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The Mysterious Design of Little Boy
On August 11, 1945 — just two days after the bombing of Nagasaki — the U.S. government issued a technical history of the Manhattan Project, written by Princeton physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth.1 The Smyth...
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You Don’t Know Fat Man
Everybody knows “Fat Man,” right? The atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki has been described in some detail in the last few decades. It, just like the “Trinity” “gadget,” was an implosion design...
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Nuclear Bombs, Soviet Style (1958)
This set of Friday Images comes from an obscure Soviet publication I tracked down on a trip to the Library of Congress a few weeks ago. I had been searching for this for awhile, since I knew that the...
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Illustrating the Manhattan Project (1945)
Only two weeks after the bombing of Hiroshima, Life magazine devoted a huge portion of an issue to the Manhattan Project, in particular the “Trinity” test. It was mostly a popular distillation of the...
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The Third Shot and Beyond (1945)
Counterfactual history — or alternate history — is not a genre that most professional historians indulge in. We’re quick to sneer at it, for good reason: it’s pure fantasy, and about as relevant to...
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The Censored Chapter (1946)
An article of mine (“A Tale of Openness and Secrecy: The Philadelphia Story”) has recently been published in Physics Today. Even better, the article has been made available for free on the Physics...
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Visualizing the Stockpile
How does one make visual sense out of the size of the nuclear stockpile? On paper it’s just a number. Or a lot of numbers, if you’re talking about it historically. Or even more numbers, if you’re...
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What If Truman Hadn’t Ordered the H-bomb Crash Program?
The debate over the hydrogen bomb is one of my favorite Cold War episodes. I keep coming back to it, both on the blog and in my research. I’d posit that it is in many ways a lot more interesting than...
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Bethe argues against the MIKE test (1952)
To say that Hans Bethe was a fascinating character would be something of colossal understatement. His stance on the hydrogen bomb is one of the most enigmatic: in early 1950, he strongly lobbied...
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Bethe on SUNSHINE and Fallout (1954)
Project SUNSHINE definitely takes the prize for “most intentionally-misleading title of a government program.” The goal of SUNSHINE (co-sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission and RAND) was to figure...
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Hanford doggerel
The Hanford site, in rural Washington state, was not a very fun place to work during World War II. The conditions were unpleasant, the site was remote, and, well, almost nobody really knew what they...
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Death of a patent clerk
This post is a bit longer than most, but the story is a bit more involved than most. It’s got a little bit of everything — if by “everything” one means atomic patents and mysterious deaths. Manhattan...
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The 36-Hour War: Life Magazine, 1945
When NUKEMAP first got very hot, the Washington Post’s blog declared its popularity a sign of our jittery times. Those were Iranian jittery times, if we remember back all the way to a year ago — today...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What If Truman Hadn’t Ordered the H-bomb Crash Program?
The debate over the hydrogen bomb is one of my favorite Cold War episodes. I keep coming back to it, both on the blog and in my research. I’d posit that it is in many ways a lot more interesting than...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bethe argues against the MIKE test (1952)
To say that Hans Bethe was a fascinating character would be something of colossal understatement. His stance on the hydrogen bomb is one of the most enigmatic: in early 1950, he strongly lobbied...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bethe on SUNSHINE and Fallout (1954)
Project SUNSHINE definitely takes the prize for “most intentionally-misleading title of a government program.” The goal of SUNSHINE (co-sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission and RAND) was to figure...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Hanford doggerel
The Hanford site, in rural Washington state, was not a very fun place to work during World War II. The conditions were unpleasant, the site was remote, and, well, almost nobody really knew what they...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Death of a patent clerk
This post is a bit longer than most, but the story is a bit more involved than most. It’s got a little bit of everything — if by “everything” one means atomic patents and mysterious deaths. Manhattan...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The 36-Hour War: Life Magazine, 1945
When NUKEMAP first got very hot, the Washington Post’s blog declared its popularity a sign of our jittery times. Those were Iranian jittery times, if we remember back all the way to a year ago — today...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What did the Nazis know about the Manhattan Project?
The primary motivation of much Manhattan Project secrecy was to keep the Germans from finding out that the United States and United Kingdom were feverishly working on developing nuclear weapons. So it...
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