Word: fissioning
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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That was in the old days. Now atomic fission is everywhere. Nowhere is the conflict between East and West, Communism and Democracy, so clearly outlined as on the Charles River. A nightmare is haunting today's single sculler: the vision of a motorboat filled with little boys. The little boys are armed with rocks, and they pursue him relentlessly until he is capsized into the nuclear waters of the Charles, Cambridge's first casuality from radioactivity...
Whether or not the circumstances of Einstein's death seem particularly fitting, the newspaper descriptions of him as "the man who made the atomic bomb possible" seem grossly inappropriate. To be sure, the Theory of Relativity did provide the theoretical basis for nuclear fission. But if there was anything that Einstein's life-work opposed, it was the bomb. A leader in warning of the weapon's destructive potential, Einstein championed total world disarmament to prevent its further use. He early cited the danger of radiation poisoning, and commented in 1945, when told of the Hiroshima bombing, "the world...
...widespread notions that the monastic life was unnatural, unhealthy, a "waste." Today that view is drastically changing: the monastery has begun to recapture the world's imagination. It has dawned on the world that the robed nun, the cowled monk have a place in the Age of Fission...
...Fission to Fusion. At the end of World War II, only two ingredients were in the nuclear picture. They were uranium 235 and plutonium, both of which are fissionable, i.e., the addition of a single neutron to the atomic nucleus splits the nucleus, with a vast release of energy. Later a third nuclear ingredient, fissionable U-233, was made out of nonfissionable thorium...
About five years ago came the "fusion" reaction. In this, an isotope of hydrogen (either deuterium, H2, or tritium, H3) was forced by extreme high temperature to "fuse" into helium with an enormous release of energy. The scientists got the required high temperature by exploding a conventional fission bomb as a detonator. With this development of fusion-which has never been officially described-the number of reactive nuclear ingredients rose to at least...