Blowups Happen(1940)

Gene SzafranRobert A. Heinlein

"Blowups Happen" is a 1940 science fiction short story by American writer Robert A. Heinlein. It is one of two stories in which Heinlein, using only public knowledge of nuclear fission, anticipated the actual development of nuclear technology a few years later. The other story is "Solution Unsatisfactory", which is concerned with a nuclear weapon, although it is only a radiological "dirty bomb", not a nuclear explosive device.

The story was first published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1940, before any nuclear reactors had ever been built, and for its appearance in the 1946 anthology The Best of Science Fiction, Heinlein made some modifications to reflect how a reactor actually worked. In the omnibus The Past Through Tomorrow, "Blowups Happen" is referred to as a 1940 story, but it mentions Hiroshima and Nagasaki, reflecting revisions made in 1946.

The story made a later appearance in The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein, a collection of short stories published in 1966. It also appears in his Expanded Universe in 1980, but here it appears as it did in Astounding in 1940 and Heinlein writes in an introduction to the story: "I now see, as a result of the enormous increase in the art in 33 years, more errors in the '46 version than I spotted in the '40 version when I checked it in '46".

The story is one of the earliest in Heinlein's Future History chronology, taking place in the late 20th century.