Word: hydrogen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...atom turned physicists into politicians and politicians into physicists. Scientists were forced to reckon with the repercussions of what they had wrought, while political and military leaders had to comprehend the power they held at their fingertips. In Richard Rhodes' epic and fascinating Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (Simon & Schuster; 731 pages; $32.50), a sequel to his Pulitzer prizewinning The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Rhodes shows how the failure of scientists and political leaders to understand each others' realms almost brought the world to nuclear Armageddon...
...stage for his story about the hydrogen bomb, Rhodes deftly recounts the deeds of the perfidious Klaus Fuchs, the German emigre who furnished the Russians with not only a hand-drawn model of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki but also the theoretical plans for making the H-bomb. As scientist Hans Bethe remarked later, Fuchs was "the only physicist I know who truly changed history"--but he changed it by passing on nature's secrets, not discovering them...
...Soviets' test of their first atomic weapon in 1949 that galvanized Washington and U.S. scientists. Something bigger, exponentially more powerful than the atom bomb, had to be built, argued physicist Edward Teller. When Harry Truman was told of Teller's design for a hydrogen bomb, code-named Super, the President said, "What the hell are we waiting for?" The U.S. effort went into overdrive, partly because Washington suspected--rightly, as it turned out--that the Soviets were developing a Super of their...
...tested its first hydrogen bomb, dubbed "Mike," on Nov. 1, 1952, on Eniwetok atoll, 3,000 miles west of Hawaii. It exploded with a blinding white fireball more than three miles across, generating so much energy, Rhodes writes, "that the crews of the task force 30 miles away felt a swell of heat as if someone opened a hot oven." The yield was 10.4 megatons, a force a thousand times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, a blast greater than all the explosives used during World...
...replaced by intense curiosity. What were these animals feeding on in the absence of any detectable food supply? How were they surviving without light? The answer, surprisingly, had been found by a Russian scientist more than 100 years earlier. He had shown that an underwater bacterium, Beggiatoa, lived on hydrogen sulfide, a substance that is highly toxic to most forms of life. The bacterium was chemosynthetic--as opposed to photosynthetic--getting its energy from chemicals rather than from...