Free Republic

In 1958, America accidentally dropped a nuclear weapon on two little girls’ playhouse For certain rural residents of the Carolinas during the Cold War, apocalyptic anxiety hit disturbingly close to home. In 1958 and 1961, the American Air Force lost nuclear weapons over the skies of South and North Carolina, respectively, raining potential apocalypse on the folks below. In both incidents, complete catastrophe was avoided thanks to that ever-potent combination of foresight and unmitigated dumb luck. And in the former incident, the bomb fell square on some unsuspecting children's playhouse. The first accident occurred over Florence, South Carolina on March...

Johnston designed the first atomic bomb detonator and is believed to be the only eyewitness to all three 1945 atomic explosions - at White Sands, N.M., and in Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, events that killed some 200,000 people and ended World War II. Johnston was assigned to measure the impact of the bombs. Johnston had just completed his bachelor's degree and begun graduate work at University of California, Berkeley in 1940, when he agreed to follow his mentor, Nobel-prize-winning Luis Alvarez, to Boston to help develop microwave radar at MIT's Radiation Laboratory. By 1943, Johnston had helped develop a...

A WAR hero's medals have revealed the untold story of a Scottish soldier who survived three years of suffering building the notorious Burma Railway. Kenneth McLeod, who has died aged 92, was captured by the Japanese in the Second World War and was one of the last surviving veterans who worked on the bridge over the River Kwai. Now his daughter and son are donating his war medals, Glengarry bonnet and sporran to the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders museum at Stirling Castle, where he was based more than 70 years ago. Mr McLeod, of Bridge of Weir, Renfrewshire, was...

Actual Test Was Success Japan developed and successfully tested an atomic bomb three days prior to the end of the war. She destroyed unfinished atomic bombs, secret papers and her atomic bomb plans only hours before the advance units of the Russian Army moved into Konan, Korea, site of the project. Japanese scientists who developed the bomb are now in Moscow, prisoners of the Russians. They were tortured by their captors seeking atomic "know-how." The Konan area is under rigid Russian control. They permit no American to visit the area. Once, even after the war, an American B-29 Superfortress en...

This week marks 65 years since the United States dropped the atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945, President Harry Truman delivered a “rain of ruin” upon Hiroshima, Japan, with Nagasaki hit three days later, killing 100,000 to 200,000. Truman’s objective was to compel surrender from an intransigent enemy that refused to halt its naked aggression. The barbarous mentality of 1940s Japan was beyond belief. An entire nation lost its mind, consumed by a ferocious militarism and hell-bent on suicide. Facing such fanaticism, Truman felt no alternative but to use the bomb. As George C. Marshall put it, the Allies needed...

Iran has been able to smuggle advanced technological equipment to its uranium enrichment plant in Natanz via a complex smuggling route based in Dubai, the Sunday Telegraph reported on Sunday. According to the report, an Iranian company has purchased control systems from one of Germany's leading electronic manufacturers. The deal was negotiated with a Dubai trading company, which in turn sold Iran a range of electronic equipment for use at its enrichment facility, the British website reported. The report comes amid growing concerns that though Iran claims its nuclear program has only peaceful aims, Tehran is in fact working toward...

Theodore Van Kirk is sitting at his desk in a detached bungalow in the gated community outside Atlanta, Georgia, where he lives. The room is cluttered with boxes, trinkets, shelves full of books on wartime history and photographs of planes on the walls...

Time is definitely beginning to slip away. According to a new report from Israeli military intelligence, Iran has sped up its nuclear development and may have enough nuclear fuel to produce a bomb by the end of this year. Iran already has a delivery system The Seji-2 missile, a two-stage missile, with a 2,000-kilometer range missile which is powered by solid fuel: President Obama has said that he wants to give his "out reach" to the Iranian despot at least until the end of the year. It looks as if Ahmadinejad is racing ahead to make that deadline moot:

January 26, 2009 Why we are helpless dealing with enemies on our own soil From the Cold War to the current Islamofascist threat--do we ever learn? By Wes Vernon "With a stroke of the pen, he [President Obama] effectively declared an end to the 'war on terror,' as President George W. Bush had defined it." So reads a front-page story in Friday's Washington Post. Stop right there. That is a snapshot of the wishful rose-colored-glasses mentality that opinion leaders in academia, media, big-money foundations, entertainment, etc., have foisted on Americans (with varying degrees of success) for decades. It lasted throughout...

