Free Republic

Hollywood really does seem to be running out of new ideas. British big-budget director Christopher Nolan had his successes a few years ago with yet another round of Batman movies, but his expensive, visually lavish, films have otherwise not drawn large audiences. His new release, about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who helped build the first atomic bombs, seems very much just another thin remake of a story long told. It is based on a 17-year-old book, American Prometheus, that was itself started way back in 1980. The late Cold War era featured miniseries, movies, documentaries, and plays all about...

Universal Studios released the second full trailer for Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” Monday, making this the must-see movie of the summer. Cillian Murphy is in the starring role alongside Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer. The movie also stars Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Jack Quaid, Rami Malek and many more. The plot line is riveting, and this epic trailer brings audiences on a gripping ride, thrusting them into pulse-pounding scenes showcasing a man who must risk destroying the entire world in a wild and dangerous attempt to save it. Oppenheimer” tells the tale of American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer...

In a 1945 summary, a U.S. Army Air Forces unit on Okinawa described August as “an eventful month in world history.” That understatement holds up 77 years later. Events had accelerated in the spring and summer of 1945. Germany surrendered on May 8 but Russia already was shipping massive amounts of men and materiel eastward. Moscow and Tokyo had a non-aggression treaty that Soviet premier Joseph Stalin cancelled on August 9. That night a massive Russian assault into Japanese-held Manchuria opened the Far East end game, briefly overlapping impending Japan’s surrender to the Allies. American forces began deploying from Europe...

A cancer survivor is vowing to untangle the twisted mystery of why almost 100 people associated with a New Jersey high school have developed “extremely” rare malignant brain tumors. Al Lupiano is among the 94 former staff and students from Colonia High School in the Woodbridge Township School District who have been stricken by the devastating diagnoses in recent years. “I will not rest until I have answers,” Lupiano, 50, declared in an interview with NJ.com and the Star Ledger on Thursday. “I will uncover the truth.” [snip] Lupiano told NJ Spotlight News that the school is located less than...

A cancer survivor is vowing to untangle the twisted mystery of why almost 100 people associated with a New Jersey high school have developed “extremely” rare malignant brain tumors. Al Lupiano is among the 94 former staff and students from Colonia High School in the Woodbridge Township School District who have been stricken by the devastating diagnoses in recent years. “I will not rest until I have answers,” Lupiano, 50, declared in an interview with NJ.com and the Star Ledger on Thursday. “I will uncover the truth.”

WASHINGTON - A group of top American scientists backed by billionaires and industry titans says it has the answer to the coronavirus pandemic, and has delivered a report to the White House through backdoor channels. The scientists compiled a confidential 17-page report that suggests a number of unorthodox measures to combat the coronavirus, including the use of powerful drugs that were intended to be used against Ebola in far heftier doses than tried in the past, reported The Wall Street Journal. Specific recommendations made by the group, such as slashing manufacturing regulations and requirements for specific coronavirus drugs, have already...

Danish physicist Niels Bohr was a scientific genius who also displayed a coincidental penchant for espionage and intrigue. He employed these skills, along with a bit of science, to foil the Nazi at several turns. His small crusade began in 1933 after the Nazis came to power in Germany. Over the next few years several scientists fled Germany with Bohr’s help. Many escapees went on to work on the Manhattan Project, including Edward Teller, James Franck and Otto Frisch. Some of them stayed with Bohr in Denmark, working at the Bohr Institute until moving elsewhere.

Seventy-two years after two torpedoes fired from a Japanese submarine sunk cruiser USS Indianapolis (CA-35), the ship’s wreckage was found resting on the seafloor on Saturday – more than 18,000 feet below the Pacific Ocean’s surface.

It was on this date in 1945 that, for good or ill, the "nuclear age" began, with the explosion of the first experimental atomic bomb, code-named Trinity, in the western desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Trinity, with a yield equivalent to 20 kilotons of TNT, was the first spherical implosion bomb, developed at Los Alamos under the auspices of the Manhattan Project during World War II. The weapon designers were so confident of the success of the simpler gun-barrel configuration that the device of that type dropped on Hiroshima only three weeks later had never been tested. The subsequent Nagasaki...

5:30 A.M., Monday July 16th, 1945: The day dawned brighter than ever before over the New Mexico desert. But it was not the Sun's soothing rays that set the landscape alight; it was the radiant flash of the very first atomic bomb. Trinity, the nuclear offspring of the Manhattan Project, detonated with the force of 21,000 tons of TNT. The accompanying fireball reached temperatures of 8,430 degrees Kelvin, hotter than the surface of the sun, and sent a mushroom cloud of smoke and debris soaring more than seven miles into the sky. That day, every human on the planet was...

