Atomic John

[Dave Monroe]

Atomic John
A truck driver uncovers secrets about the first nuclear bombs.
by David Samuels
December 15, 2008


The single, blinding release of pure energy over Hiroshima, Japan, on
August 6, 1945, marked a startling and permanent break with our prior
understandings of the visible world. Yet for more than sixty years the
technology behind the explosion has remained a state secret. The
United States government has never divulged the engineering
specifications of the first atomic bombs, not even after other
countries have produced generations of ever more powerful nuclear
weapons. In the decades since the Second World War, dozens of
historians have attempted to divine the precise mechanics of the
Hiroshima bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, and of the bomb that fell three
days later on Nagasaki, known as Fat Man. The most prominent is
Richard Rhodes, who won a Pulitzer Prize, in 1988, for his dazzling
and meticulous book "The Making of the Atomic Bomb." But the most
accurate account of the bomb's inner workings—an unnervingly detailed
reconstruction, based on old photographs and documents—has been
written by a sixty-one-year-old truck driver from Waukesha, Wisconsin,
named John Coster-Mullen, who was once a commercial photographer, and
has never received a college degree....

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_samuels