Unsung heroes of Los Alamos:

Rethinking Manhattan Project Spies and the Cold War, MAD — and the 75 years of no nuclear war — that their efforts gifted us

  75 years ago, just before dawn on July 16, 1945, a cataclysmic explosion  brighter than the still unseen sun hook the New Mexico desert as scientists from the top-secret Manhattan Project tested their nightmarish creation:  the first atom bomb dubbed “the Gadget” by its inventors (the test was called “Trinity.”) This birth of the …

Recalling the start of the nuclear era as a new arms race threatens:

US bombings on Hiroshima & Nagasaki less about ending WWII than scaring Stalin

Almost three-quarters of a century ago on August 9, 1945, the United States dropped a 22-kiloton plutonium bomb called the “Fat Man” on Nagasaki. The total destruction of that city, and the instant incineration of 40,000 mostly civilian people, occurred just three days after the destruction of Hiroshima by a 15-kiloton uranium bomb, which instantly …

Remembering Ted Hall and Klaus Fuchs

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Spies Who Kept a Criminal US with a Nuclear Monopoly from Making More of Them

Cambridge, UK, Aug. 6 — Seventy-four years ago today, the US dropped the first ever atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, a non-military target of several hundred thousand, instantly vaporizing some 70,000 people, mostly civilians, and causing the painful, slower death of another 70,000 who died of burns and radioactive damage to their bodies …