It was built in the 1940s as part of the "Manhattan Project" to develop the first atomic weapon during World War II.
Asia had been ravaged by war - atomic bombs fell over Hiroshima, succeeding armies marched across the Philippines, guerrillas fought over Indochina.
Remember it took the U.S. less than four years to go from the invention to the use of atomic weapons during World War II.
And it was the planet of the apes after the destructive act of a big war, and atomic bombs and whatever in the movie.
The only radiation events on this scale, where large populations received 0.1 Sv (10 rem) to 1 Sv (100 rem) have been the atomic bomb blasts from World War II.
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Then there is the Manhattan Project, the name given to America's development of the atomic bomb during the second world war.
The group, which was founded by scientists who had worked on the first atomic bombs in the second world war, listed the continuing crisis between India and Pakistan over the disputed region of Kashmir as one of their concerns.
While there is still debate about the issue, many historians believe the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan shortened the war and saved thousands of American lives that would have been lost in a land invasion of Japan.
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By 1964, when I was negotiating puberty in the chill deeps of the Cold War, history itself had become the Atomic Disintegrator.
"You have the rockabilly artists who are essentially having a great deal of fun and basically swapping out hot rods for spacecraft, " says Bill Geerhart, who runs a Web site and the Atomic Platters record label, both devoted to Cold War music.
Iraq maintains that it no longer has any such programmes, although one senior Iraqi official has all but admitted that the country came close to building an atomic bomb in 1991, at the time of the Gulf war.
He had the grit to use the atomic bomb, the imagination to grasp the nature of the emerging cold war, and the simple eloquence needed to explain the strange new world to the Americans.
Of course, the atomic bomb was one of the greatest U.S. secrets of World War II.
This anniversary also recalls that during the Cold War American spies, such as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, stole atomic secrets and sent them to Moscow.
Creating atomic-time standards became a priority in both America and Britain after the second world war.
It later became visible beyond doubt that, when the Gulf War broke out, Saddam had been only six to 18 months from his first atomic device.
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