#Norris Bradbury

[un-ionizetheradlab]

Every time I see that pic of Norris Bradbury sitting next to the Gadget wearing that hat, I think it's Oppie at first and my heart skips a beat.

Trinity Gadget July 16, 2015 Today is the 70th anniversary of the first atomic bomb test. “The first detonation of an atomic bomb (code name: Trinity) took place at 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, on the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, located about 230 miles south of the Manhattan Project’s headquarters in Los Alamos, New Mexico. When the implosion-design plutonium device (known as the “Gadget”) exploded, it filled the sky with a terrifying radioactive cloud, scorched the earth below and released the explosive energy of about 19 kilotons of TNT.“

[denimbex1986]

'Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s highly acclaimed blockbuster, is an intense experience, a grand portrayal of the Manhattan Project’s leader. When the movie ends, it might be easy think that’s where the story ends, to let the notoriety of the work and its consequences be the last word. But of course, it’s not. Los Alamos continues as a community and the Los Alamos National Laboratory has greatly expanded its role.

As a part of that community, Trinity on the Hill, the only Episcopal parish on the mesa, has a number of ties to the movie and to the real events and people that the movie depicts. The church’s foundations go back to the Manhattan Project, many parishioners work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and at least two of them worked as extras on the film. They’re also concerned with how the film is influencing perception of the people and events, both past and present.

According to a parish histories written in 1954 and 2004, “Trinity on the Hill had its beginning in the work of the Rev. C.J. Kinsolving III … and of Army Chaplain Matthew H. Imre,” both of whom “conducted services for the small group of Episcopalians employed on the Project.” They initially worshiped in what was called the “Big House,” which was a part of the Los Alamos Ranch School. Kinsolving later served as Bishop of New Mexico and Southwest Texas (now the Diocese of the Rio Grande) from 1956 to 1972.

In 1949, a steering commission chose the parish’s name. The Rev. Mary Ann Hill, rector of Trinity since May, adds that Norris Bradbury, Oppenheimer’s successor, helped establish the parish.

Did the church have any connection with Trinity as the test codename? When Hill suggested that possibility, “another priest who has lived here a long time took offense.” Hill added that the “church is also on Trinity Drive, so that may be part of how it got its name, but of course I’m sure the road did get its name from the test site.”

Trinity draws on the gifts of its members to form a strong Christian community whose mission is, as Hill stressed, “to be a force for good.” Trinity’s chapel stays open overnight for folks who need temporary shelter, and the building is often used by the larger community. Los Alamos is a company town — 70 to 80 percent of the population works for the lab, and Hill loves the nerdy aspect of her congregation (her license plate is Luke Skywalker’s call sign, Red 5). She said the church has “a high degree of Ph.D.s,” which, among other things, makes for interesting comments on her sermons; as academics, they want to explore her sources.

One such parishioner is Jeffrey Favorite, who is a nuclear engineer. He has been at the lab for 25 years now; his work involves radiation transport applications, which he explains as studying gamma rays and neutrons to learn the effects of radiation. Favorite is a longtime member of Trinity on the Hill, having joined soon after his arrival in Los Alamos.

He’s served in many leadership roles, including vestry member, finance committee chair, treasurer, Sunday school teacher, and more. He says that not only is he a member of the town’s local theater (which originated during the Manhattan Project) but also a professional dramatic storyteller, presenting the Gospel of Mark for audiences regularly.

So it seems only natural that Favorite responded to the second Oppenheimer casting call for extras — “Everybody responded.” He was hired as an extra for the Senate confirmation hearings scenes, in which Lewis Strauss, played by Robert Downey Jr., is being considered as Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce. The enthusiasm in his voice, as he spoke of his time on the set in March 2022, was palpable and contagious.

His official role was “Senate Observer.” He can be seen on screen as a group of men standing in the background behind a seated Strauss. He’s also on screen as a photographer. One of the highlights, Favorite says, was sitting next to Alden Ehrenreich for some of the shots, though those ended up being cut. He noted that the actor was reading Anna Karenina while on the set.

One of the points the nuclear engineer stressed is that “everyone in town has some connection to the movie, so I’m not unique in this at all — it’s a community thing.” When he and his family watch, “it’s not just me we are looking for; it’s many of our friends.”

John Singleton is a British scientist who “came to the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory’s Los Alamos campus for a change [getting back to hands-on science] and [unexpectedly] stayed.” During his time at Trinity, he directed and accompanied the youth and Evensong choirs, among other ministries.

Singleton tells intriguing stories of his conversations with the “old ones,” as he calls them, folks who lived on the hill as part of the original Manhattan Project community. One of his several disappointments is that Nolan’s film doesn���t do justice to the reality of life there — the “frenetic” pace at which they all worked, the crowded conditions, and the partying that went on. Singleton said one of the old ones told him it reminded him of Tolkien’s Mordor at times.

Hill, Favorite, and Singleton all emphasized the sense of judgment inherent in Oppenheimer. Their consensus is that the issue of nuclear weapons is more complicated than as expressed in the movie. Hill says that while she would love for all such weapons to be destroyed, she holds a pragmatic view that they are part of our broken world, keeping it safe from massive aggression.

