In the mid 1940s, my grandfather, Commander Larry Condon, witnessed the testing of three-nuclear powered atom bombs. Although all of his war stories have interested me in the past, upon learning of this particular experience, I became fascinated with the subject-especially given one particular comment he made when describing the explosions to me: "It was beautiful. Just beautiful." It seemed remarkable to me that anyone could call an atom bomb exploding at the destructive capacity of millions of sticks of dynamite "beautiful."
I decided to look into it, and upon researching the topic, I d…
