Word: atomic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...your book, you say that the U.S. dropped atom bombs on Japan but not on Germany because Americans were racially prejudiced against the Japanese...
...controls and diagnostics. But scientists at Berkeley, Stanford, M.I.T., AT&T, IBM and a handful of other research centers around the world see much broader possibilities for minuscule machines. They envision armies of gnat-size robots exploring space, performing surgery inside the human body or possibly building skyscrapers one atom at a time. "Microelectronics is on the verge of a second revolution," says Jeffrey Lang, a professor of electromechanics at M.I.T. "We're still dreaming of applications...
...American, British and Soviet leaders met at Yalta at a time when the Red Army had liberated most of Eastern Europe from Hitler's troops and were poised to take Berlin. Although the ailing Roosevelt knew that the U.S. could soon assault Japan with the first atom bomb, his top military advisers doubted that its use would be immediately decisive. An American priority at Yalta was to ensure Japan's quick defeat by persuading Stalin to join the Far East conflict once Germany surrendered...
...strategic importance in 1952, when the U.S. exploded its first hydrogen bomb. That explosion demonstrated the destructive force that can be released when tritium fuses with deuterium, another hydrogen isotope, to yield helium and a burst of nuclear energy. Today, tritium is used both to enhance the power of atom bombs and in the trigger mechanism of the far more destructive H-bomb. Because it decays at the rate of 5.5% a year, the gas must be regularly replenished if atomic weapons are to maintain their full explosive potential...
Dehmelt has performed other small miracles as well. By creating an electromagnetic "cradle," he has kept a lone electron suspended in a vacuum for months at a time. He has also succeeded in observing the fabled quantum jump of a single trapped atom as it absorbed energy and then emitted it in the form of light...