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Archives Week: Day 3, Edward Teller on the Early History of the “Super”
Studying the past is important. Don’t believe me? Well, check this guy out: Study the Past. Or else this guy’s going to be very disapproving. This guy sits outside the researcher entrance to the...
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Archives Week, Day 4: Conspiring for Livermore (1952)
Just a quick document for you today from the Legislative Archives: John Walker and Bill Borden, staff members on the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, conspiring about creating a “second laboratory”:...
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Archives Week, Day 5: The Lost JCAE Hearings
On my post for Day 1 of this week’s archival trip, I noted that the Lexis Nexis database of Executive hearings of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE) was empty after 1962. I wondered if that...
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Archives Week, Addendum: More Notes on Technique
My post on Day 2 of Archives Week got a few people asking me if I could elaborate on my post-processing methods for all those photos I take — the conversion from JPEG to PDF that I hinted at. I’ve...
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Bullseye on Washington (1953)
Today’s image of the week comes from the files of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE). In February 1953, the JCAE got their first briefing from the Atomic Energy Commission about the success of...
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More from the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy
A few weeks ago, I spent some time at the Legislative Archives in downtown Washington, DC, looking at the files of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE). It was my first time over there since I...
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Cold War Sex, Cold War Secrecy
This weekend I read a fascinating article in the New York Times about the unusual death of an MI6 agent. The agent in question was found dead in his apartment, badly decomposed and locked in a duffel...
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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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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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The leak that brought the H-bomb debate out of the cold
In September 1949, the United States unambiguously detected radioactive residues which indicated that the Soviet Union had, some weeks before, detonated their first atomic bomb. President Truman was...
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