Hannah’s War menu for Book Clubs

Because Hannah Weiss is Austrian, as is her colleague at Los Alamos, Peter Reichl), I put together a menu of Austrian dishes, the kinds of Austrian specialties that might invoke happy memories of the old world and better times.

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Op. Ed: Trinity Test Anniversary

July 16th will mark the 75th anniversary of the first atomic test, known as Trinity. The day is rightly known as the day the world changed forever, entering into the “nuclear age.” The Trinity test was the result of an extraordinary number of characters, circumstances, and scientific principles that came together like pieces of an…

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Oppenheimer’s Legendary Martini or “The Manhattan Project”

J. Robert Oppenheimer was said to have existed on “martinis, coffee, and cigarettes” when he was directing the Allies efforts to build the bomb in World War Two. Many crucial formulas were scrawled on cocktail napkins by the leading scientists of the Manhattan Project during Oppie’s nightly martini parties at his house on Bathtub Row.

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About Dr. Lise Meitner: Inspiration for Hannah’s War

Lise-Meitner by Zsuzsa Szvath

One of the great luxuries of living in New York City is having access to the Public Library’s extraordinary microfilm collection; it was there that I read the issue of the New York Times on the day the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In the Times’ summary of the complex and secret history of the Manhattan Project, one paragraph leapt off the page: “The key component that allowed the Allies to develop the bomb was brought to the Allies by a “female, non-Aryan physicist.’” Who was this woman, I wondered, And why isn’t her face staring out of every science textbook?

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