Singleton asks viewers not to be too hasty to criticize the scientists who were “driven by an aspect of revenge” in their race to make the bomb, who wanted to see “Berlin as a pool of molten rock with Hitler in the middle.” Many of them lost family members in Nazi concentration camps, and that desire helped allay their pain.

All three pointed out the current work happening at the lab, which is devoted to nonproliferation of more weapons, to “stockpile stewardship” (making sure that what does exist is safe); and to other projects that lead toward more sustainable energy sources and ways of living. John and his team won an R&D award last year for work on communications antennas that would assist internet access in rural places.

Oppenheimer is a cultural phenomenon that will, for a while longer, generate conversations about the development and use of nuclear weapons and about the complicated man who led the work in the United States. Trinity on the Hill Episcopal Church, however, will carry on the stories of those, past and present, who are tied to the Los Alamos community, continuing in their mission to be a force for good.'

[whats-in-a-sentence]

Evans addressed him in the following terms:

Dr Evans: Do you think that scientific men as a rule are rather peculiar individuals?

Bradbury: When did I stop beating my wife?

Mr Gray: Especially chemistry professors?

Dr Evans: No, physics professors.

Bradbury: Scientists are human beings . . . a scientist wants to know. He wants to know correctly and truthfully and precisely. ... Therefore I think you are likely to find among people who have imaginative minds in the scientific field individuals who are also willing, eager, to look at a number of other fields with the same type of interest, willingness to examine, to be convinced and without a priori convictions as to rightness or wrongness, that this constant or that curve or this or that function is fatal.

I think the same sort of willingness to explore other areas of human activity is probably characteristic. If this makes them peculiar I think it is probably a desirable peculiarity.

Dr Evans: You didn't do that, did you?

Bradbury: Well—

Dr Evans: Do you go fishing and things like that?

Bradbury: Yes, I have done a number of things. Some people and perhaps myself among them, I was an experimental physicist during those days, and I was very much preoccupied by the results of my own investigations.

Dr Evans: But that didn't make you peculiar, did it?

Bradbury: This I would have to leave to others to say.

Dr Evans: Younger people sometimes make mistakes, don't they?

Bradbury: I think this is part of people's growing up.

Dr Evans: Do you think Dr Oppenheimer made any mistakes?

"Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists" - Robert Jungk, translated by James Cleugh

[oppenheimerblog]

Norris Bradbury (left) and J. Robert Oppenheimer (right)

Source

[wumblr]

one time at an anarchist open mic night i introduced a song with a story like "the government set up spy satellites in orbit around the earth but when they pointed them out toward space this song was playing" and i did not know it at the time but this is almost exactly how gamma ray bursts were discovered, using the only satellite network that cartoon dweebs here on tumblr have ever fucking harassed me about. that's right! the vela satellites

i'm sorry, i got distracted and googled "vela satellite merch" hoping to find, i don't know. a desktop-sized tchotchke or something, which i now realize was remarkably misguided of me because i have learned an unfortunate and haunting fact: you can buy tshirts with a schematic of the nagasaki bomb on them from los alamos national laboratory... seems a bit gauche, to vastly understate the problem. but what else could you expect from the world's most hideously expensive war empire

they also have a "challenge coin" commemorating norris bradbury and the vela satellites inscribed with "ensuring america's security from space" which like... did you. did you ensure the security. from gamma ray bursts. i know you didn't, you sat on that research for years, our security from them is frankly still not ensured. (but don't worry. we've never detected one less than like 117mly away. possibly coincidence. and perhaps not. who can say!)

you know if you think about it's kind of wild that we as a species have managed to present more of an existential threat to ourselves than outer space does. anyway i'm not buying that. LANL does NOT need my money. they already have it. from the tax-funded the department of energy budget

[pepsi-maxwell]

Was Oppenheimer at Los Alamos when Slotin fucked around and found out, I know Oppenheimer was there when Daghlian FAFO’d

probably not! oppenheimer resigned as director of los alamos in october 1945, whereas slotin's death wasn't until may 1946

there's the possibility he may have still spent some time there, but given his replacement, norris bradbury, was in favour of more nuclear tests and increased production/stockpiling of nuclear weapons, and by '47, oppenheimer was advocating against nuclear proliferation, it's unlikely

(one of the sad facts is slotin was also disillusioned with his work, and training a replacement for his planned return to academics. what could have been!)

[taxi-davis]

[dccomicsnews]

Review: Aquaman/ Green Arrow: Deep Target #1

Review: Aquaman/ Green Arrow: Deep Target #1

Review: Aquaman/ Green Arrow: Deep Target #1[Editor’s Note: This review may contain spoilers] Writer: Brandon ThomasArt: Ronan CliquetColors: Ulises ArreolaLetters: Josh Reed Reviewed by: Matthew B. Lloyd     Summary A scientist retrieves a dinosaur from the past, but what’s the real plot?  And What does Oliver Curry King of Atlantis have to say about it?   And, why is Arthur Queen vying for the…

[aubainmary]

Send 👤 and I will write more about an NPC in my muse’s life

(supernatural verse)

You know how most people who become hunters have a tragic youth? A murdered father, a killed sister, a trauma? Not Benton Norris. Benton, known as Ben to friends, became a hunter when he was forced into it at a later age.

