War

The Woman Whose Invention Helped Win a War β€” and Still Baffles Weathermen

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The Woman Whose Invention Helped Win a War β€” and Still Baffles Weathermen

ut in the post-lunch hours, meteorologists started picking up what seemed to be a rogue thunderstorm on the weather radar. The “blob,ȁ as they referred to it, mushroomed on the radar screen. By 4 PM, it covered the entire city of Huntsville. Strangely, however, the actual view out of peoples’ windows remained a calm azure.

The source of the blob turned out to be not a freak weather front, but rather a cloud of radar chaff, a military technology used by nations all across the globe today. Its source was the nearby Redstone Arsenal, which, it seems, had decided that a warm summer’s day would be perfect for a completely routine military test.

More surprising than the effect that radar chaff has on modern weather systems, though, is the fact that its inventor’s life’s work was obscured by the haze of a male-centric scientific community’s outdated traditions.

The inventor of radar chaff was a woman named Joan Curran.

How the Nazi Concentration Camps Worked | The New Yorker

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How the Nazi Concentration Camps Worked | The New Yorker

Hitler’s Germany as a highly regimented dictatorship, in practice Nazi rule was chaotic and improvisatory. Rival power bases in the Party and the German state competed to carry out what they believed to be Hitler’s wishes. This system of “working towards the Fuhrer,” as it was called by Hitler’s biographer Ian Kershaw, was clearly in evidence when it came to the concentration camps. The K.L. system, during its twelve years of existence, included twenty-seven main camps and more than a thousand subcamps. At its peak, in early 1945, it housed more than seven hundred thousand inmates. In addition to being a major penal and economic institution, it was a central symbol of Hitler’s rule. Yet Hitler plays almost no role in Wachsmann’s book, and Wachsmann writes that Hitler was never seen to visit a camp. It was Heinrich Himmler, the head of the S.S., who was in charge of the camp system, and its growth was due in part to his ambition to make the S.S. the most powerful force in Germany.

Blast From the Past

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Blast From the Past

Shortly before sunrise on Sept. 22, 1979, a U.S. surveillance satellite known as Vela 6911 recorded an unusual double flash as it orbited the earth above the South Atlantic. At Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, where it was still nighttime on Sept. 21, the staff in charge of monitoring the satellite’s transmissions saw the unmistakable pattern produced by a nuclear explosion—something U.S. satellites had detected on dozens of previous occasions in the wake of nuclear tests. The Air Force base issued an alert overnight, and President Jimmy Carter quickly called a meeting in the White House Situation Room the next day.

When Henry Wallace Warned of β€˜American Fascism’ – The American Prospect

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When Henry Wallace Warned of β€˜American Fascism’ – The American Prospect

Building on the success of the New Deal, FDR added Wallace, initially his agriculture secretary, as vice president in 1940, dumping segregationist Democrat John Nance Garner. Roosevelt felt that Wallace could succeed him and ultimately continue on the work of the New Deal. More importantly, FDR needed Wallace’s energy and vision to help make the case to the American public to back the war effort.

As vice president, Wallace spent the war years touring the U.S. with a vigor that the wheelchair-bound FDR couldn’t, arguing that in order to truly win the war against fascism abroad, the United States must take on racism, sexism, and economic inequality at home, or risk the rise of a new “American fascism.”

May the Best Firebomb Win

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May the Best Firebomb Win

7/16/2020 by Pushkin Industries

Web player: https://podplayer.net/?id=109770566
Episode: https://pdst.fm/e/chtbl.com/track/39E17/traffic.megaphone.fm/CAD3463123798.mp3

Basement laboratories. Mad scientists. Sticky gels, and a bake-off in the desert. The strange story behind Curtis LeMay’s weapon of choice. Part two.

The nutty and horrific story of how nepalm came to be. Unthinkable now but came out of a horrific war.