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It was during the 1960s and he was talking about the publication of a book based on some of his lectures about the state of physics and the moral and ethical dilemmas scientists needed to grapple with.

He explicitly refused to answer questions about the Manhattan Project, etc., due to security clearance issues. But he did say that he was profoundly uncertain whether, knowing what he knew by then (the mid-1960s,) he "would have made all the same decisions during the course of that project," or something like that.

He died shortly after that, of cancer.

I remember thinking that I had never seen such a deeply tormented individual, and feeling a kind of horrible, helpless compassion for him.

somberly,
Bright

He was convinced the bomb project was necessary because he reasonably expected Germany was capable of building the bomb too.

After the war he directed his efforts towards peace and arms control. He opposed Edward Teller's Strangelovian enthusiasm for "better" bombs (Teller being one of the actual inspirations for Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove.)

When I was a university student and newspaper reporter, Hans Bethe came to town for a United Nations charity event. By some random chance I took his callback to the university newspaper.

I was entirely in awe. This was the guy who figured out how the sun and stars work!!!

In our conversation he invited me to be a guest at one of the dinners he was having with wealthy people who were writing checks to his charities for thousands of dollars.

Later, he was on campus. followed by an entourage of physics grad students, and he noticed me sitting on a bench eating a snack and waved at me to come along.

I was ready, right then and there to start anew and change my major to physics... Nah, hah, hah, I'm too easily distracted to slog through all that math. I did the standard year of physics for scientists, and that was enough, no matter how much I enjoyed playing with stuff in the labs.

Able, Baker, Charlie, and Dog...





How can one sing it without breaking into tears?

They had no real idea what the bomb was, only that their mission was to end the war.

Although some crew members knew more than others, they were forbidden to talk about what they did know. Once the Enola Gay was in the air Paul Tibbets got on the intercom and asked the crew members if they had any idea about the bomb itself. I can't remember which crew member it was, but one said "splitting atoms". This is the account that was given in the book Enola Gay

Better the atomic bomb than Olympus.

Better we got it first.

Thank God for the atom bomb.

I think in the end it turned out that Japan and Germany were not that close to having a bomb, but it was critical that we get it as soon as possible. And it did end the war quickly.

It was just sitting up there on the tower.

I can't imagine the horror of sitting up there guarding it with a gun as lightening flashed about, especially thinking back on that, once the bomb had been ignited, and another plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki, one of the great war crimes of the 20th century.

Anyways, Chicago Pile-1, built under the viewing stands of the original Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, was lit up on December 2, 1942, which is where most people date the beginning of the Atomic Age.



The F-1 reactor is the Russian equivalent, lit up on December 25, 1946 and still in operation as a research reactor, still running on the original fuel loading, which will last hundreds or maybe thousands of years at the usual low power levels. It has a maximum power thermal power output of 24 kilowatts.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both legitimate military targets, regardless of what else they might have been.

The plutonium reactors and refining trenches at Hanford had been built huge, built to mass-produce plutonium bombs to fight a possible nuclear war against Germany and in anticipation of later conflict with "godless" Communism and intimidation of other U.S. "enemies." This was the bomb of the future, a tool coveted by the most amoral and genocidal aspect of U.S. culture, people grasping for a last minute opportunity to test one of these plutonium on a living city.

Hiroshima was the press poster child of a city destroyed by an atomic bomb, but it was destroyed by a very expensive enriched uranium bomb, a bomb that was already obsolete. Meanwhile the bulk of U.S.A. military researchers were swarming over Nagasaki assessing the damage a plutonium bomb did to industrial infrastructure and living human beings.

If Japan, for some unfathomable reason, hadn't surrendered then there were plans to drop more bombs on them until they did, bombs that were already being assembled.

With a very brief interlude after the war to patch up the most worrisome safety risks of the Hanford plant, risks that had been deemed acceptable in time of war, and to build an actual bomb assembly line, rather than a bunch of scattered shops, we continued production of these plutonium bombs until April 1949 at which point we had 120 of them and had started to build new and improved atomic bombs.

The U.S.A. was crazy about The Bomb, Stalin and everyone else knew that, and played a grim game of keeping up during the entire Cold War.

Of course Stalin wanted the bomb too, so did France and Britain, all using information they'd gleaned from their spies within the Manhattan Project to jump start their own atomic weapons projects. It really was an "arms race." The whole thing was insanity.

Yes, there was no World War III nuclear Armageddon, but in a lot of ways it was the luck of fools and children, playing with things they did not fully understand. We were toddlers who had just found a loaded gun.

Just the facts Ma'am history is bullshit and "revisionist" too. Jack Webb, playing a Los Angeles City Cop on "Dragnet," a radio and later television show glorifying the LAPD, only wanted the "facts." This was during a time the LAPD had declared war against both the black community and the antiwar leftist community, wars that led to an inevitable escalation of violence between the extremist on either side.

"Just the facts" is just another way of covering up the deeper, and much uglier realities of the human story. We humans live by stories that reflect reality and it's a distorted reflection. One must be able to shift one's point of view about, like looking into a funhouse mirror, to better comprehend the distortions, and maybe achieve a better understanding of the reality they reflect.

So tired of this revisionist nonsense.

It's indisputable: The very moment The Gadget exploded all plans for a mainland invasion of Japan were moot, if they were not already moot.

We were going to drop atomic bombs and huge conventional bombs and firebombs on Japan until they surrendered, or there was nothing left of them but starving refugees.

There is no glory in the atomic bomb, and no one was "saved." That's a bald-faced lie, and you will either not respond to this assertion or do a squid ink "fact" dump, just like a corporate lawyer dropping of truckloads of bullshit documents during the discovery phase of a trial.

Japan had already lost the war, the only question was how they would surrender. Japan was in ruins while the U.S.A. still had all it's industrial might running 24/7 entirely intact and fueled by oil and coal reserves that still haven't been depleted to this day. And oh yes, we had The Bomb.

The history of World War II as taught to our children in the U.S.A. is a stinking pile of puke and shit, just as foul and misleading as the history of the war as it is taught to children in Japan.

We are uncomfortable about the way racism factored into our response to the Japanese, and the Japanese are uncomfortable with the racist atrocities their Empire committed in China, Korea, and other territories they controlled.

That's the assessment of the casualties Olympus would have suffered based on the empirical data collected over the past two years. To say no one was saved reveals the lack of critical thinking your post demonstrates.

So, why didn't the Japanese surrender after Hiroshima?

We are very lucky to be alive .

Climate change poses a much greater threat than nuclear war ever did.