Ben was part of Charlie Bradbury's LARP group in Moondor. He plays the role of a young elven prince, who wants nothing more than to find a romantic partner in his endeavors to join him and start their own kingdom. It's not too far from the truth: Ben would love to have his own family but he'd had no luck with his dates yet - despite Charlie's attempts to match him with another elf in Moondor.

One day he was venturing out in the wildlands to pick some moonflowers, a lovely bouquet to offer to said prince. However, he was rudely interrupted by a werewolf hungry for his heart. It was pure luck that Ben was carrying a silver knife and plunged it into the werewolf's neck in defense. That was the start of his journey as a hunter: today he's a fully fledged one, armed and dangerous. While he still enjoys LARPing, he's not nearly as committed to it as he was in the past. Instead, he now spends his time adopting books (because those poor old paperpacks at the thrift shops need a home too!), researching lore and killing monsters.

Mary met him when she accidentally saved him during a hunt, protecting him from a wraith ready to feed on him. He then finished the job with the very same silver knife he used before. They eventually contacted each other more frequently to team up and they are friends now. He's one of the few hunters Mary isn't scared of due to his usually gentle nature and kind voice. But he's a fierce warrior and shouldn't be underestimated despite his good intentions. fc: Aaron Jakubenko

[tabloidtoc]

TV Guide, January 18-31

You can buy a copy of this issue for your very own at my eBay store: https://www.ebay.com/str/bradentonbooks

Cover: Jared Padalecki is the new Walker 

Page 1: Contents, Editor’s Letter, Your Feedback 

Page 4: Ask Matt -- Star Trek: Discovery, Aidy Bryant and Saturday Night Live, The Great Christmas Light Fight, Coming Next Issue -- The Hot List with Outlander’s Sam Heughan on the cover 

Page 6: TV Insider -- 25 top shows 

Page 7: First Look -- Cynthia Erivo as Aretha Franklin in Genius, The Show We’re Talking About in the Office -- WandaVision, The Big Number -- 10 is the number of NCIS episodes that landed in the 100 most watched broadcasts of 2020 more than any other scripted series; Chicago Fire was the No. 2 scripted show with eight episodes making the list 

Page 8: Family Room -- shows both adults and kids will love 

Page 10: The Roush Review -- midseason sitcoms look to the stars for laughs with mixed results -- Mr. Mayor, Call Me Kat, Call Your Mother 

Page 11: Coyote, Trickster, The Watch 

Page 16: Cover Story -- Supernatural’s Jared Padalecki reboots a Chuck Norris action series as the Texas family drama Walker 

Page 17: Genevieve Padalecki on her role as Walker’s dead wife Emily 

Page 18: Gina Torres suits up as a heroic paramedic on Season 2 of 9-1-1: Lone Star 

Page 20: The Unicorn’s scene stealers -- Rob Corddry and Michaela Watkins match wits on the hit comedy 

Page 22: What’s Worth Watching -- Week 1 -- Ty Pennington on Ty Breaker 

Page 23: Monday, January 18 -- Folake Olowofoyeku on Bob Hearts Abishola, The Bold and the Beautiful, All American, 9-1-1, The Clown and the Candyman 

Page 24: Tuesday, January 19 -- Finding Your Roots with John Waters and Glenn Close, Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, NCIS, Prodigal Son, Unpolished

Page 25: Wednesday, January 20 -- David Eigenberg on Chicago Fire, Presidential Inauguration, The Alps, Riverdale, Nancy Drew, When Disaster Strikes 

Page 26: Thursday, January 21 -- Craig Ferguson on The Hustler, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Legacies, The Rev 

Page 27: Friday, January 22 -- Hisham Tawfiq on The Blacklist, The Wrong Prince Charming, The UnXplained, Blue Bloods, Painting With John 

Page 28: Saturday, January 23 -- Sandra “Pepa” Denton on Salt-N-Pepa, A Wild Year on Earth, A Winter Getaway, Sunday, January 24 -- A Discovery of Witches, Bridge and Tunnel, Agatha Christie’s England 

Page 29-45: TV listings 

Page 46: Stream It! Your guide to the very best streaming available now -- Netflix -- Ralph Macchio and William Zabka on Cobra Kai, The Dig, Penguin Bloom, Pieces of a Woman 

Page 47: Last Tango in Halifax, Lupin, Monarca, After Life, The Crown, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Hollywood, Ratched, Space Force, Netflix Top Ten, What I’m Bingeing -- Outlander 

Page 48: Prime Video -- Vikings, 5 British mysteries to watch now -- Grantchester, Endeavor, Fearless, Silent Witness, Unforgotten, Roush Review -- A Discovery of Witches 