The appearance of nuclear weapons materials on the black market is a growing global concern, and it is crucial that the United States reinforce its team of nuclear forensics experts and modernize its forensics tools to prepare for or respond to a possible nuclear terrorist attack. Large quantities of nuclear materials are inadequately secured in several countries, including Russia and Pakistan. Since 1993, there have been more than 1,300 incidents of illicit trafficking of nuclear materials, including plutonium and highly enriched uranium, both of which can be used to develop an atomic bomb. And these are only the incidents we...

HIROSHIMA, Japan (Reuters) - Japan marked the 62nd anniversary of Hiroshima's atomic bombing with a solemn ceremony on Monday as the city's mayor criticized the United States for refusing to give up its nuclear weapons program. Tens of thousands of elderly survivors, children and dignitaries gathered at the Peace Memorial Park, near ground zero where the bomb was dropped, to remember the more than 250,000 people who ultimately died from the blast. "Even to those who managed to survive, it was hell where they envied the dead," Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba told the crowd, describing scenes from the bombing such...

1945 : United States conducts first test of the atomic bomb The United States conducts the first test of the atomic bomb at its research facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The terrifying new weapon would quickly become a focal point in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. The official U.S. development of the atomic bomb began with the establishment of the Manhattan Project in August 1942. The project brought together scientists from the United States, Great Britain, and Canada to study the feasibility of building an atomic bomb capable of unimaginable destructive power. The...

June 19, 1953 : Julius and Ethel Rosenberg executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a married couple convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in 1951, are put to death in the electric chair. The execution marked the dramatic finale of the most controversial espionage case of the Cold War. Julius was arrested in July 1950, and Ethel in August of that same year, on the charge of conspiracy to commit espionage. Specifically, they were accused of heading a spy ring that passed top-secret information concerning the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. The Rosenbergs vigorously protested their innocence, but after a...

Lost in all the coverage of the Virginia Tech tragedy were the sobering words of Vice President Dick Cheney about a calamity facing America that will dwarf anything it has ever experienced as a nation. Characterizing it as "the greatest threat we face," Cheney once again raised the ugly specter of nuclear terrorism against the U.S. "It's a very real threat," he said, "something that we have to worry about and defeat every single day." Tying the warning to politicking over Iraq war policy, he said a precipitous withdrawal from that country by U.S. military forces would invite and encourage...

WASHINGTON – A joint task force involving the military, Department of Homeland Security and police is set to begin a sophisticated and realistic drill today on how to respond to a terrorist nuclear bomb detonated on U.S. soil. Dubbed "Nobel Resolve '07," the series of tests are a follow-up to a similar operation last year called "Urban Resolve" and will run through Friday. The U.S. Joint Forces Command, which recently modeled every building in Baghdad in virtual space, is using that same technology in the Tidewater area of southern Virginia for this modeling and simulation project. Joining the command in...

TOKYO: Japan said Tuesday it has the legal right to develop nuclear weapons despite its pacifist constitution but has no intention even to consider the long-taboo idea. Prominent lawmakers have called on Japan, the only nation to suffer nuclear attack, to debate the nuclear option after communist neighbor North Korea on October 9 said it had tested its first atom bomb.

1. Khamenei: Iran Will Have Bomb in April April 8, 2006 could turn out to be an ominous date in history - that's the day Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei says that Iran will have a nuclear weapon. Late last year Khamenei gathered his top advisers for a strategy meeting and told them "it has been promised that by April 8, we will be in a position to show the entire world that we are members of the club." This presumably refers to nuclear weapons, according to National Review Online Contributing Editor Michael Ledeen, who offered an inside look at...

