The last time Britain nuked Australia was at Maralinga on 9 October 1957, over half a century ago. The last of the Antler series of tests, code-named Taranaki (above), involved the detonation of a 25 kiloton fission bomb from a captive balloon at a height of 300 metres. The fallout ‘moved east and then north-east […]
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] I’ve been using the Internet for nearly two decades: in 1992 — after nervously checking with the physics computer lab manager first — I sent an email to my future Honours supervisor while she was visiting Toronto. I was quickly hooked by the promise of overcoming the tyranny of distance and transparently
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] Libya now holds an unfortunate record. It is the country which has the longest experience of aerial bombardment. Libya was first bombed in 1911, by Italy; now, in 2011, it is being bombed by its own air force. That makes it just under a century from the first bomb to the latest.
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] I know. Writing about Wikipedia is so 2006. And yes, finding errors in Wikipedia articles is not exactly difficult. But I have a bee in my bonnet which needs releasing. Wikipedia’s page on the Blitz has a section entitled ‘Commencement on September 6’. This is how it currently reads (sans hyperlinks and
I’ve recently been reading Peter Ewer’s Wounded Eagle: The Bombing of Darwin and Australia’s Air Defence Scandal, which I found to be unexpectedly interesting, but not always in a good way. Wounded Eagle has much less about the Second World War than I’d thought: much of the early part of the book is taken up
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] There’s been much discussion in various places and in various ways recently about the woeful state of the humanities in various university systems around the English-speaking world, particularly in light of the Browne Review in the UK — for example, at Larvatus Prodeo (also here and here), Skepticlawyer, zunguzungu (a response to
There have been a lot of stories in the press recently with titles like ‘Churchill ordered UFO cover-up, National Archives show’. Actually, the TNA files — part of an ongoing series of releases of UFO-related files — don’t show this at all, as is clear if you read the article more closely. The cover-up is
This photograph of Australian soldiers was taken during the First World War. It’s not particularly unusual: just a group of mates getting together to record a memento, perhaps after a weekend’s carousing in the fleshpots of Cairo or Paris. Mateship is a important concept in Australian culture. The OED defines it as ‘The condition of
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] The new Military History Carnival has been posted at Wig-Wags. One of the featured posts, The state of strategy at Kings of War — which looks at the great strategic thinkers of history and wonders why there seem to have been relatively few in recent times — inspired the above title. It’s
No sooner does Bomber Command get approval for its own grand memorial — to be precise, a £3.5 million neoclassical pavilion in London’s Green Park commemorating its 55,000 dead — than Fighter Command trumps it with a proposal for an even grander memorial: a ‘Battle of Britain Beacon’ at the RAF Museum at Hendon, which
