Manhattan Project

If ever a film was meant to be seen under the stars, it's "October Sky," a marvelous evocation of what it was like to be a kid in the early days of the space race (it's set in the months after the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik) and a poignant look at how fathers and sons can connect in all sorts of ways. It's also that rarest of rarities, a family film suitable for all ages.So thank goodness D. Vogel and his Bengies Drive-In have returned for yet another season of open-air film exhibition.

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.

Chien-Shiung Wu,84, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and later conducted a landmark experiment in physics, died of a stroke Sunday in New York. Born in Shanghai, Ms. Wu came to the United States in 1936 and received her doctorate in physics from the University of California at Berkeley. She went on to teach at Smith College and Princeton University.In the 1940s, Wu worked on the Manhattan Project, a covert project to build an atomic bomb in World War II. She joined Columbia University after the war and taught there for more than three decades.

Brig. Gen. Kenneth E. Fields,87, whose military career took him from the pinnacle of his class at West Point to the battle for the bridge at Remagen, Germany, and on to the Manhattan Project and then to civilian eminence at the Atomic Energy Commission, died July 1 at a nursing home in Stamford, Conn.After he left government service in 1958, he became executive vice president of the International Standard Electric Corp., a subsidiary of International Telephone and Telegraph, and the president of another of its subsidiaries, ITT Europe.

Gerhard Dessauer, 85, a German-born physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project that created the first atomic bomb, died Feb. 11 in Savannah, Ga. He was in charge of radiation monitoring for the first postwar bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946.

Alexander Langsdorf Jr., 83, a physicist who worked on the team that developed the atom bomb and later spoke in opposition to the weapon, died Friday in Chicago from complications from hip surgery. He worked with Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago on the Manhattan Project, which resulted in the development of the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Mr. Langsdorf's contribution to the bomb was a speck of plutonium that he produced from a cyclotron, an atomic-particle splitter developed at Washington University in St. Louis.

Fifty years ago today, on July 16, 1945, the United States exploded the first atomic bomb. It wasn't over Hiroshima or Nagasaki, but in New Mexico. And somehow, the cause of this brilliant light, this enormous blast, remained a secret until the end of World War II.It wasn't the first secret of the war, by any means. And atomic secrecy was such a habit by war's end that it continued for years afterward. Most journalists willingly obliged; physicists, whose discoveries had sprung from freedom of information before the war, found their avenues of communication shut off; and any American without a security clearance lacked the facts necessary to learn to guide such a terrifying force.

LONDON -- A Soviet spy chief's memoir published here claims that the late J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the U.S. atomic bomb project during and after World War II, passed nuclear secrets to Soviet agents.The allegations were made by Gen. Pavel Sudoplatov, who was in charge of efforts to obtain atomic secrets from the West, and excerpts of them ran in the Sunday Telegraph. Time magazine will print excerpts of the book in today's issue.The memoir charges that Dr. Oppenheimer, a University of California physicist known as the "father of the atomic bomb," condoned and assisted in the flow of vital nuclear secrets.

Washington. -- Down goes Star Wars, while the Space Station shrinks toward oblivion, and the super atom smasher in Texas faces formidable money problems.Times are bad for these and other so-called mega-projects, America's unique invention for the advancement of science and technology in space and on earth. Along with their mammoth scale, the mega-projects share a common political trajectory of strong commitment at the outset, rising budgets in the billions, disillusionment and decline.Once considered a virtue in high-tech endeavors, bigness itself has become a ground for suspicion whenever scientists or engineers aspire to grand creations.

In 16 unremarkable concrete bunkers built by the Army for a war with Hirohito and Hitler, the United States has begun assembling about 50 tons of plutonium, a vast stockpile of one of the most expensive materials ever produced and perhaps the most important to safeguard. The Department of Energy says the bunkers, each about the size of a two-car garage, are going to be used for interim storage, meaning six or seven years.But plutonium, which was invented by the Energy Department's predecessor, the Manhattan Project, may turn out to be the hardest thing on Earth to dispose of. And at the Energy Department, "interim" can have an elastic meaning.

LOUIS ROSEN, 91 Scientist worked on Manhattan Project Louis Rosen, a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project and later created an influential neutron center at the facility, died Thursday in New Mexico. The Lujan Neutron Scattering Center at LANSCE credits Dr. Rosen with leading the way in developing the world's most powerful linear accelerator, culminating in construction of the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility, known today as the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center, or LANSCE.

