I just read an interesting book. It is a collection, in the format of a book, of reproductions of the front page of The New York Times on selected days from 1939 to 1945. It is called "Page One: The Front Page History of World War II As Presented in The New York Times." The days picked for inculsion in the collection always had big war news blaring across the the top of page.

It was fascinating to see the how the mudane also made the bottom of the front-page when the top of the page chronicled some of the more significant events in WWII. For example, during the war, there were front-page stories on a beer shortage gripping New York, and separately, the price of eggs spiraling to 66 cents for a dozen...with predictions of (gasp!) the price going as high as $1.00. Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia said that the "outlook is serious on eggs." The egg story appeared on the same front page as a story with a giant banner headline on Mussolini being ousted from Italy. The date was July 26, 1943. My mother would be born 23 days later in Philadelphia.

A bit more haunting were the early efforts of journalists and politicians grappling with how describe the atomic bombs our country dropped on Japan. First, it was total surprise to almost everyone who had not been involved in the project. The talk in the days leading up to the bombing was all about a massive invasion of Japan. On the front page of the NYT on August 7, 1945, President Truman said the the bomb was a "harnessing of the basic power of the universe" and "the force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed." He went on to say that "we have spent two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history--and won." I hope Mr. Truman's words about winning our gamble are as accurate in the coming decades as they were in 1943.

This talk of nuclear weapons reminded me of two things: (1) a book, Face to Face With the Bomb that I bought a couple years back, which shows nuclear bomb-related pictures, primarily of US military personnel going about their business near various nuclear bombs. For example, the cover picture is a guy casually sweeping the floor right next to a rack of nuclear bombs. You can see this picture at the link above, and the author of the introduction notes that just two of the bombs on the rack could unleash more destructive force than the aggregate of all firepower and bombs in World War II.

And (2) I recently saw on the History Channel a piece about a weapon that is so absurd that you wonder how we can have the designers of this doozy on the same team as people who are smart enough to actually design and manufacture nuclear weapons. This weapon is called the Davy Crockett (aka the "Nuclear Rifle"). It could be launched by a couple of soldiers with a tripod, and it had an explosive yield of 0.01 kilotons, equivalent to about ten tons of TNT. Problem was, its range, about 2.5 miles, was not far enough to protect the artillery guys from the effects of the bomb, especially if they were downwind from the target site. Duh!