Dr Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious ... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
Russian Ambassador: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor. ibid.
Peace Is Our Profession. ibid. motto of 843th Bomb Wing Strategic Command
Some people have suggested along a number of lines of evidence that there may have been atomic warfare, atomic bombs, atomic explosions in the very distant past. Dr Robert M Schoch
The news today about ‘Atomic bombs’ is so horrifying one is stunned. The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world! Such explosives in men’s hands, while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out firearms to all inmates of a gaol and then saying that you hope ‘this will ensure peace’. But one good thing may arise out of it, I suppose, if the write-ups are not overheated: Japan ought to cave in. Well we’re in God’s hands. But He does not look kindly on Babel-builders. J R R Tolkien 1945
In reality there are atoms and space. Democritus
When Rutherford was done with the atom all the solidity was pretty well knocked out of it. Stephen Leacock, The Boy I Left Behind Me, 1947
Suppose I cut a piece out of this apple pie ... Suppose we cut this piece in half ... and keep going. How many cuts before we get down to an individual atom? The answer is, about ninety successive cuts. Professor Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Cosmos: The Lives of the Stars, 1979
Deep inside the atom, hidden far beneath the outer electron cloud, is the nucleus comprised chiefly of protons and neutrons. The atom is very small. ibid.
The total number of atoms in that apple pie is only about 10 to the 26th. ibid.
Three units put together in different patterns make essentially everything. A neutron is electrically neutral as its name suggests. A proton has a positive electrical charge. And an electron an equal negative electrical charge. Since every atom is electrically neutral, the number of protons in the nucleus must equal the number electrons far away in the electronic cloud. ibid.
Why does the nucleus hold together? ... Because there is another force in Nature – not electricity, not gravity – the nuclear force. ibid.
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. Carl Sagan, Cosmos
When one studies the properties of atoms, one found that the reality is far stranger than anybody would have invented in the form of fiction. Atoms really do have the possibility of in some sense being in more than one place at one time. Professor Alan Guth, MIT
There are said to be a billion atoms in the full stop of a sentence. But even atoms themselves are made up of even smaller particles. Extreme Universe: Super-Sized
The Grove’s own internal annals brag that the Manhattan Project for the plan to create the A-bomb was hatched inside this building known as the Chalet. The Strategic Defence Initiative, better known as Star Wars, and also the brain-child of Grove members, and was born inside the Chalet. Chris Everard, Illuminati vol II
When it came to create the modern equivalent of the Philosopher’s Stone, to master alchemy at its highest level, changing one element into another, changing uranium into plutonium, one of the highest secrets of alchemy, where did the SI Uranium Committee of the Manhattan Project meet? Well, they of course consummated their alchemical knowledge in the Bohemian Grove. Amongst ancient trees grown men listened to the manic laughter of Satan, wearing owl masks and black robes. It was here at Bohemian Grove that the consummation of thousands of years of alchemical atomic research took place – nothing less than the birth of the bomb. ibid.
American author Michael Hoffman in his book Secret Societies & Psychological Warfare speculates that the golem foetus may have been placed inside a giant twenty-five-foot long, twelve-foot in diameter canister which was photographed at the Los Alamos atomic bomb test range. This mysterious canister was nicknamed Jumbo. It was made of solid lead and cement. It is conceivable that the foetus was placed in the centre of the canister, and then irradiated with the blast of the world’s first atomic bomb, thus infusing the demon child with what Kabbalists call the demonic force of the atomic fire. ibid.
Robert Oppenheimer and his Jewish scientists, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, named the first atomic bomb Trinity. ibid.
Robert Oppenheimer’s team calculated the forces which would be unleashed from splitting a single atom. They became concerned that a global chain reaction would take place igniting all the hydrogen and gasses in the Earth’s atmosphere and thus incinerating the entire planet. Chris Everard, Spirit World II
In 1945 in the aftermath of War scientists were heroes, particularly the physicists who had built the atomic bomb. ‘They are men,’ said Life magazine, ‘who wear the tunics of supermen and stand in spotlight of a thousand suns’. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box VI: A is for Atom, BBC 1992
In the late ’40s there was a growing belief that scientific methods could be used to solve social problems. ibid.
They had found that the closer they peered into the structure of the world the more complex and unpredictable it became. ibid.
Politicians began to look to Atomic power as more than just cheap electricity. It became the way to a better world. ibid.
Then in October 1957 there was a major accident in Britain. The core of the [Calder Hall] reactor caught fire and spewed high levels of radioactivity across north-west England. The radioactivity released was far worse than the public was told. ibid.
The idyllic picture of a nuclear Eden masked a [Soviet] reality in which safety was barely even considered. The reactors were built at great speed to cut costs and to fulfil the Soviet plan. Some had no protective containment at all despite the higher pressures of steam. ibid.
‘Under Brezhnev things started to fall apart. Theft and negligence were rife. In the late seventies the Brezhnev era reached new heights of corruption just as we were building more atomic plants than ever. Our efforts to solve this problem internally failed completely so we went public.’ ibid. nuclear scientist
In America the enormous nuclear plants ordered in the sixties were nearing completion. The engineers in charge were beginning to discover the trap they had set themselves by failing to redesign the containment. If a molten core could not be contained then the emergency systems to prevent a meltdown would have to work whatever happened. ibid.
On March 28th 1979 a series of human and mechanical errors at the Three-Mile Island plant exposed the core. It reacted with steam and produced hydrogen which exploded. None of the emergency teams could understand what was going on inside the reactor. ibid.
There were protests against nuclear power throughout the world. In the public’s imagination it was transformed from something good to something bad. Much of the anger was turned on the nuclear scientists. It emerged they had deliberately concealed many of the risks and uncertainties they had discovered. ibid.
So far the first of the gas-cooled reactors being built here on the Kent coast at Dungeness hasn’t produced a single watt of electricity. Ordered at a cost of eighty million pounds, and due to be commissioned in 1972, it might just start producing energy in 1977. And really nobody has a clue how much it’s going to cost us. Tomorrow’s World, BBC 1975
They were years of great hope. Stalin had just died. Krushchev had come to power. We believed atomic power would lead to a better life for everyone. Professor Yuri I Koryakin, USSR Institute of Power Research
The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts. Omar Bradley, American general
The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. Omar Bradley
It is essential that no country gain ascendancy over the United States in the development, manufacture and tactical use of Atomic weapons. Admiral William H P Blandy
This is the story of the greatest scientific discovery ever: the discovery that everything is made of atoms. The vast variety and richness of everything we see around us in the world and beyond, how it’s built up, how it all fits together, is all down to atoms and the mysterious laws they obey. Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Chemistry: A Volatile History, BBC 2010
It’s only in the last two hundred years that we’ve known what an element is: it’s a substance that can’t be broken down into a simpler one by a chemical reaction. ibid.
John Dalton’s idea in the early 1800s that elements had different atomic weights was dismissed by many scientists. ibid.
Today we know Newland’s Law of Octaves as the Law of Periodicity. ibid.
There are more known compounds of carbon than any other element. ibid.
Rutherford had concluded the atoms was mostly empty space. With tiny electrons buzzing around a central nucleus, containing protons, Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Atom: The Clash of the Titans, BBC 2007
Einstein proved that for Brownian motion to happen atoms must exist. ibid.