Word: chaining
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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With no more fuss than buying a pencil, a new nationwide department store chain was started last week. Merchandiser Walter Hoving (rhymes with roving), who had resigned his $135,000-a-year job as president of Lord & Taylor five months ago, made a deal to buy Manhattan's Bonwit Teller, Inc. ("High Class but not High...
Apparently Dr. Slotin and seven or more other scientists were working with "subcritical masses" of uranium or plutonium. Kept apart, these masses were lifeless as lead, but if brought together to form a mass above "critical" size, a chain reaction would start. Its violence would depend on the character of the materials. Probably they were midway in activity between mild-mannered natural uranium and furious plutonium...
Bringing such "reactors" together is touchy business. The scientists work with infinite caution, watching instruments which measure the number of free neutrons within the experimental mass. Under some conditions, the chain reaction starts slowly. But sometimes it leaps into violence in a millionth of a second. There is no explosion, no vibration, no sound. No human sense can detect the outburst of deadly radiation. The only warning, which comes too late, is a faint bluish glow. Some experts think it is caused by ionization of the air; others believe it to be an optical illusion telegraphed to the brain...
Perhaps Dr. Slotin was watching the warning instruments more carefully than his fellows; perhaps he saw the bluish glow. At any rate, he realized that the chain reaction had spurted to high intensity. The room was being swept with deadly radiation. He leaped forward, put his body between his colleagues and the radiating mass, scattered its materials. The chain reaction halted immediately...
Ever since Hiroshima, thinkers have started one chain reaction after another about The Bomb. "To clear away the hysteria," five of them published The Absolute Weapon (Harcourt Brace; $2) this week. The five (Bernard Brodie, Frederick Dunn, Arnold Wolfers, Percy Corbett, William Fox), all members of the Yale Institute of International Studies, have produced the best overall job yet on the atom's actual political implications. They make it more real by frankly presupposing that the only two powers likely to engage in an atomic-armament race are the U.S. and Russia...