Page 49: Hulu -- Russell Tovey on The Sister, True-Crime Intrigue -- Torn From the Headlines: New York Post Reports, Who Killed Jeffrey Epstein?, Streaming Service Spotlight -- Discovery+ 

Page 50: New Movie Releases 

Page 51: Series, Specials & Documentaries 

Page 52: What’s Worth Watching -- Week 2 -- Sean Bean on Snowpiercer 

Page 53: Monday, January 25 -- America’s Hidden Stories, All Rise, World’s Most Unexplained, The Salisbury Poisonings, The Good Doctor, Lucille Ball: Life Death & Money 

Page 54: Tuesday, January 26 -- Tika Sumpter on mixed-ish, To Tell the Truth, This Is Us, black-ish, Big Sky, The Proof Is Out There, The Terror 

Page 55: Wednesday, January 27 -- The Big Interview With Dan Rather -- Randy Travis, Resident Alien, For Life 

Page 56: Thursday, January 28 -- Vanna White on Celebrity Wheel of Fortune, Mr. Mayor, Rehab Addict Rescue, Go-Big Show, Friday, January 29 -- The Ray Bradbury Theater, Little Women: Atlanta

Page 57: Saturday, January 30 -- Wendy Williams on Wendy Williams: The Movie and The Wendy Williams Story: What a Mess!, Snowkissed, Heartland Docs DVM, Saturday Night Live 

Page 58: Sunday, January 31 -- The Long Song, Love Is a Piece of Cake, American Gods, The 63rd Annual Grammy Awards, All Creatures Great and Small, Cal Fire 

Page 59-78: TV listings 

Page 84: Cheers & Jeers -- cheers to Mr. Mayor’s national treasure, Bling Empire, The Rookie, Name That Tune, jeers to The Masker Dancer, The Stand, The Office 

[justforbooks]

The greatest year for books ever?

Several years including 1862, 1899 and 1950 could be considered literature’s very best. But one year towers above these, writes Jane Ciabattari.

The year 1925 was a golden moment in literary history. Ernest Hemingway’s first book, In Our Time, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby were all published that year. As were Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, among others. In fact, 1925 may well be literature’s greatest year.

But how could one even go about determining the finest 12 months in publishing history? Well, first, by searching for a cluster of landmark books:  debut books or major masterpieces published that year. Next, by evaluating their lasting impact: do these books continue to enthrall readers and explore our human dilemmas and joys in memorable ways? And then by asking: did the books published in this year alter the course of literature? Did they influence literary form or content, or introduce key stylistic innovations?

Books that came out in 1862, for instance, included Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. But Gustave Flaubert’s novel of that year, Sallambo, set in Carthage during the 3rd Century BC, was no match for Madame Bovary. George Eliot’s historical novel Romola and Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm were also disappointments.

The year 1899 is another contender for literature’s best. Kate Chopin’s seminal work The Awakening was published then, as was Frank Norris’s McTeague and two Joseph Conrad classics – Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim (serialised in Blackwood’s Magazine). But Tolstoy’s last novel Resurrection, published also in 1899, was more shaped by his religious and political ideals than a powerful sense of character; and Henry James’ The Awkward Age was a failed experiment – a novel written almost entirely in dialogue.

And in 1950 there were published books from Isaac Asimov (I, Robot), Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles), Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train), Doris Lessing (The Grass Is Singing) and CS Lewis (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). But other great fiction writers produced lesser works that year – Ernest Hemingway’s minor Across the River and into the Trees; Jack Kerouac’s The Town and the City, written under the influence of Thomas Wolfe; John Steinbeck’s poorly received play-in-novel-format Burning Bright and Evelyn Waugh’s only historical novel, the Empress Helena (Roman emperor Constantine’s Christian mother goes in search of relics of the Cross).

But 1925 brought something unique – a vibrant cultural outpouring, multiple landmark books and a paradigm shift in prose style. Literary work that year reflected a world in the aftermath of tremendous upheaval. The brutality of World War One, with some 16 million dead and 70 million mobilised to fight, had left its mark on the Lost Generation. In Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf created the indelible shell-shocked veteran Septimus Smith, “with hazel eyes which had that look of apprehension in them which makes complete strangers apprehensive too. The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?”

Looking inward

The solid external world of the realists and naturalists was giving way to the shifting perceptions of the modernist ‘I’. Mrs Dalloway, which covers one day as Clarissa Dalloway prepares for a party – and Septimus Smith for his demise – is a landmark modernist novel. Its narrative is rooted in the flow of consciousness, with dreams, fantasies and vague perceptions gaining unprecedented expression. Woolf’s stylistic breakthrough reflected a changing perception of reality. Proust was also all the rage at this moment, as Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Remembrance of Things Past’s third volume was just out. Woolf admired Proust’s “astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification”.

