Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
I'm utterly fascinated by nuclear weapons, my brain just can't seem to process the magnitude of their destructive power.
Same here.
What's incredible is that the jump in destructive power between the early weapons of the '40s and the H-bombs of the '50s was of a similar magnitude to the jump from common-or-garden high explosives to Little Boy and Fat Man. The Soviets tested a bomb in 1961 that had about three thousand times the yield of the Hiroshima weapon.
The history of their development is full of weird shit, too - you had people like John von Neumann (one of the last century's greatest scientists and mathematicians, said by some to leave Einstein in the dust for sheer brain power) advocated a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the USSR in the late '40s before they developed their own bomb...Edward Teller led a campaign during the Manhattan Project to skip fission devices altogether and go straight to a fusion bomb, and later testified against the Project's leader Oppenheimer during the latter's security clearance hearing. Seems he was also instrumental in kick-starting Israel's nuclear programme. Crazy times.
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