The Philosopher's Bomb, Part 3

Those Magnificent Men and their Atomic Machines

The Philosopher's Bomb: The AEC Effort to Create New Elements with Nuclear Explosions

Part III

Back to Part I, Part II

With Special Thanks to Dr. Stephen A. Becker and Dr. David W. Dorn

DURYEA through VULCAN

The AEC fired four more heavy element tests in the spring of 1966: DURYEA (April 14 1966, 70 kT, LRLL), CYCLAMEN (May 5 1966, 12 kT, LASL), KANKAKEE (June 15 1966, 20 to 200 kT, LRLL), and VULCAN (June 25 1966, 25 kT, LRLL).^[GURC][Be2] DURYEA was a failure, but I haven't been able to find out anything else about it. The other shots left more concrete records.

Partial List of US Scientific Nuclear Tests

I'm posting this as a separate post, prior to posting Part 3 of The Philosopher's Bomb, because there's a very common misconception about how many nuclear shots the Plowshare program fired off.   Most lists of Plowshare tests do not include most of these tests, because they were officially sponsored by the AEC's Division of Military Applications as military tests, and the incorporated experiment was only an add-on.   Nonetheless, if we ignore them - which almost all histories of the Plowshare program do - we're missing an important part of the story.

War in the Atomic Age?

So, last week I snagged a rather entertaining little item through interlibrary loan.

 Figure 1: War in the Atomic Age? Cover

(Public Domain)

A Friendly Shout-Out to the Neighbors

I don't often make posts that are just links to something else.   That's very deliberate, both because I want to maintain a high quality:quantity ratio, and because I think relatively few sites are really working in the same specific niche I'm trying to work in.   I'm going to make an exception today: check out Atomic Annihilation, "the internet's most complete guide to the end of the world".   I particularly recommend 1952...destruction and 1946...wacky!