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To demonstrate, or not to demonstrate?
As the atomic bomb was becoming a technological reality, there were many scientists on the Manhattan Project who found themselves wondering about both the ethics and politics of a surprise, unwarned...
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History in the flesh
My main mode of interacting with history is through documents. Memos, reports, letters, telegrams, transcriptions, diagrams — the written word. The sociologist of science Bruno Latour calls these kinds...
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Were there alternatives to the atomic bombings?
As we rapidly approach the 70th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there have been all sorts of articles, tributes, memorials, and so forth expressed both in print and online. I’ve...
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“Nagasaki: The Last Bomb”
This is just a quick place-holding note (a longer post on this will follow next week): I have an article up on the New Yorker’s Elements blog about the bombing of Nagasaki, which took place 70 years...
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Hiroshima and Nagasaki at 70
This month marked the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the cessation of hostilities in World War II. Anniversaries are interesting times to test the cultural...
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Did Lawrence doubt the bomb?
Ernest O. Lawrence was one of the giants of 20th-century physics. The inventor of the “cyclotron,” a circular particle accelerator, Lawrence ushered in an era of big machines, big physics, big budgets...
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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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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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What journalists should know about the atomic bombings
As we approach the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even with everything else going on this year, we’re certainly going to see an up-tick in atomic bomb-related...
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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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