Share this story On paper, it should have worked. Take the superb Douglas Skyraider, replace its thundering piston engine with a modern turboprop of more than 5,000 horsepower, and the U.S. Navy would have a carrier attack aircraft faster and harder-hitting than...
Share this story Somewhere above your head, right now, there is a small robotic spaceplane that the United States has been flying for more than fifteen years — and the government will not tell you what it does. It looks like a Space Shuttle that shrank in the...
Share this story The finale of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. Nine parts brought the bomb from a London traffic light to Nagasaki. The last part answers the question Washington asked in September 1949: how did Stalin get it so fast? Somewhere...
Share this story Part 9 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. Everything in this series converges here: the physics of Part 1, the exiles of Part 2, the bomb of Part 5, the aircraft of Part 7, the fire doctrine of Part 8. Two missions, four days, one...
Share this story Part 8 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. Part 7 left the three-billion-dollar B-29 failing at high altitude. This part is about the man who turned it around, the night that followed, and the sixty-plus cities after that. It is not...
Share this story Part 7 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. The Manhattan Project cost 1.9 billion dollars. The aircraft built to deliver its product cost three billion. This is the engineering story of the B-29 Superfortress — bought off the...
Share this story Part 6 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. Before one aircraft could destroy one city, the burning of cities had to become ordinary. This part tells how that happened over Germany — soberly, by the numbers, and through the people...
Share this story Part 5 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. While Germany’s program starved (Part 4), America built an industry the size of its automobile sector — in secret. This is the Manhattan Project, from a squash court in Chicago to a...
Share this story Part 4 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. Fission was discovered in Berlin. So why did the bomb come from New Mexico? This part examines the German and Japanese programs — and the errors, raids and illusions that stopped them. The...
Share this story Part 3 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. Part 2 followed the exodus of Europe’s Jewish scientists. Now, in a Berlin laboratory those laws had just emptied, the uranium atom comes apart. Kungälv, on the Swedish west coast,...
Share this story Part 2 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. Part 1 followed the physics revolution to Leo Szilard’s traffic-light epiphany. This part is about the men who carried the idea to America — and the regime that made them refugees....
Share this story This is Part 1 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series on the science, the aircraft and the men and women behind the atomic bomb — from a London traffic light in 1933 to a mushroom cloud over the Kazakh steppe in 1949. London, September...
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