The year 1925 also contributed to the culmination of Gertrude Stein’s career. She had moved to Paris in 1903 and established a Saturday evening salon that eventually included Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound and Sherwood Anderson, as well as artists Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Stein responded to her immersion in the Parisian avant-garde by writing The Making of Americans, which was published in 1925, more than a decade after its completion. In over 900 pages of stream-of-consciousness, Stein tells of “the old people in a new world, the new people made out of the old,” and describes an American “space of time that is filled always filled with moving”. Early critics like Edmund Wilson couldn’t finish Stein’s complex web of repetition, but she has been credited with foreshadowing postmodernism and making key stylistic breakthroughs, including using the continuous present and a nearly musical word choice. As Anderson put it: “For me, the work of Gertrude Stein consists in a rebuilding, an entirely new recasting of life, in the city of words.”

Stein’s experiments with language influenced Hemingway’s signature sparseness. Beginning with the autobiographical Nick Adams stories in his first book, 1925’s In Our Time, his fiction is characterised by pared-down prose, with symbolic meaning lying beneath the surface. Nick witnesses birth and suicide as a young boy accompanying his father, a doctor, to deliver a baby in the Michigan woods. He is exposed to urban crime when two Chicago hitmen come to his small town. And as a war veteran trying to keep his memories at bay, he gravitates toward the familiar pleasures of camping and fishing: "He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him."

Modern times

The midpoint of the Roaring ‘20s was a time of rare prosperity and upward mobility in the United States. The stock market seemed destined to climb forever, and the American Dream seemed within the grasp of the masses. 1925 was special, though. In New York, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer and other writers of the Harlem Renaissance were given a definitive showcase that year in the anthology The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke. At the same time Harold Ross launched a revolutionary and risky weekly magazine called The New Yorker, which featured portraits of Manhattan socialites and their adventures and offered what would be a treasured showcase for short stories ever since.

F Scott Fitzgerald dubbed this flamboyant postwar American era “the Jazz Age”. Alcohol flowed freely despite Prohibition; flappers followed the sober suffragettes into a time of sexual freedom. New wealth was spreading the riches and opening doors to players like Fitzgerald’s immortal character Jay Gatsby, whose fortune was rumoured to be based on bootlegging. The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, gives a portrait both tawdry and touching, as Gatsby remakes himself in a doomed attempt to win the love of the wealthy Daisy Buchanan. The tarnished American Dream also was central that year to Theodore Dreiser’s naturalist masterpiece, An American Tragedy. Dreiser based the novel on a real criminal case, in which a young man murders his pregnant mistress in an attempt to marry into an upper class family, and is executed by electric chair. Also ripped from the headlines, Sinclair Lewis’s realistic 1925 novel Arrowsmith was a first in exploring the influence of science on American culture. Lewis wrote of the medical training, practice and ethical dilemmas facing a physician involved in high-level scientific research.

These books weren’t just original, even revolutionary, creations – they were helping to establish the very idea of modernity, to make sense of the times. Perhaps 1925 is literature’s most important year simply because no other 12-month span features such a dialogue between literature and real life. Certainly that’s the case in terms of how new technologies – the automobile, the cinema – shook up literary form in 1925. John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer introduced the cinematic narrative form to the novel. New York, presented in fragments as if it were a movie montage on the page, is the novel’s collective protagonist, the inhuman industrialised city presented as a flow of images and characters passing at high speed. "Declaration of war… rumble of drums... Commencement of hostilities in a long parade through the empty rain lashed streets,” Dos Passos writes. “Extra, extra, extra. Santa Claus shoots daughter he has tried to attack. Slays Self With Shotgun." Sinclair Lewis called Manhattan Transfer "the vast and blazing dawn we have awaited. It may be the foundation of a whole new school of fiction."

Was 1925 the greatest year in literature? The ultimate proof, 90 years later, is the shape-shifting the novel has undergone, still based on these early inspirations – and the continuing resonance of Nick Adams, Jay Gatsby and Clarissa Dalloway. These characters from a transformative time are still enthralling generations of new readers.

Copyright © 2020 BBC

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[mongoose-bite]

Reading list 2019

Here it is, all the books I read this year. You can find my previous reading lists here. I read a lot of books this year: forty-six, which is a record for the years I've been keeping count (I'm sure I read more as a teenager.) I don't have a goal for number of books in mind. I could read a hundred if I confined myself to fast-paced, easy-to-read novels, so it's relatively meaningless. I read a bunch of shorter books and the number goes up.

By the end of the year I'm usually starting to forget the less memorable ones, but these are my favourites:

- The Dove's Necklace by Raja Alem - the blurb mislead me into thinking this was a murder mystery, instead it is something much more interesting. A street in an ancient slum in Mecca is a PoV character.

- Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood - much more relevant and interesting than the prequel, a contemporaneous, fictionalized account of pre-Nazi Germany.

- Passing Strange by Ellen Klages - mid-century historical lesbian juust barely fantasy. I thought it was fun.

- The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin - It's le Guin; of course it's good. A view from the eighties imagining various future scenarios, and a monkey's paw problem.

- Less by Andrew Sean Greer - gay writer has mid-life crisis, but parts of it are funny as hell. Books that make me giggle out loud are as rare as hen's teeth.

