Atomic Snapshots: Peacekeeper Rail Garrison

On the edge of the National Museum of the United States Air Force, quite a distance from the museum, itself, you’ll see a red-orange rail car that seems out of place.

Part of the Peacekeeper Rail Garrison, this disguised and modified boxcar was designed to transport and launch Peacekeeper ICBMs which would be deployed on the nation’s rail network to avoid being targeted on a first strike.

Authorized in 1986 by President Reagan, the planning and testing occurred over the next several years, with operational delivery expected in December 1992. However, the program was cancelled in 1991 because of the end of the Cold War. Following termination, the prototype rail garrison car was delivered to the museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, in 1994 for public display.

Atomic Snapshots: Eads Hall

In Eads Hall at Washington University in St. Louis, you’ll find a grouping of plaques and information in the first floor hallway. The building housed the Department of Physics where Arthur Compton demonstrated the particle concept of electromagnetic radiation, proving Einstein’s proposal that light was both a wave and particle. The Compton Effect garnered him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927.

Arthur Compton went on to direct the Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab) at the University of Chicago, a vital link in the Manhattan Project, which supported the development, construction, and operation of the reactors at Hanford and enrichment activities at Oak Ridge.

The grouping consists of an informational plaque, an historic marker, a photograph, the sketched experiment of the scattering of X-rays, and a description of his Nobel Prize winning experiment.

KEM 1945 Christmas Card

A 1945 Christmas card from political cartoonist Kimon Evan Marengo (Kem). This card comments on the dropping of atomic bombs, showing Harry S. Truman as the Statue of Liberty, holding both money and the bomb. Joseph Stalin, Clement Attleee, Charles De Gaulle, and Chaing Kai-shek all hold out hands of friendship, but they are really reaching out for the atom bomb in Truman’s hand. (Source.)