Word: bombings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Rumors of bigger & better atomic bombs chilled the blood of the many who heard them. The new models, said rumor, would be one thousand, or one hundred thousand, times as powerful as the bomb used at Nagasaki. Exploded high in the stratosphere they would devastate whole states, exterminate whole nations...
Laski's wild statement was promptly and properly ridiculed in Washington by General Leslie R. Groves, military head of the Manhattan Project. But Groves did not say exactly how wrong the Professor had been, nor did he deny that a better bomb was cooking...
Last week Washington atomic insiders let a little information leak out. A really "super" bomb existed only in the minds and notebooks of atomic idealists. It was theoretically possible, but exceedingly difficult to construct. The best the bomb-fanciers could do for the present, they thought, would be to step up the destructive power of the Nagasaki-type (Model-T) bomb about one hundred times...
This would multiply the radius of blast (three miles for the Nagasaki bomb) by about the cube root of 100, or 4.6 times. An exercise in high school arithmetic proved that the new bomb would, under the best of circumstances, devastate something like 600 square miles. This was considerably less than twice the land area of New York City. Laski had been...
...Russian Government, painfully conscious of its atomic-bomblessness, had made Kapitza's name a national reassurance. "Don't worry," it comforted its people, "the great Kapitza will build you a bomb in no time." According to Russian reports and rumors, he was buzzing around like a June bug, supervising the building of cyclotrons, studying cosmic rays, taking full scientific charge of the Soviet's own Manhattan (or Moscow) Project. Generalissimo Stalin was said to have called him into his presence and offered him everything he needed...