Three losses
There were three Manhattan Project losses that I heard about over the last week that I thought were worth briefly commenting on. They highlight, in different ways, how the living history of the...
View ArticleNarratives of Manhattan Project secrecy
Secrecy suffused every aspect of the Manhattan Project; it was always in the background, as a context. But it’s also a topic in and of itself — people love to talk about the secrecy of the work, and...
View ArticleThe price of the Manhattan Project
There’s been a little radio silence over here last week; the truth is, I’ve been very absorbed in NUKEMAP-related work. It is going very well; I’ve found some things that I thought were going to be...
View ArticleThe bomb and its makers
In part of the “make this blog actually work again” campaign, I’ve changed some things on the backend which required me to change the blog url from http://nuclearsecrecy.com/blog/ to...
View ArticleThe Third Core’s Revenge
By the end of August 1945, there had been a total of three plutonium cores created in the entire world. Everyone knows about the first two. The first was put into the Gadget and detonated at Trinity in...
View ArticleThe worst of the Manhattan Project leaks
We live in an era where the press regularly rejoices in printing “national security secrets,” via leaks, as an evidence of its “watchdog” status. This isn’t exactly a new thing, of course. Press leaks...
View ArticleLittle boxes of doom
I was at a (very interesting) conference last week and didn’t get a chance to do a regular blog post. I’ll have a real post on Friday, as usual, but I thought in the meantime people might enjoy this...
View ArticleThe year of the disappearing websites
I’m a big fan of digital historical research. Which is to say, I’ve benefited a lot from the fact that there are a lot of great online resources for primary source work in nuclear history. These aren’t...
View ArticleFeynman and the Bomb
Richard Feynman is one of the best-known physicists of the 20th century. Most of those who know about him know he was at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project — some of the best “Feynman stories”...
View ArticleWho smeared Richard Feynman?
One of the many physicists who came under official FBI scrutiny during the Cold War was Richard Feynman.1 Feynman’s work on the bomb at Los Alamos, combined with his fame, penchant for telling stories...
View ArticleThe Fat Man’s uranium
What a long set of weeks it has been! On top of my usual teaching load (a few hours of lecture per week, grading, etc.), I have given two public talks and then flown to Chicago and back for the annual...
View ArticleHow to die at Los Alamos
The people who ran the Manhattan Project worried about a lot of different things. Usually when we talk about this, it’s a story about the Germans, or the Japanese, or the physics, or other very...
View ArticleWhat did Bohr do at Los Alamos?
In the fall of 1943, the eminent quantum physicist Niels Bohr managed a dramatic escape from occupied Denmark, arriving first in Sweden, then going to the United Kingdom. He was quickly assimilated...
View ArticleHistory in the flesh
My main mode of interacting with history is through documents. Memos, reports, letters, telegrams, transcriptions, diagrams — the written word. The sociologist of science Bruno Latour calls these kinds...
View ArticleWhat remains of the Manhattan Project
What remains of the Manhattan Project? A lot of documents. Some people. A few places. And a handful of artifacts. Maybe less than one might expect, maybe more than one might expect — it was a very...
View ArticleTrinity at 70: “Now we are all sons of bitches.”
A quick dispatch from the road: I have been traveling this week, first to Washington, DC, and now in New Mexico, where I am posting this from. Highlights in Washington included giving a talk on nuclear...
View ArticleThe doubts of J. Robert Oppenheimer
The latest episode of Manhattan (Ep. 204) pivoted on the internal conflicts of J. Robert Oppenheimer. The standard, popular version of Oppenheimer as Los Alamos Director is one of infinite competence,...
View ArticleHere be dragons
The most famous experiment conducted by Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, after the Trinity test itself, is the one with the most evocative name. “Tickling the Dragon’s Tail,” also known...
View ArticleWomen, 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...
View ArticleWhy spy?
It’s impossible to talk about the work at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project without mentioning the spies. And yet, for the first five years of the atomic age, nobody would have mentioned them,...
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