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How many people have Q Clearance?
The Q Clearance is the enigmatically-named security clearance created to allow access Restricted Data, the legal category for nuclear secrets in the United States (after which my book is named). It is...
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“The possibility of bigger bangs”
I’m excited to announce the publication of a new article of mine in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: “An Unearthly Spectacle: The untold story of the world’s biggest nuclear bomb.” As the title...
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The leak that brought the H-bomb debate out of the cold
In September 1949, the United States unambiguously detected radioactive residues which indicated that the Soviet Union had, some weeks before, detonated their first atomic bomb. President Truman was...
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How not to redact a warhead
The job of the document reviewer is the job of a censor: they look at documents that might be released and, based on a declassification guide and their own judgment, decide what should be made public...
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How many people died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
One question I’ve been asked a lot by journalists is, “how many people died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?” The reason they ask isn’t because they can’t use Google, it’s because if you start hunting around...
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John Wheeler’s H-bomb Blues
It’s been forever since I’ve updated on here, and I wanted to let you know that not only have I not abandoned this blog project, I’m planning to do a lot more blogging in 2020. I ended up taking a...
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Cleansing thermonuclear fire
What would it take to turn the world into one big fusion reaction, wiping it clean of life and turning it into a barren rock? Asking for a friend. Graphic from the 1946 film, “One World Or None,”...
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A “purely military” target? Truman’s changing language about Hiroshima
Some time ago, I wrote a blog post about a hypothesis I had regarding President Truman and the decision to use the atomic bomb. My basic thesis then (and continues to be) is that there is good reason...
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The Smyth Report: A chemical weapon coverup?
Two weeks ago, The Atlantic published an article on its website that made an interesting and provocative claim about the history of the atomic bomb. The thesis, in short, is that the Manhattan Project...
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The President and the Bomb, Part III
This is the third blog post I've written on the question of presidential nuclear authority. If you have unresolved questions, or feel like I'm taking some things for granted, you might first check out...
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FDR and the bomb
Franklin D. Roosevelt is one of the most enigmatic figures of the early American atomic bomb program. The four-term US president always features briefly in any story of the Manhattan Project: first,...
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The blue flash
This last weekend was the 70th anniversary of Louis Slotin’s criticality accident. One slip of a screwdriver; a blue flash and wave of heat; and Slotin had a little over a week to live. It’s a dramatic...
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Solzhenitsyn and the Smyth Report
The Smyth Report is one of the more improbable things to come out of World War II. It is one thing to imagine the United States managing to take nuclear fission, a brand-new scientific discovery...
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Nuclear history bibliography, 2015
It’s (roughly) that time of the year again: my annual nuclear history bibliography for the previous year. (It’s a little later than usual this time around, but I’ve been busy teaching and writing.) 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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Here 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...
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When did the Allies know there wasn’t a German bomb?
Fears of a German nuclear weapons program were the initial motivating concerns behind pushes in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein in the United States, and...
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The improbable William Laurence
The most recent episode of Manhattan features the arrival of a character based on one of my favorite real-life Manhattan Project participants: William L. Laurence, the “embedded” newspaperman on the...
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The plot against Leo Szilard
One of the recurring themes on WGN America’s Manhattan is the willingness of Manhattan Project security to use extreme extrajudicial methods against scientists on the project they found suspicious,...
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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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