re: #8 engineer cat

what really scares me is that some of the manhattan project scientists said afterward that they weren’t really sure that they wouldn’t “blow up the atmosphere” when they did the first bomb test in the desert

That’s a myth. It’s terribly easy to run the equations that showed how the plutonium implosion “gadget” would (and did) behave on detonation. Simple physics. Now it its true that Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad Gita (“I am become death; the destroyer of worlds”) because he foresaw the political mess this weapon would create, but that’s a considerably different issue.