Those of us who enjoy military history usually just switch on the History Channel for our daily fix of guts, gore and armed conflict. But if you’re a serious war buff, and you want to relive one of the most horrifying moments in the deadliest war in human history, an Italian toy maker has just the thing. Brumm recently unveiled miniature models of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man.” Those names may conjure up images of cuddly cartoon characters, but they’re actually the codenames for two atomic bombs that the U.S. military dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the final days...

Scientist: Brazil Nearly Built Atom Bomb By MICHAEL ASTOR, Associated Press Writer Brazil's military continued work on an atomic bomb after it was ordered to scrap the program in 1985 and by 1990 had nearly finished building one, a leading nuclear scientist said. Jose Luiz Santana, the former president of Brazil's nuclear energy commission, known by its Portuguese acronym CNEN, said the military was preparing a test explosion when the program was ultimately dismantled in August 1990. Earlier this month, former President Jose Sarney, who led Brazil's first civilian government after a 1964-85 military dictatorship, told Globo TV that he...

A friend of Horsefeathers sent us the following statement Harry Truman made (Memoirs, pg.422) after the Atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. We've since had 60 years of peace with Japan and are now at war with a more dangerous foe. "We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake: we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war.It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July...

A terrorist attack using nuclear weapons is an imminent and immediate threat to the United States, said Harvard University professor Graham Allison during his lecture Monday in the School of Management. Terrorists setting off a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb in Boston's Statehouse would vaporize everything within one-third of a mile, he said. The lecture, part of the College of Communication's Distinguished Lecture Series, attracted hundreds of Boston University students as Allison addressed his new book, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe. COM Journalism Chair Robert Zelnick said he hoped the lecture would create public awareness and help students keep up with...

Washington, DC, Nov. 19 (UPI) -- U.S. intelligence officials are evaluating worrisome new information about an Iranian missile purportedly capable of carrying an atomic bomb.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Sunday he had no reason to suspect President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan of past involvement in an international nuclear black market but declined to rule out other possible high-level military complicity. "I do not believe that there's any evidence or any suggestion that President Musharraf was involved," Rumsfeld said in an interview on the ABC program "This Week." Abdul Qader Khan, the so-called father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, admitted in February to having given nuclear weapons know-how and equipment to Iran, Libya and North Korea (news - web sites), saying he...

<p>CHANTILLY, Va. -- There it was, that gleaming silver Boeing B-29 Superfortress: huge, plump, and more evocative now, as a retired bomber on clunky yellow stands, than on the morning of its major mission, before it changed the world.Fully assembled for the first time in 40 years, the Enola Gay is a chilling centerpiece in the National Air and Space Museum's new companion facility, opening tomorrow at Dulles International Airport.</p>

McCarthyism - The Right's Badge Of Honor By William A. Mayer On Monday May 5, 2003 over 4,200 pages of previously classified testimony, made before the 1953-1954 Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations, became available to the public. These hearings [although some of the thunder had already been stolen during the 1948 - 1949 Nixon chaired HUAC sessions] delved further into the charges that the Soviet Union had placed intelligence agents - spies - throughout the Democrat administrations of both FDR and Harry Truman. The Committee’s lighting rod chairman at the time was the Republican Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph P....

Saddam Hussein had us completely fooled, once. Prior to Desert Storm in 1991, we had monitored and embargoed his importation of high tech centrifuge and laser equipment that could be used to make highly-enriched uranium (HEU) material that — once you have it — makes building an atomic bomb easy. Rest of story...

<p>Washington -- More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has intensified its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said Saturday.</p>

Cannabis poses a greater threat to health than tobacco, lung experts have warned. The warning comes on the day that Home Secretary David Blunkett is due to make a Commons statement about the future of government drug policy. Many young people are simply not aware that smoking cannabis may put them at increased risk of respiratory cancers and infections . Dame Helena Shovelton: The Home Affairs Select Committee has recommended that cannabis is downgraded from a class B drug to class C. This would mean that possession would lead to a caution, rather than arrest. The British Lung Foundation is...