Word: mcphee
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...CURVE OF BINDING ENERGY by JOHN MCPHEE 232 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
Practically on the day this chilling book reached the public, someone with religious or political convictions detonated four car bombs in Dublin and a town to the north, killing 28 people. The event gave special interest to Author McPhee's thesis, which is that right now one fairly skilled technician, using easily obtainable equipment and information, and easily stolen uranium 235 or plutonium 239, could make a nuclear fission bomb. The bomb certainly would be small enough to fit into a Volkswagen, and perhaps into a golf...
Like a number of people now concerned with the problem (TIME, May 13), McPhee assumes that sooner or later someone will do it and will hold a city, or cities, at ransom. The motive might be idealism or simple criminality. Whatever his (or their) reasons, McPhee notes, the bomb makers would have to establish credibility and so presumably would make two bombs. The first would be set off as a free sample, and the second would be offered at a price...
...McPhee is not a physicist but a journalist, one of the very best now writing, who specializes in the long, reportorial essay. He has written books about such things as oranges, tennis, ecology, an unlikely tract of New Jersey outback called the Pine Barrens and a group of men who tried to reinvent the zeppelin. Like all journalists dealing with science, McPhee is tethered by limitations in his readers' knowledge and imagination...
Arthur Ashe, hero of John McPhee's classic of sports reporting, Levels of the Game, did not join team tennis, although offered a bundle of easy cash. He admitted the idea was interesting but said he didn't think that was what tennis was all about. If it works, he said he'd eat his tennis racket...