Atomic Bomb

Henderson Supplee Jr., 88, who retired in 1965 as chairman of the board of the Atlantic Refining Co. just before the merger that created the present Atlantic Richfield Co., died Monday of complications of cancer at a hospital in Bryn Mawr, Pa. Before joining the oil company in 1947, the resident of Radnor, Pa., had been president of the Supplee-Wills-Jones Milk Co., which had become a subsidiary of the National Dairy Products Corp. He was a former trustee of Princeton University and former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Philadelphia.

"Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb," by Richard Rhodes. New York: Simon & Schuster. 731 pages. $32.50 There are many books to be written on nuclear weapons, and in "Dark Sun" Richard Rhodes makes a stab at half a dozen of them. One is the Prometheus legend, how man stole fire from heaven, and the price he paid for his audacity. The personal and political stories of the Western and Soviet scientists have been told before: What Rhodes does is to bring Los Alamos and its Soviet equivalents under one roof.

A memorial service for R. Carson Dalzell, a former resident of Baltimore and a retired metallurgist for the Atomic Energy Commission, will be held at 12:15 p.m. tomorrow at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington.Mr. Dalzell, who was 84 and lived in Arlington, Va., died Sunday ata hospital there of a respiratory illness.He retired in 1961 after 11 years with the Atomic Energy Commission, where he managed research on metals for reactors.He was the U.S. scientific secretary at the first International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, a member of the executive committee of the nuclear standards board of the American Standards Association and a delegate to the International Organization of Standardization.

The atomic bomb gets the "Forrest Gump" treatment tomorrow night on Showtime, and the results are a mind-blowing film from director Roger Spottiswoode ("And the Band Played On"). "Hiroshima," a three-hour docudrama premiering at 8 Sunday night, takes 1945 newsreel film of President Harry Truman in Washington and Emperor Hirohito in Japan and marries it to a scripted drama with actors that is filmed to look like the 50-year-old black-and-white footage.This use of high-tech to look low-tech results in a seamless and relentlessly compelling docudrama that explores the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 50 years ago. LTC It's a triumph of docudrama technique, but it also raises serious questions about the hybrid of fact and fiction called docudrama, and the role such quasi-history on television plays in what we learn -- or don't learn -- about our national past.

Paris -- World War II is as distant from us as the Spanish-American War was to the men who welcomed victory in the Pacific 50 years ago.We are further from 1945 than its people were from the America of the Indian wars, which lasted into the early 20th century.Time, however, is not what separates us from 1945 so much as power. The United States was a powerful country then, of course, but not so powerful that it could defeat Japan without a terrible struggle.The Russians made victory in Europe possible.

Dayton, Ohio -- The Smithsonian Institution may decide today to save its beleaguered World War II atomic bomb exhibit by taking this cue from the U.S. Air Force Museum: keep it simple.Since 1961, the Air Force Museum here has displayed Bockscar, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945, the second nuclear blow that forced Japan's unconditional surrender and ended the war. There have been no public protests, no petition campaigns, no tumult in the museum hierarchy.

I am standing in a great, echoing hall of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, surrounded by examples of man's mechanical wings: a replica of the Wright brothers' 1903 Flyer, Charles A. Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, and space capsules from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. The museum calls this exhibit, "Milestones of Flight," and describes it as "artifacts which represent major achievements in the history of aviation and space flight."We learn here that the Wright craft was the first true airplane; and that Lindbergh and his monoplane made the first solo, nonstop, trans-Atlantic flight, from New York to Paris in 1927.

Editor's note: Sun photojournalist Chiaki Kawajiri recently visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima, Japan, dedicated to the memory of the dropping of an atomic bomb there 60 years ago this week. There, she heard the story told by Setsuko Iwamoto, 75, who was a teenager when the bomb made her hometown synonymous with the horrors of war. SETSUKO IWAMOTO saw a light and another blue light. Then she lost consciousness. At 8:15 a.m., Aug. 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was used as a weapon for the first time in history.

Thomas Fulton, a longtime physics professor at the Johns Hopkins University who swapped notes with the great minds of science, died of heart failure on April 8 at his daughter's home in Ruxton. He was 83. Born Tamas Feuerzeug, in Budapest, Hungary, he immigrated to the United States with his family in 1941 at the age of 14. His immediate family fled Nazis in Hungary and Germany, where many of his other family members died in the Holocaust, and traveled to fascist Spain, where he secured three boat tickets to Cuba by borrowing $100 from a British consular official.

Charles W. Sweeney, 84, a retired Air Force general who piloted the plane that dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, in the final days of World War II, died Thursday at a Boston hospital. He was 25 when he piloted the B-29 bomber that attacked Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945, three days after the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and six days before Japan surrendered. About 70,000 people were killed in the explosion of the bomb, dubbed "Fat Man." It was the first bomb Mr. Sweeney dropped on an enemy target.