Introduction The uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, is frequently described as the “simple” atomic bomb. Nearly every history of the Manhattan Project explains that Little Boy used a gun-type design in which one subcritical mass of uranium-235 was fired into another to produce a supercritical assembly. Because this basic principle appears…
Introduction On July 1, 1946, less than a year after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a B-29 bomber named Dave’s Dream approached Bikini Atoll carrying a plutonium implosion bomb nearly identical to the weapon that had destroyed Nagasaki. Unlike its wartime predecessor, however, this bomb carried a different identity. Painted on its casing…
Leaving Iran I was born in Tehran in 1982, in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. My mother, Zohreh, and my father, Abbas, as well as one (perhaps two?) of my mother’s brothers, in addition to two of my father’s brothers, were all members of a group called Mujahedin-e Khalq-e Iran (MEK), or…
