July 16, 2015 archive

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

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July 16 is the 197th day of the year (198th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 168 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1945, at 5:29:45 a.m., the Manhattan Project comes to an explosive end as the first atom bomb is successfully tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one…

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Bhagavad Gita

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Plans for the creation of a uranium bomb by the Allies were established as early as 1939, when Italian emigre physicist Enrico Fermi met with U.S. Navy department officials at Columbia University to discuss the use of fissionable materials for military purposes. That same year, Albert Einstein wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt supporting the theory that an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction had great potential as a basis for a weapon of mass destruction. In February 1940, the federal government granted a total of $6,000 for research. But in early 1942, with the United States now at war with the Axis powers, and fear mounting that Germany was working on its own uranium bomb, the War Department took a more active interest, and limits on resources for the project were removed.

Brigadier-General Leslie R. Groves, himself an engineer, was now in complete charge of a project to assemble the greatest minds in science and discover how to harness the power of the atom as a means of bringing the war to a decisive end. The Manhattan Project (so-called because of where the research began) would wind its way through many locations during the early period of theoretical exploration, most importantly, the University of Chicago, where Enrico Fermi successfully set off the first fission chain reaction. But the Project took final form in the desert of New Mexico, where, in 1943, Robert J. Oppenheimer began directing Project Y at a laboratory at Los Alamos, along with such minds as Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, and Fermi. Here theory and practice came together, as the problems of achieving critical mass-a nuclear explosion-and the construction of a deliverable bomb were worked out.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Breakfast Tune: “Fly Me To The Moon” Eddy Davis Tenor Banjo

Uploaded on Oct 24, 2009

Eddy Davis plays FLY ME TO THE MOON, Sept. 25, 2009 in NYC, on a Gibson Mastertone TB5, which originally belonged to Jim Robinson, who purchased it new in 1931. Jim played it until 2005, when he died at the age of 92.

Today in History

(July 16)[Notes:ANCHOR VOICE] July 16th, 1945: (AP Archive Video / AP Photos)The world’s first test of a nuclear weapon — as the United States explodes an atomic bomb in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico.Weeks later, the U.S. drops atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — bringing World War Two to an end.1973: (AP Photos)(NAT of Nixon tape)On Capitol Hill, former White House aide Alexander Butterfield reveals President Richard Nixon’s secret taping system.The disclosure during Senate hearings probing the Watergate scandal plays a pivotal role in Nixon’s resignation the following year.1999: (AP Photos)(SOT of JFK, Junior)John F. Kennedy, Junior — son of America’s 35th President — dies when the plane he is piloting plunges into the Atlantic Ocean.Kennedy’s wife Carolyn and her sister Lauren Bessette are also on board and killed in the crash off Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.2004: Martha Stewart is sentenced to five months in prison and five months of home confinement by a federal judge in New York for lying about a stock sale. And, 1969: (AP Archive Video)(NAT of Apollo 11 liftoff)Apollo 11 lifts off from Kennedy Space Center, Florida — on the first manned mission to the surface of the Moon.

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