Ten days ago in Houston, the Ravens were fresh off a big win and the team's media relations staff had corralled Joe Flacco for the post-game news conference. But the rookie quarterback had to stand off to the side and wait his turn. While coach John Harbaugh was answering questions, eight-year veteran Todd Heap came into the room. Kevin Byrne, the Ravens' public relations whiz, flashed a look that told Flacco that Heap would be cutting ahead and speaking with reporters first. "I know," Flacco said.

Dorothy S. Childs, a former office manager and longtime Towson homemaker, died of pneumonia Sunday at St. Joseph Medical Center. She was 88. Dorothy Sands was born in Baltimore and raised in Cedarcroft. She was a 1936 graduate of Western High School and attended the University of Maryland in College Park. During the late 1930s, she worked in the payroll department of the old Glenn L. Martin Co. in Middle River and then took a job in 1940 working with a team of scientists on the Manhattan Project, which led to the creation of the atomic bomb.

For an hour, visiting author Carolyn Reeder explained how she had crafted her latest work of young-adult historical fiction, The Secret Project Notebook. As seventh-graders at Folly Quarter Middle School listened attentively, she explained how she moved from original idea to finished product -- a book centering on the children of scientists working on the Manhattan Project. Her discussion was both a history lesson and a discussion of the yearlong process of creating her book. Using a slide show and peppering her talk with plenty of anecdotes, she told how she did her research and explained about oral histories.

ONE NIGHT IN 1990, Ann Finkbeiner, a Baltimore science writer, attended a dinner at Johns Hopkins University in honor of an eccentric physicist. The others in attendance, her husband included, regarded Freeman Dyson as a genius, much the way a star athlete might look upon an actual Hall of Famer. What struck Finkbeiner, though, were Dyson's stories. In one, the elderly, birdlike man described himself wandering the Mexican border late one night, helping police officers look for drugs. Why, Finkbeiner wondered, would a physicist -- a man normally interested in the properties of matter, space and time -- be looking for narcotics along a border?

I always fall for streets that arrive with history attached. Balmar's is cast in iron. Not so far from the new metal lettering proclaiming Clipper Mill is this newly created thoroughfare called Balmar. Therein lies a tale of what's being built on the western flank of the Jones Falls Valley. Located in Woodberry, Clipper Mill is the name attached to a 17-acre sprawling industrial campus that sits in a little recess between Druid Hill Park and Television Hill. This is a chunk of prime new-old Baltimore, for many years off-limits because of the dangers posed by heavy industry located here.

Ernesta Drinker Ballard, 85, a founding member of the National Organization for Women and a horticulturist who helped build the Philadelphia Flower Show into a world-renowned event, has died in Philadelphia. Ms. Ballard died of complications after a stroke on Aug. 11, her family said. Heavily involved in feminist and civic causes, Ms. Ballard marched on Washington, lobbied for the Equal Rights Amendment, and raised money for female candidates. She also was a founding member of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, and was chairwoman of NARAL from 1989 to 1991.

Hey, New Jersey, you want a piece of us? Huh? You lookin' to get your face rearranged or something? 'Cause it said in the newspaper yesterday that you're all bent out of shape about this Defense Department plan to transfer thousands of military jobs from your Fort Monmouth to Aberdeen Proving Ground here in the Free State. In fact, you're so ticked that some of your state officials have been questioning whether we have enough scientific talent down here to fill all those jobs. Oh, that's low, New Jersey.

109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos, by Jennet Conant. Simon & Schuster. 432 pages. $26.95. The 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki this year has unleashed a flurry of books about the Manhattan Project and some of its most colorful figures. But in 109 East Palace, Jennet Conant stakes out less-trafficked territory, producing an engaging portrait of life on the remote mesa that served as backdrop for the world's most audacious scientific enterprise.

WASHINGTON - Geiger counters crackle continuously in a low, ominous mutter as you move through the replica of the first atomic bomb laboratory that sculptor Jim Sanborn has created at Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art. Oscilloscopes hum and flicker blue dancing lines that move across the screens like lunging fencers. Sanborn has re-created almost exactly the work tables where scientists of the Manhattan Project moved uranium and plutonium closer and closer to the critical mass that would release the power of the nuclear bomb.