text: G. I. Taylor was told by the British Ministry of Home Security that it might be possible to produce a bomb in which a very large amount of energy would be released by nuclear fission and asked to report the effect of such weapons. Taylor presented his results on June 27, 1941. Exactly at the same time, in the United States, John von Neumann was working on the same problem and he presented his results on June 30, 1941. It was said that Leonid Sedov was also working on the problem around the same time in the USSR, although Sedov never confirmed any exact dates.
  The complete solution was published first by Sedov in 1946. von Neumann published his results in August 1947 in the Los Alamos scientific laboratory report on , although that report was distributed only in 1958. Taylor got clearance to publish his results in 1949 and he published his works in two papers in 1950. In the second paper, Taylor calculated the energy of the atomic bomb used in the Trinity (nuclear test) using the similarity, just by looking at the series of blast wave photographs that had a length scale and time stamps, published by Julian E Mack in 1947. This calculation of energy caused, in Taylors own words, much embarrassment (according to Grigory Barenblatt) in US government circles since the number was then still classified although the photographs published by Mack were not. Taylors biographer George Batchelor writes This estimate of the yield of the first atom bomb explosion caused quite a stir... G.I. was mildly admonished by the US Army for publishing his deductions from their (unclassified) photographs.