jerumebrunneng:

dracophile:

nunyabizni:

brosefvondudehomie:

alternative-munster:

tilthat:

TIL Tom Clancy’s stories were so detailed, many assumed he was ex-military. In fact he never served. He wrote most of his stories in his spare time whilst working as an insurance salesman.

via ift.tt

He was actually interrogated by the Feds for this. 

He used logic to figure out the most efficient way the inside of a ship would be laid out. Said ship being a vessel in the United States Navy. It was so accurate that the DoD wanted to know who was giving him details about ship layouts because his description of areas included places civilians aren’t allowed to see ever.

I’m reminded of when Kubrick was making “Dr. Strangelove” and managed to get far too many of the details of the bomber used correct for the DoD to ignore, but he’d only ever seen a couple pictures of the outside of it and just managed to somehow get it right inside and out.

In 1944, Astounding Science Fiction published a serial called Deadline, by Cleve Cartmill, describing a nation at war secretly working on an atomic bomb. People working on the Manhattan Project at the time recognized a lot of information in there that was supposed to be top secret.

The FBI came to interrogate the magazine’s editor, John W. Campbell. He argued that there was nothing in there that a reasonably bright person couldn’t figure out or guess from publicly available information about how nuclear fission works, and the rest is just common sense extrapolation about how engineering works. Eventually, he convinced them that censoring the story halfway through would be much more suspicious than letting it finish.

Then, just as the agents were leaving, Campbell added “Oh, and by the way, I know you’re building The Bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico.” It turns out about a quarter of the physicists in the US had suddenly changed their mailing address to the middle of the desert.