Word: bomb
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...After the Soviet atomic explosion and the subsequent Washington decision to press for an H-bomb, calculations based on the theories of Teller and others were set up on a machine called ENIAC. But there was fear that this electric brain would be too slow. Stan Ulam, a mathematician, with one helper, "undertook to execute the same job by straightforward hand computation. The next few months saw an amazing competition between the tortoise and the (electronic) hare." Ulam's "results were available even before the lengthy instructions to the machines had been completed . . . In a real emergency the mathematician...
...Greenhouse was not a bomb. On the hard road to the goal of the transportable bomb, Teller singles out two steps: an imaginative suggestion by Ulam and a fine calculation by Frederic de Hoffmann. Of De Hoffmann, Teller says...
...time the first H-bomb was to be exploded, Teller had left Los Alamos to organize a nuclear weapons laboratory at Livermore, Calif. ("Science . . . thrives on friendly competition"). He watched for the results of the first H-bomb, "Mike," on a University of California seismograph. Teller writes: "The room was completely dark except for the tiny luminous spot that the pencil of light threw on the photographic paper . . . Soon the luminous point gave me the feeling of being aboard a gently and irregularly moving vessel, so I braced a pencil on a piece of the apparatus and held it close...
...those who still question the wisdom of going ahead with the H-bomb, Teller has words of firm faith: "We would be unfaithful to the tradition of Western civilization if we were to shy away from exploring the limits of human achievement. It is our specific duty as scientists to explore and to explain . . . The construction of the thermonuclear weapon was a great challenge to the technical people of this country. To be in possession of this instrument is an even greater challenge to the free community in which we live. I am confident that, whatever the scientists are able...
...Post-Bomb Leukemia. Another delayed effect of radiation has already been recognized in humans. Dr. William C. Moloney of Tufts Medical School and Dr. Robert D. Lange report in Blood, The Journal of Hematology on leukemia (blood cancer) among Japanese atom-bomb survivors. Most people near the centers of explosion at Hiroshima and Nagasaki died of heat or blast. Some survived these effects, but got heavy doses of gamma rays and neutrons. In Hiroshima, 750 people who had been within 1,000 meters (3,300 ft.) recovered from their radiation sickness and remained apparently well for years. Then an unusual...