Leaders in a St. Louis suburb are urgently calling on top Obama administration officials to quickly clean up a landfill with radioactive waste that they believe could catch fire. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been working for 25 years on the West Lake Landfill in Bridgeton, Mo., which has housed barium sulfate waste from the Manhattan Project since the 1970s. The EPA is still studying the site and considering a wide range of actions to contain the radioactive material under its Superfund program for cleaning severe environmental contamination. But with an underground, smoldering fire in an adjacent landfill, residents...

On July 16, 1945, the United States Army detonated the world’s first nuclear weapon in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto desert. The test, code-named “Trinity,” was a success, unleashing an explosion with the energy of about 20 kilotons of TNT and beginning the nuclear age. Since then, nearly 2,000 nuclear tests have been performed. Most of these took place during the 1960s and 1970s. When the technology was new, tests were frequent and often spectacular, and they led to the development of newer, more deadly weapons. Since the 1990s, there have been efforts to limit the testing of nuclear weapons,...

Benjamin Bederson turned past the page in the diary from long ago, the page he had burned a hole through, and mentioned things he had done since that summer of 1945. “Was an experimental atomic physicist,” he said. “Worked as a professor at New York University, taught almost every course in physics, was editor in chief of the American Physical Society and helped usher physics journals into the electronic age.” He left out the part about helping to usher in the atomic age — the part about testing the ignition switches for the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki...

Obama bundler Jodie Evans, far left, protests in Yemen with al Qaeda tied group al Karama, June 17, 2013. Photo via al Karama. Obama bundler Jodie Evans and Code Pink, the leftist group she co-leads, have been found to be working with a group whose leaders have recently been declared terrorists and al Qaeda supporters by the Treasury Department. This is not the first time the Democratic Party allied group has been caught in bed with terrorists. As this writer has reported over the years, Code Pink works with terrorists, state sponsors of terrorists, the Democratic Party and President Barack...

“A confidential message from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, reproduced in [Diana] West’s new book, told [White House aide Harry] Hopkins that a ‘continuing’ investigation had discovered that Russian diplomat (and Comintern agent) Vasily Zarubin had made a payment to U.S. Communist Party official Steve Nelson to help place espionage agents ‘in industries engaged in secret war production … so that information could be obtained for transmittal to the Soviet Union.’ This information had come from a ‘bug’ at Nelson’s home in Oakland, California, through which the FBI first learned of the Soviet effort (code-named ‘Enormous’) to obtain the atomic...

A book called "American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character" (St. Martin's Press) shouldn't promise uplift and spiritual renewal. I know. I wrote it. That said, the story of "betrayal" that my new book lays out -- betrayal enabled by a de facto Communist occupation of Washington by American traitors loyal to Stalin, which would solidify in the 1930s under FDR and be covered up by successive U.S. administrations and elites -- is not without inspiration. I am talking about the inspiration of the truth-tellers. "American Betrayal" presents a rewrite of most of World War II and Cold...

<p>A plan now before Congress would create a national park spread over three states to protect the aging remnants of the atomic bomb project from World War II, including an isolated cabin where grim findings threw the secretive effort into a panic.</p>

This is a telephone conversation transcript between Colonel Seaman of the Manhattan Project and General Hull of Marshall's staff that took place on 13 August 1945. The subject is atomic bomb deployment and production timeline.

A Los Alamos Story Worthy of Stephen King Ever heard of The Demon Core? It was named by Los Alamos scientists — who are generally not a superstitious lot — after it claimed multiple lives, in a series of strange and horrible accidents. Discover a legend of science... that's worthy of a horror movie. When I was reading Stephen King stories, I was constantly amazed at the things he made scary. It was like reading the legend of the monkey's paw over and over again, with increasingly weird objects. His most famous evil objects are the hotel in The Shining...

Twenty-eight years after the prophet's death, a secret complex code-named Y-12 was built in Bear Creek, and a secret city sprang up — seemingly almost overnight — in the next valley over in the shadow of Black Oak Ridge. Not shown on any maps at the time, Oak Ridge — first called Clinton Engineering Works after the nearby town of Clinton — was born in 1942 during World War II. It was the key facility in the huge effort called the Manhattan Project to build the world's first atomic bomb.