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J. Edgar Hoover on Fuchs and Lilienthal (1950)
Last weekend I saw Clint Eastwood’s new film about the FBI’s first director, “J. Edgar.” I can’t say that I thought it was a great film. Aside from the question of its historical accuracy (which...
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Excerpts from the Klaus Fuchs File (1951)
Recently — sometime in the last year — the FBI revamped its online FOIA Reading Room and replaced it with a new website called the FBI Vault. Somehow I missed this until just this week. The Vault...
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The Ivy MIKE leak (1952)
On November 1, 1952, the United States detonated the world’s first hydrogen bomb.1 Shot MIKE of Operation Ivy was the culmination of nearly a decade of work on developing thermonuclear weapons, and it...
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Mysteries of the Soviet Biological Weapons Program
This is a nuclear-themed blog, but as you probably could guess, I’m pretty equal-opportunity when it comes to being interested in weapons of mass destruction. (Heck, I find conventional weapons pretty...
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Plutonium Lives and Half-lives
Plutonium is a fascinating element. It’s named after the Roman God of Death (by way of being named after a former planet). Its atomic abbreviation, “Pu,” was chosen to sound like “Peee-yooou,” as in,...
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Death of a patent clerk
This post is a bit longer than most, but the story is a bit more involved than most. It’s got a little bit of everything — if by “everything” one means atomic patents and mysterious deaths. Manhattan...
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What did the Nazis know about the Manhattan Project?
The primary motivation of much Manhattan Project secrecy was to keep the Germans from finding out that the United States and United Kingdom were feverishly working on developing nuclear weapons. So it...
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Who smeared Richard Feynman?
One of the many physicists who came under official FBI scrutiny during the Cold War was Richard Feynman.1 Feynman’s work on the bomb at Los Alamos, combined with his fame, penchant for telling stories...
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Why spy?
It’s impossible to talk about the work at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project without mentioning the spies. And yet, for the first five years of the atomic age, nobody would have mentioned them,...
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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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