- The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo - the setting makes this one. I can't really decide what genre it is. 1930's Malaysia, multiple PoV characters, and a central mystery revolving around severed fingers and the possibility of a kind of weretiger.

- The Rich Man's House by Andrew McGahan - the author apologises for the fact the novel wasn't quite as edited as it could be as he was trying to get it done before he died of cancer. Regardless, I liked it. Starts off like a setup for a thriller but I'd argue it's cosmic horror by the end. I loved the alternate history stuff; there's a ridiculously huge mountain, and the billionaire who climbed it invites a small group of people to the house he's just completed on the tiny island next to it. I cannot say more.

Honourable mention goes to Iain M Banks's Culture novels. I liked both the ones I read, and I've missed big, chunky sci-fi books with big scale ideas. Well plotted too.

Full list below the cut:

Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen Force of Nature – Jane Harper Prince of Mist - Carlos Ruiz Zafón Tales From the Inner City – Shaun Tan Flights – Olga Tokarczuk Convenience Store Woman – Sayaka Murata Ice – Anna Kavan First Person – Richard Flanagan The Dove's Necklace – Raja Alem Yoss – Odo Hirsch Ancient, Ancient – Kiini Ibura Salaam Melmoth – Sarah Perry Possession – A S Byatt Mr. Norris Changes Trains – Christopher Isherwood Goodbye to Berlin – Christopher Isherwood They're a Weird Mob – Nino Culotta The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy Sorcerer to the Crown – Zen Cho My Name is Red – Orhan Pamuk Ladies in Black – Madeleine St John Transit – Rachel Cusk Passing Strange – Ellen Klages Lighthousekeeping – Jeanette Winterson The Lathe of Heaven – Ursula Le Guin Emma – Jane Austen Anyone But You – Jennifer Crusie Earthquake Weather – Tim Powers The Leopard - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Underground – Haruki Murakami Less – Andrew Sean Greer I Shall Wear Midnight – Terry Pratchett Stories – Helen Garner The Silent Patient – Alex Michaelides A Closed and Common Orbit – Becky Chambers Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons The October Country – Ray Bradbury The Night Tiger – Yangsze Choo Surface Detail – Iain M Banks All This I Will Give to You – Dolores Rendondo (translated by Michael Meigs) The Rich Man's House – Andrew McGahan The Wine of Solitude – Irene Nemirovsky The French Lieutenant's Woman – John Fowles The Crack-Up – F. Scott Fitzgerald The Secret in Their Eyes – Eduardo Sacheri The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje Coin Locker Babies – Ryu Murakami The Hydrogen Sonata – Iain M. Banks

[whats-in-a-sentence]

The change is evident in the report of an eye-witness, Gordon Dean, then Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission:

We had at that meeting in June of 1951 every person, I think, that could conceivably have made a contribution. People like Norris Bradbury, head of the Los Alamos laboratory, and one or two of his assistants. Dr Nordheim, I believe, was there from Los Alamos, very active in the H programme. Johnny von Neumann from Princeton, one of the best weapons men in the world, Dr Teller, Dr Bethe, Dr Fermi, Johnny Wheeler, all the top men from every laboratory sat around this table and we went at it for two days.

Out of the meeting came something which Edward Teller brought into the meeting with his own head, which was an entirely new way of approaching a thermonuclear weapon.

I would like to be able to describe that but it is one of the most sensitive things we have left in the atomic-energy programme . . . it was just a theory at this point. Pictures were drawn on the board. Calculations were made, Dr Bethe, Dr Teller, Dr Fermi participating the most in this. Oppy very actively as well.

At the end of those two days we were all convinced, everyone in the room, that at least we had something for the first time that looked feasible in the way of an idea.

I remember leaving that meeting impressed with this fact, that everyone around that table without exception, and this included Dr Oppenheimer, was enthusiastic now that you had someone foreseeable. I remember going out and in four days making a commitment for a new plant . . . we had no money in the budget to do it with and getting this thing started on the tracks, there was enthusiasm right through the programme for the first time. The bickering was gone. The discussions were pretty well ended, and we were able within a matter of just about one year to have that gadget ready.

"Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists" - Robert Jungk, translated by James Cleugh

[abdulaziz2023]

الفيزيائي نوريس برادبري يجلس بجانب الأداة النووية التي صنعها العلماء لاختبار أول قنبلة ذرية في العالم ، 1945

Physicist Norris Bradbury sits next to the assembled “The Gadget”, the nuclear device created by scientists to test the world’s first atomic bomb, 1945

[zeedesertfox]

For @aveanexalea , since he requested it and it was on my vote list.

Back in the early portion of the cold war, US air planners and air defence controllers had a major problem. In the day and age of a single modern bomber being able to take out an entire city, or multiple in a single mission, the US had to guarantee that to the best of their ability to be able to take down as many soviet bombers as possible, preferably all of them, in the event of an atomic conflict.

From past experience, they knew that the “bomber would always get through”, especially when used in mass bomber swarms, or combat boxes, as was the US term. (More of a specific bomber formation doctrine, but eh). Conventional Anti-aircraft measures could and would down some of the bombers, but a large volume would get through. Any Soviet bombers escaping air defences would more than likely result in destroyed US cities and the millions of preventable casualties that would follow.

