As everyone knows, cockroaches are supposedly the only creatures able to survive a nuclear explosion.Which may be an exaggeration, but not by much. Well, I think I’ve found the pre-atomic, chemical equivalent! It’s from a novel published in 1926: Poison gas in the open is one thing. Dropped on a densely populated town like London […]
There’s an interesting article on the rise of radio news in the United States in the late 1930s, in the February 2006 issue of History Today: “On the right wavelength” by David Culbert. One thing I learned from this article was that it was the Munich crisis in September 1938 which made radio news reporting
Boing Boing has a link to a very interesting and oddly beautiful set of Japanese air raid precautions posters at the National Archives of Japan. (Boing Boing says they are from the Second World War, but according to the page itself, they date from 1938.) I am myself somewhat ignorant of Japanese history, but as
Twenty years ago this week, Sting’s song “Russians” entered the US top 40: In Europe and America, there’s a growing feeling of hysteria Conditioned to respond to all the threats In the rhetorical speeches of the Soviets Mr. Krushchev said we will bury you I don’t subscribe to this point of view It would be
On this day in 1952, the United States detonated the first hydrogen bomb, at Eniwetok Atoll in the Marsall Islands. Possibly not coincidentally, the October 2005 issue of History Today features an absorbing article by Geoffrey Best entitled “Winston Churchill, the H-Bomb and nuclear disarmament”. I have a quibble though … Best quotes a 1953
Aside from the whole shadow-of-the-bomber thing, I have an amateur (okay – more amateur, then) interest in the Cold War and the fear of nuclear war. Partly because of the obvious continuities and parallels with the area I’m studying, but also because I’m old enough to remember the last flowering of nuclear paranoia in the
This is very tangentially relevant to my topic: it has been found that anthrax samples given to Iraq by the US in the 1980s can be traced back to a cow which died in Oxfordshire in 1937. British scientists weaponised anthrax taken from this cow for their biological warfare tests during the Second World War
