Enter Mindanao – the second-largest island in the Philippines, the heart of an archipelago stretching south toward Borneo and the site of one of the longest religiously framed conflicts in modern history. Not always violent, but never at peace, Mindanao is roughly the size of Greece. It is home to 26.5 million people, representing 24…
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…
