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...
Share this story In the 1960s, the United States built a space station whose true purpose was so secret that the men chosen to fly it could not tell their own families what they did. The cover story was research — testing whether astronauts could be useful in...
Share this story In the mid-1950s, Britain faced a nightmare: waves of Soviet bombers climbing ever higher and flying ever faster, each one potentially carrying an atomic bomb. Conventional fighters simply could not climb quickly enough to catch them in time. So...
Share this story On certain moonlit nights during the Second World War, deep inside Nazi-occupied France, a handful of Resistance members would gather in a remote field and lay out three small torches in the shape of an L. Minutes later, a single black aircraft would...
Share this story For as long as there have been cars and aeroplanes, people have wanted to combine them. Almost everyone who tried, failed. But one man actually did it: he built a flying car that flew, that drove, that carried passengers, and that a government safety...
Share this story In 1934, an Australian chocolate millionaire offered a fortune to whoever could fly fastest from England to Melbourne — nearly 11,000 miles across deserts, jungles and oceans. Airliners of the day could not come close. So de Havilland built...
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