Word: bombing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Davis, a University of Illinois English professor, tries to weave the story of the A-bomb around the friendship and eventual falling out of America's two most influential wartime scientists-Ernest Lawrence, who won a Nobel Prize for his invention of the cyclotron, and Julius Robert Oppenheimer, who headed the team of scientists that developed the bomb. The literary device does not quite work. Oppenheimer, after death as in life, dominates the scene; he provides the point, but Lawrence does not emerge as a man big enough to supply the counterpoint. Still...
Death Wish. Other names usually mentioned only as footnotes in stories about the A-bomb suddenly acquire personality in Lawrence and Oppenheimer. While wiser and more experienced scientists at a Los Alamos meeting discussed a gun-and-bullet technique for igniting the Abomb, tall, bony Seth Neddermeyer sat quietly, visualizing uranium spheres squeezed like oranges. Finally, he spoke up haltingly for the principle of implosion, understanding it instinctively but expressing it so clumsily that he made little impression on anyone-except Oppenheimer, who encouraged him to devise what finally became an efficient triggering mechanism for nuclear weapons...
...there was Louis Slotin, a morose Canadian with an apparent death wish, who conducted tests of critical assemblies by poking curved segments of uranium or plutonium together with a screwdriver while eying his Geiger counter and neutron monitor. One day in 1946, nudging segments of a Bikini test bomb a little too close, he suddenly saw a blue ionization glow in the room-the sign of a dangerously radioactive reaction. He threw his body over the segments until everyone else in the room could hurry out. Although the others lived, Slotin achieved his death wish. He died in agony nine...
Shortly after Pratt left the chapel, B.U. officials received a telephone call saying that a bomb had been put into the building. The second serviceman--Army Pfc. Raymond Kroll, 18--and the divinity students supporting him left the chapel, which the police bomb squad then searched...
...Marigold initiative was killed by two sets of bombing raids on Hanoi during the most delicate phases of the diplomatic effort. Cynics may find this hard to believe, but the first set of bombings--December 2 and December 4--were mistakes and nothing more. As The Secret Search relates, only one official in the vast web of American government, a deputy assistant Secretary of State, happened to know about both the military's plan to bomb Hanoi and the peace initiative; and he was buried away in the State Department bureaucracy with no decision making power, and, due to security...