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General Groves’ secret history
The first history of the Manhattan Project that was ever published was the famous Smyth Report, which was made public just three days after the bombing of Nagasaki. But the heavily-redacted Smyth...
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Oppenheimer, Unredacted: Part II – Reading the Lost Transcripts
This is the second and final part (Part II) of my story about the lost Oppenheimer transcripts. Click here for Part I, which concerns the origin of the transcripts, the unintuitive aspects of their...
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Were there alternatives to the atomic bombings?
As we rapidly approach the 70th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there have been all sorts of articles, tributes, memorials, and so forth expressed both in print and online. I’ve...
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Hiroshima and Nagasaki at 70
This month marked the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the cessation of hostilities in World War II. Anniversaries are interesting times to test the cultural...
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Did Lawrence doubt the bomb?
Ernest O. Lawrence was one of the giants of 20th-century physics. The inventor of the “cyclotron,” a circular particle accelerator, Lawrence ushered in an era of big machines, big physics, big budgets...
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In Memoriam: Richard G. Hewlett (1923-2015)
Richard Greening Hewlett, the first official historian of the Atomic Energy Commission, has passed away at the age of 92.1 I never knew Hewlett, but nobody can work in this field without acknowledging...
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Neglected Niigata
Last week I gave a talk at a conference on “Nuclear Legacies” at Princeton University on Kyoto and Kokura, the two most prominent “spared” targets for the atomic bomb in 1945. The paper grew out of...
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Women, minorities, and the Manhattan Project
One of the things I most appreciate about the writers of the show Manhattan is that they took the effort to get beyond the standard, most common vision of the “Los Alamos scientist.” Several of the...
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The curious death of Oppenheimer’s mistress
The most recent episode of Manhattan, 209, is the penultimate episode for Season 2. There were many aspects that pleased me a lot, in part because I saw my own fingerprints on them: the discussion...
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Maintaining the bomb
We hear a lot about the benefits of “innovation” and “innovators.” It’s no small wonder: most of the stories we tell about social and technological “progress” are about a few dedicated people coming up...
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