Atomic Bomb

WASHINGTON -- As the FBI prepared to question a scientist last week in the alleged theft of American nuclear-weapons secrets by China, former U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry was closeted across the Pacific for several days with key Chinese military and security experts, talking shop.Perry is among thousands of Americans who meet regularly with their Chinese counterparts in exchanges on scientific, military and technological subjects that have drawn warm praise from both sides.But now, as charges of lax security reverberate through the nation's military-scientific community in the wake of the espionage probe, academics and experts are bracing for a new climate of suspicion that could freeze this growing cooperation.

Norris Bradbury, 88, the physicist who assembled the first atomic bomb and headed the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory for 25 years of the Cold War, died Wednesday at his home in Los Alamos, N.M.Bradbury joined the Manhattan Project in 1944 and led the team charged with assembling the non-nuclear components for the world's first atomic bomb explosion. That explosion, on July 16, 1945, at Trinity Site in New Mexico, set up the bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the next month.

Thomas J. Connor, 91, the last surviving member of the FBI detail that gunned down John Dillinger in Chicago in 1934, died April 14 in Southbury, Conn.As part of the Dillinger detail, he was stationed in an alley at the side entrance to a theater and didn't witness the fatal confrontation. Dillinger, "Public Enemy No. 1," had robbed more than three dozen Midwestern banks and killed more than a dozen people.Mr. Connor resigned from the FBI in 1935 and later worked with the CIA in New York.

"Albert Einstein: A Biography," by Albrecht Folsing. Viking. 878 pages. $37.95.Albert Einstein once said, "What is essential in the life of a man of my kind lies in what he thinks and how he thinks, and not in what he does or suffers." As an expositor of Einstein's scientific ideas, Albrecht Folsing, who has previously published biographies in German of Galileo and Rontgen, is hopeless, lacking flair for images, modeling, metaphor or logic.Folsing is equally inept as a portraitist. The major scientists in Einstein's early years, Ernst Mach, Clerk Maxwell, H.A. Lorenz and Max Planck; and later Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrodinger and Enrico Fermi, never achieve human form.

The former director of the National Air & Space Museum seems at peace with the memory of his own head on a platter. Martin Harwit served it at his boss' request, resigning after a long dispute over a planned exhibit about the atomic bombings of Japan.Some of his adversaries publicly applauded his downfall, others were content to claim a customary spoil of victory: the power to have history told their way.Harwit, an astrophysicist by profession, went home to Washington, disappointed but not bitter.

Edmund D. Campbell, 96, a lawyer who helped argue the landmark "one man, one vote" case and fought strong resistance in Virginia, died Thursday in Arlington, Va.. He was 96.In 1962, he gave the closing argument in the U.S. Supreme Court case that established the right of all citizens to equal representation in their legislatures. He had challenged Virginia's apportionment, arguing that Arlington and Fairfax were shortchanged.Five years earlier, he helped form the Save Our Schools Committee to fight a state law passed to undermine the Supreme Court decision requiring integration of public schools.

From The Sun Oct. 8-14, 1845* Oct. 10: We are occasionally requested by persons who take The Sun in the various boarding houses in the city to hint to others who are also boarders, that the first reading of a newspaper belongs of right to him who takes and pays for it.* Oct. 14: We place in our columns to-day, the nineteenth annual report of the president and directors of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company.From The Sun Oct. 8-14, 1895* Oct. 9: The county commissioners have directed the Mount Washington Electric Light and Power Co. to put ten electric lamps on Bellona Avenue, four on Ashland Avenue and two on Cold Spring Lane.

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.

HIROSHIMA, Japan -- As dusk fell yesterday, children who have never known war led a silent memorial on the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.From riverbanks in this coastal city, little hands pushed hundreds of candle-lit paper lanterns seaward on the evening tide. The children were aided by adults, including survivors of the first nuclear attack in history.Down the rivers the flickering vessels -- bearing good wishes for the souls of atomic bomb victims and pleas for world peace -- floated toward Hiroshima Bay and the Inland Sea beyond.

"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.