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Declassifying ARGUS (1959)
One of the strangest — and perhaps most dangerous — nuclear tests ever conducted was Operation ARGUS, in late 1958. The basic idea behind them was proposed by the Greek physicist Nicholas Christofilos,...
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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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The Problem of Redaction
Redaction is one of those practices we take for granted, but it is actually pretty strange if you think about it. I mean, who would imagine that the state would say, “well, all of this is totally safe...
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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 I – Finding the Lost Transcripts
I wrote this piece up several months ago, and was thinking about what to do with it, where to try and publish it, and so forth. Eventually I came to the conclusion that it would require a whole lot of...
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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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H-bomb headaches
Once again, the US government has gotten itself into a bad situation over the supposed secret of the hydrogen bomb. As The New York Times reported earlier this week, the Department of Energy (DOE)...
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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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Silhouettes of the bomb
You might think of the explosive part of a nuclear weapon as the “weapon” or “bomb,” but in the technical literature it has its own kind of amusingly euphemistic name: the “physics package.” This is...
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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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