On May 21, 1956, the United States exploded its first airborne hydrogen bomb above the Bikini Atoll, a chain of Pacific islands north of the equator.
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A bipartisan coalition in Congress, at my urging, recently defeated legislation that would authorize up to $21,000,000 of taxpayers' money to build a series of parks in honor of the Manhattan Project, the project that resulted in the development of the atomic bomb.
There appears little doubt that unless President Obama is as good as his word, Iran will have nuclear weapons within the next four years. Israel will face an existential threat. And the world will be a far more dangerous place.
The historical significance of the Manhattan Project is beyond question, and that is the essence of why Congress should authorize a national historical park to commemorate and interpret the project.
In his debut book Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb, author and illustrator Jonathan Fetter-Vorm tackles the immense history of the Manhattan Project, the top-secret government effort to build an atomic bomb.
The suppression of the U.S. Army film was part of a broad effort to suppress a wide range of material related to the atomic bombings, including photographs, reports on radiation effects, information about the decision to drop the bomb, even a Hollywood movie.
It cannot credibly be denied that much good has come from scientific exploration. But in achieving such results, scientific discovery has also unearthed numerous problems, some with serious moral implications.
No matter how many new reports there will be on this anniversary, the facts remain the same. Nuclear power is far dirtier and far deadlier than anything man has ever created.
Republican presidential candidates' extreme comments about economics and culture have dominated headlines, but lurking in the shadows is a hawkish Cold War mentality. Gingrich, Romney and Santorum want to beef up the military and put nuclear weapons back on the table.
For Wal-Mart to match the market share it has across America, it would have to open 159 stores in NYC -- and nearly 14,000 jobs would be lost at other merchants. This would be the retail equivalent of an atomic bomb dropped on the retail economy in Gotham.
One of the great mysteries of the nuclear age was solved just six years ago: What was in the censored, and then lost to the ages, newspaper articles filed by the first reporter to reach Nagasaki following the atomic attack on that city on August 9, 1945.
To welcome its first pro team, Hiroshima erected the stadium in the early 1950s. The mayor hoped baseball would "revitalize the spirit of Hiroshima," and make citizens forget what had happened. Yet he built the stadium 300 yards from the epicenter of the atomic explosion.
"I felt so dishonored that I had to experience the atomic bomb twice. It's nothing to be boastful about. I could not talk to anyone about it because almost no one else met the bomb twice. So there was no one who could sympathize with me."
Two cheers for Obama for at least marking what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Next step: an honest American reappraisal and real progress on nuclear abolition.
No one in America ever wrote a bestselling book called Nagasaki, or made a film titled Nagasaki, Mon Amour. "We are an asterisk," Shinji Takahashi, a sociologist in Nagasaki, once told me, with a bitter smile.
It was announced today that the United States of America, also known as the U.S., U.S.A. and the U.S. of A., died during the last week of August 2011 ...
Over and over, top policymakers and commentators say, "We must never use nuclear weapons," yet they endorse the two times the weapons have been used against cities in a first strike. To make any exceptions means exceptions can be made in the future.