Sublime

In the fall of 1942, Major General Leslie R. Groves, representing the War Department, went to du Pont with the request that the company undertakes a share of a project of great importance in the war effort. This project dealt with the release of atomic energy. At the time, many other nations were working on different projects that could help end th... See more

The very distance of small islands from large populations has made them ideal sites to test and store nuclear devices. When the United States tested its first atomic bomb, scientists used the New Mexican desert. But for subsequent tests the Atomic Energy Commission sought places far from the mainland. “We just took out dozens of maps and started lo

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Her discovery may have been crucial to creating the atomic bomb, but she wanted nothing to do with it nor wanted to be depicted in films about it. And I believe Meitner’s refusal to participate in the weaponization of her work on moral grounds makes her more worthy of commemoration than Oppenheimer. She chose humanity over notoriety.

Fermi and the Manhattan Project embodied an age of discovery that rewarded quality over quantity in expertise. In nuclear physics, the 1930s and 1940s were an age of fundamental breakthroughs, and when it came to making those breakthroughs, one Enrico Fermi was worth thousands of less brilliant physicists. American leadership in this era was built

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In 1925, Congress passed a law creating the Federal Helium Reserve (FHR), a storage facility that once held over a billion cubic meters of it. Initially created to ensure supplies for airships, the reserve took on heightened importance after World War II, when helium’s utility in rocketry became apparent. For decades, the federal government’s infra... See more