported by rail to Osaka, where I began a year of Occupation duty. The propriety of the use of the atom bomb to bring about the surrender of the Japanese will be debated endlessly. But one thing is clear: we encountered no resistance as occupiers because the Japanese, a people of great discipline and national pride, responded to the dictates of their Emperor. Had the Emperor asked the Japanese people to resist...
With the discovery of fission," C.P. Snow once wrote, "physicists became, almost overnight, the most important military resource a nation-state could call upon." The unleashing of the awesome destructive power of the atom turned physicists into politicians and politicians into physicists. Scientists were forced to reckon with the repercussions of what they had wrought, while political and military leaders had to comprehend the power they held at their fingertips. In Richard Rhodes' epic and fascinating Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (Simon & Schuster; 731 pages; $32.50), a sequel to his Pulitzer prizewinning The Making of the Atomic...
...said in Washington after the Japanese surrendered that the Soviets couldn't put an atom bomb in a suitcase because they didn't know how to make a suitcase. That was true only to a point: though they had yet to learn how to manufacture decent luggage, Soviet spies had given them a blueprint for the bomb...
...Soviets' test of their first atomic weapon in 1949 that galvanized Washington and U.S. scientists. Something bigger, exponentially more powerful than the atom bomb, had to be built, argued physicist Edward Teller. When Harry Truman was told of Teller's design for a hydrogen bomb, code-named Super, the President said, "What the hell are we waiting for?" The U.S. effort went into overdrive, partly because Washington suspected--rightly, as it turned out--that the Soviets were developing a Super of their...
...counter this, LeMay actually proposed "a nuclear Sunday punch," a pre-emptive strike against the Soviets. In 1949 he wanted to send an armada of U.S. planes, carrying the entire Los Alamos stockpile--numbering more than 100 atom bombs--to destroy 70 Soviet cities. It was out of fear that a hot-headed general like LeMay might be able to launch a nuclear attack on his own that the Kennedy Administration later instituted a complex chain of commands governing the use of nuclear weapons...