This weekly feature is a place to discuss new developments in fields of history and archaeology. This can be newly discovered documents and archaeological sites, recent publications, documents that have just become publicly available through digitization or the opening of archives, and new theories and interpretations.
This is not a major discovery, but the other day I came across a recently-declassified estimate made by Los Alamos scientists in 1945 for how many "Super" (hydrogen) bombs would be necessary to render the world dangerously radioactive. It is surprisingly low — between 10 and 100. (By contrast, they thought it would take 10,000-100,000 fission bombs to achieve the same outcome.) Business Insider did a brief write-up here after I tweeted on it, with a link to the document in question. Screenshot of the relevant part of the document. Kind of neat, that they were already extrapolating from the relatively small weapons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to weapons in the 10-100 Mt range (if not higher), with a nodding towards total world annihilation. "Presumably Supers of this type would not be used in warfare for just this reason." Ah, such idealism...
This perhaps trips up against our 20 year rule, as there is a heavy political element to it. I beg everyone's indulgence.
The French writer Pierre Pean has a new book out called Nouvelles Affaires Africaine in which he alleges that the current president of Gabon, Ali Bongo, was really born to Igbo parents in Nigeria, and was secretly adopted by former president Omar Bongo during or after the Nigerian Civil War.
The veracity of these claims, and their implications for Gabonese politics is beside the point of this post.
The point is, these allegations have raised awareness of the flood of Igbo refugee children who fled Biafra between 1967 and 1970, to be adopted by families in Gabon, Cameroon, and Equatorial Guinea.
This increased visibility has been helpful to groups such as the Igbo League that are working to reconnect these now-adult refugees with their relatives in Nigeria.
It also underscores the unresolved nature of the Nigerian civil war within popular memory, inasmuch as successive Nigerian governments have failed to make similar efforts to reunite Igbo families divided by that war.
edit- here is a good write-up of it from an African news blog
An African American teenager who was sentenced to death at the age of 14 for the murder of two white girls, has been exonerated, 70 years after his execution.