This was unacceptable. The USAF, taking a page from their Army comrades, decided to go nuclear. The US army’s doctrine was to use atomic munitions to vaporize soviet armoured divisions if they were able to roll through any conventional weapons, for the defence of Western Europe. The USAF decided that an atomic device air-burst in the middle of a soviet bomber formation would do just the trick.

New developments in US Atomics research had allowed for the development of sealed pit devices. “A weapon “boosted” by tritium and deuterium gas would use much less fissile material to produce a large explosion. Right before the moment of detonation, these hydrogen gases would be released into the weapon’s core. When the core imploded, the gases would fuse, release neutrons, multiply the number of fissions, and greatly increase the yield. And because the fissile core would be hollow and thin, a lesser amount of explosives would be needed to implode it. As a result, boosted weapons could be light and small.“

Eric Schlosser,  Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety.  (New York: The Penguin Press, 2013), Pg. 103.

This new development allowed for more powerful weapons in smaller packages.

This allowed the Air-2 Genie to pack the punch it required.

The Air-2 Genie represented the first sealed-pit weapon to enter US stockpile. With conventional air-to air weapons proving inadequate, and the threat of a single Soviet aircraft wreaking havoc on the mainland US, the USAF deemed the safest option for the downing of US bombers was the detonation of small atomic devices over the skies of the mainland United States, Alaska, and Canada. 

This “view was endorsed in March 1955 by James R. Killian, the president of MIT, who headed a top secret panel on the threat of surprise attack”. - “The Genie would be carried by Air Force fighter-interceptors. It had a small, 1.5-kiloton warhead and a solid-fueled rocket engine. Unlike conventional air defense weapons, it didn’t need a direct hit to eliminate a target. And it could prove equally useful against a single Soviet bomber or a large formation of them”.

-Ibid.

The Genie was to be fired upon contact with a Soviet bomber. The sooner the better for the sake of the US, as will be explained in detail below. 

The on board fire computer would calculate the distance to the bomber, or bombers, and set the on board timer for the Air-2 Genie. After launch, the US fighter would bank hard and roll out and away from the projected device initiation point. Initiation of the device would occur once the timer ran out. The rocket would speed towards the hostile aircraft at Mach 3.3 powered by a solid fueled Thiokol SR49 rocket motor. Primary kill effects were caused surprisingly enough not by blast or heat, which, despite the low yield of 1.5 kilotons, were still effective out to a great distance. The Fireball would consume any aircraft within a hundred yards, yet the most effective killing agent of this device was the prompt radiation released. Even a bad miss could still kill, given that the lethal envelope of the prompt radiation had a radius of about a mile with “the “probability of kill” (PK) within that envelope [found] to be 92 percent”.

“The Soviet aircrew’s death from radiation might take as long as five minutes—a delay that made it even more important to fire the Genie as far as possible from urban areas. Detonated at a high altitude, the weapon produced little fallout and didn’t lift any debris from the ground to form a mushroom cloud. After the bright white flash, a circular cloud drifted from the point of detonation, forming an immense smoke ring in the sky”.

-Ibid.

The discussion of permission to fire these devices was brought up, and how a request to fire the devices may be delayed to the point where several US cities may well have gone up in smoke. In response to these concerns, the use of these devices were pre-delegated to the USAF, by Eisenhower in April 1956, with the actual order coming into effect in December.

In effect, the USAF was able to fire atomic air-to-air rockets at any target that was deemed ‘hostile’. While the joint chief's of staff demanded that these devices were to be locked up in storage igloos, and never to be flown over the United States except in war time. Presumably, the reality of this was that a large volume of air interceptors were on the deck ready to jet in the event of a conflict. At first warning of the DEW line, Mid-Canada line or the Pine-tree Line, the aircraft would be armed, with Genies extracted from their storage sheds, with the air interceptors, now armed with atomic rockets, sent to intercept the soviet waves of bombers.

To prove the device safe in use, the USAF conducted  Operation Plumbbob on 19 July 1957. This proved to be the only live firing of a Air-2 Genie missile, which initiated somewhere  between 18,500 and 20,000 ft (5,600 and 6,100 m) above mean sea level. (Sources vary). A group of five USAF officers volunteered to stand hatless in their light summer uniforms underneath the blast to prove that the weapon was safe for use over populated areas. They were photographed by Department of Defense photographer George Yoshitake who stood there with them. Gamma and neutron doses received by observers on the ground were negligible. Doses received by aircrew were highest for the fliers assigned to penetrate the airburst cloud ten minutes after explosion.

Source

As shown in the video above, with the description just above, “The officers wore summer uniforms and no protective gear. A photograph, taken at the moment of detonation, shows that two of the men instinctively ducked, two shielded their eyes, and one stared upward, looking straight at the blast. “It glowed for an instant like a newborn sun,” Time magazine reported, “then faded into a rosy, doughnut-shaped cloud.”

