Sure, but the fact that he predicted a war between the U.S. and Japan after they launch a surprise attack on Hawaii, 27 years in advance, is by itself pretty phenomenal. The nuclear bomb precursor is icing on the prediction cake.
But I suppose it could be argued that there were already political tensions between the U.S. and Imperial Japan back in 1914, and if Japan were to launch a first strike on the U.S., the Naval base at Pearl Harbor would be the natural place to attack.
I’m guessing that this might possibly be a reference to a “Lord Lonsdale,” possibly this chap? . Dunno. Seems to have been an interesting person basedon press accounts.
In a 1987 episode of Married with Children, Al Bundy’s family made reference to an incident that resulted in his banning from Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs. Peggy said, " Maybe some day they’ll forget about that fan interference call that kept the Cubs out of the World Series and let Daddy back into the stadium." The infamous Steve Bartman incident happened 16 years later, when Bartman interfered with a foul ball that could potentially have been caught by left fielder Moises Alou in a game that would have put the Cubs into the World Series had they won.
Someone on this Board once suggested a likely 1950s Lonsdale that Fleming had in mind, but I don’t recall it now.
Possibly the 5th Earl of Lonsdale, who died in 1944,
…famous for his involvement with sports.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Well, in any case, I didn’t.
The 5th Earl is still remembered today because of his establishment of the Lonsdale Belt; the 6th Earl not so much.
Besides being a good guess, Charon was a perfectly logical choice for the story, since both it and Pluto are associated with the Underworld.
I can’t help but wonder if Scortia’s novel influenced the commitee that chose the name for the moon.
Didn’t Billy Mitchell plan an attack on Pearl Harbor as an exercise in the 1930s?
Creator Hank Ketcham said he was inspired by his wife Alice once saying “Our son Dennis is a menace” in exasperation over some of the boy’s antics. This was actually mentioned in a commemorative issue of the comic book that I owned long ago.
A lot of Americans probably aren’t aware of it, but there is a British comic strip called “Dennis the Menace” that started about the same time as the American strip, and is utterly different. It ran (and continues to run) in the children’s comic The Beano.
The name was said to be derived from a British music hall song, “Dennis the Menace from Venice”
A Dennis the Menace/Dennis the Menace crossover in the style of the Archie/Piunisher crossover would be interesting.
Edited to add: Evidently there was a sort of one a few months ago:
In the Beano issue for the 75th anniversary of Dennis the Menace, the other Dennis the Menace makes a cameo when the characters time travel to America.
https://fictionalcrossover.fandom.com/wiki/Dennis_the_Menace_(DC_Thomson)
I wasn’t familiar with the history behind Billy Mitchell, so I googled him. Interesting character. After WWI his opinions and actions often clashed with other military bigwigs to the point that he was court-martialed in the 20s and resigned from the military completely by 1926. But he did write a report that predicted the attack on Pearl Harbor, back in 1922. So clearly the concept was out there, long before it actually happened.
In 1922, while in Europe for General Patrick, Mitchell met the Italian air power theorist Giulio Douhet and soon afterwards an excerpted translation of Douhet’s The Command of the Air began to circulate in the Air Service. In 1924, Gen. Patrick again dispatched him on an inspection tour, this time to Hawaii and Asia, to get him off the front pages. Mitchell came back with a 324-page report that predicted future war with Japan, including the attack on Pearl Harbor.
I was aware as of post #9 
I’ve read that it was extrapolation, if Venus had 0 moons, Earth had 1, and Jupiter had 4 (that they knew at the time), then of course Mars had to had 2.
Or, as the prologue of a Science Fiction book I read as a child proposed tongue-in-check, Swift was secretly a Martian or had contact with one…
Ah, yes, of course, the sequence of floor(n^2/4), so Saturn should have 6 moons. Or maybe the sum of exponents in the prime factorization of n!, so Saturn should have 5.
Wow, 1922. I had forgotten it was that far back! 
I wonder how many today realize the B-25 medium bomber (“the Mitchell”), which was used in the Doolittle Raid on Japan in April 1942, was named after Billy, the greatest advocate of American air power.
Rosemary Clooney and Jimmy Boyd recorded “Dennis the Menace,” based on Hank Ketcham’s comic strip, in 1953:
I think it was just double the last one, with an exception made for Earth to get things going, so Saturn should have 8 moons, Uranus should have 16 and Neptune 32 (not that they knew about Uranus and Neptune yet)
James Tiptree, Jr.'s “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” postulates a virus that destroys the immune system. AIDS appeared a few years later.
Ain’s virus was much more contagious than HIV, though. And it was also engineered, not evolved.