Stanely Bashkin, subject of today's "100 Days of Science" feature, used a rotating gun turret base in his design for the giant Van de Graaff accelerator installed at the University of Arizona in 1968.
The government surplus gun turret, which held the 18-ton magnet that directed ionized beams at Bashkin's foil targets, came, coincidentally, from a Naval cruiser that had been christened in 1944 as the USS Tucson.
Bashkin, who played a role in the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, became an opponent of nuclear testing and a critic of nuclear power, warning in a 1975 debate that waste from nuclear plants could fall into the hands of terrorists.
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