Eric Schlosser,  Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety.  (New York: The Penguin Press, 2013), Pg. 105. 

Problems arise.  

Inevitably , problems began to arise. Given that sealed-pit weapons were quite new, with this model of weapon being the first in stockpiles, how safe were they? This was a bit of an unknown, one that needed to be found out when thousands of these devices would be put on airfields and storage facility's across the country, many within city limits.

The U.S. government was quite public about the Genie missile.  “When atomic bombs were first transferred to SAC bases in French Morocco, the French government wasn’t told about the weapons. But the deployment of Genies at air bases throughout the United States was announced in an Air Force press release.”

“The possibility of any nuclear explosion occurring as a result of an accident involving either impact or fire is virtually nonexistent,” Secretary of Defense Wilson assured the public”.  His press release reported “that someone standing on the ground directly beneath the high-altitude detonation of a Genie would be exposed to less radiation than “a hundredth of a dose received in a standard (medical) X-ray.”

-Ibid

However, it should be noted that “His press release about the Genie didn’t mention the risk of plutonium contamination”, not from an airburst anti-bomber detonation, but from an accidental surface burst.

“The risks of plutonium exposure were becoming more apparent in the mid-1950s. Although the alpha particles emitted by plutonium are too weak to penetrate human skin, they can destroy lung tissue when plutonium dust is inhaled. Anyone within a few hundred feet of a weapon accident spreading plutonium can inhale a swiftly lethal dose. Cancers of the lung, liver, lymph nodes, and bone can be caused by the inhalation of minute amounts. And the fallout from such an accident may contaminate a large area for a long time. Plutonium has a half-life of about twenty-four thousand years. It remains hazardous throughout that period, and plutonium dust is hard to clean up. “The problem of decontaminating the site of [an] accident may be insurmountable,” a classified Los Alamos report noted a month after the Genie’s onepoint safety test, “and it may have to be ‘written off’ permanently.” “.

Understandably, this would drive the civilian members in charge of safety quite quickly to protest, with the very thought of having to inform the public that a section, or perhaps all of a major US city would be uninhabitable for an extremely extended period being almost unthinkable.

There was heavy debate actually among those in the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), as to whether use a plutonium, or uranium-235 base for the fission products in the genie devices. 

“In one respect, uranium-235 seemed to be safer. It has a half-life of about seven hundred million years—but emits radiation at a much lower rate than plutonium, greatly reducing the inhalation hazard. And yet a Genie with a uranium core had its own risks. Norris Bradbury, the director of Los Alamos, warned the AEC that such a core was “probably not safe against one-point detonation.” In effect, shrapnel, or a stray bullet, or what have you from an aircraft crash, or sabotage, or whatever incident may well cause the device to, quite frankly, initiate. Heck, even a fire could cause it. 

In short, using uranium as the base fission product, the Genies would fail the one-point safety test, and could be set off very easily. Using Uranium as the base fission product, “Impact tests revealed that when the Genie was armed, it didn’t need a firing signal to detonate. The Genie could produce a nuclear explosion just by hitting the ground”.

Ibid-Pg 107 Understandably, “given the choice between an accident that might cause a nuclear explosion and one that might send a cloud of plutonium over an American city, the Air Force preferred the latter. Handmade, emergency capability Genies were rushed into production, with cores that contained plutonium”.

Ibid.-Pg 105

Even with the one-point safety test proven, there was still the potential for complications. “The one-point safety tests at Nevada Test Site had provided encouraging results, and yet the behavior of a nuclear weapon in an “abnormal environment”—like that of a fuel fire ignited by a plane crash—was still poorly understood. During a fire, the high explosives of a weapon might burn; they might detonate; or they might burn and then detonate. And different weapons might respond differently to the same fire, based on the type, weight, and configuration of their high explosives. For firefighting purposes, each weapon was assigned a “time factor”—the amount of time you had, once a weapon was engulfed in flames, either to put out the fire or to get at least a thousand feet away from it. The time factor for the Genie was three minutes”.

Ibid.- Pg 109

Heck, there was concern that the fire may even start the standard detonation process.

“The heat of a fire might start the thermal batteries, release high-voltage electricity into the X-unit, and then set off the bomb. To eliminate that risk, heat-sensitive fuses were added to every sealed-pit weapon. At a temperature of 300 degrees Fahrenheit, the fuses would blow, melting the connections between the batteries and the arming system. It was a straightforward, time-honored way to interrupt an electrical circuit, and it promised to ensure that a high temperature wouldn’t trigger the detonators”.

Ibid. In 1977, a study was completed that reported that “despite being the oldest sealed-pit weapon in the stockpile, vulnerable to lightning, and fitted with an outdated accelerometer, the Genie was still being loaded onto fighter planes”.

Ibid. Pg. 223

In the end, over 3000 Genie’s were produced, being used by both the USAF from 1957 to 1985, and the R.C.A.F. from 1965 to 1984.

Here, have this for your troubles.

Sources-

Wiki, for basic info-

Schlosser, Eric.  Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety.  New York: The Penguin Press, 2013.