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60th Anniversary of the Atomic Bomb
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Jul 16, 2005 04:49 AM
from the giger-counter-remembers dept.
from the giger-counter-remembers dept.
An anonymous reader writes "On July 16, 1945, the world's first nuclear bomb exploded at Trinity Site, New Mexico, marking the beginning of the Nuclear Age. Manhattan Project veteran Herb Lehr has no regrets: 'In a lot of respects I felt as if I had done something worthwhile. I am in no way ashamed of what I had done in any way, shape, matter or form. I did what I was told to do. I did it to the best of my ability.' Lehr will return to Trinity Site for the first time since the explosion. He said, 'I'm just interested in going and seeing it and maybe getting some memories back. Los Alamos was a whole interesting experience. It was something unique. I worked very hard down there.'"
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Note (Score:5, Interesting)
Good Luck
Re:Note (Score:5, Insightful)
"Please remember that Plutonium, especially pure, refined Plutonium, is somewhat dangerous. Wash your hands with soap and warm water after handling the material, and don't allow your children or pets to play in it or eat it."
or "Now hide the completed device from the neighbors and children. The garage is not recommended because of high humidity and the extreme range of temperatures experienced there. Nuclear devices have been known to spontaneously detonate in these unstable conditions. The hall closet or under the kitchen sink will be perfectly suitable."
definately have the end user in mind. It's these thoughtful tips that make this probably the best DIY WMD kit! /sarcasm>
Parent
Re:Note (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:So much for stopping nuclear proliferation. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:So much for stopping nuclear proliferation. (Score:3, Interesting)
There was a news program on TV, maybe nightline, which went to Russia to ask how much of their nuclear program has been dismantled. The anwser was not much. It is expensive to take apart nuclear missiles and store the rods. Plus, it is an attractive target for thieves. It can get good money on the black
Re:So much for stopping nuclear proliferation. (Score:3, Informative)
Your scenario has little merit. It literally takes 2 people to do it. In subs and silos, 2 people must perform an action simultaneously. Turn keys, for instance. Seperated by a dozen feet or so. 1 person physically can't do it. And that is only after getting the proper codes from the NCA(National Command Authority. President or Joint Chief, etc).
In aircraft, it would take dozens of people.
Re:So much for stopping nuclear proliferation. (Score:3, Interesting)
LOL, the Russian mob is more likely to sell you the material than the boss/workers concept. Anyway, after the material was transferred I doubt there would be anyone left alive to tell the world what the deal was. No witnesses means no messy loose ends that lead back to the source of the funds.
There are all sorts o
Re:So much for stopping nuclear proliferation. (Score:3, Informative)
This is slightly inaccurate the first bomb (Gadget) did indeed consist of two hollow hemispheres, but it was two nickel plated plutonium hemispheres (with some gold foil added to smooth it out after the nickle blistered) and not uranium hemispheres.
The first uranium bomb (Little Boy) was a gun type system with a cannon firing a bullet of uranium into a barely subcritical mass of uranium.
This is not to say that a bomb can't be m
Re:So much for stopping nuclear proliferation. (Score:4, Interesting)
...pretty much everyone signed the NPT [fas.org]. Including N. Korea and Iran. There are provisions for a country to back out of it, but N. Korea is the only country to ever do so.
No country has the ability to defend against a nuclear attack. Not just the USA is in that position.
Parent
Re:So much for stopping nuclear proliferation. (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:So much for stopping nuclear proliferation. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:So much for stopping nuclear proliferation. (Score:3, Interesting)
Wen Ho Lee [wenholee.org]. The case against him crumbled in a major way. He plead guilty to one minor count, and the government quickly trumpeted this as a victory. At sentencing, Dr. Lee was sentenced to time served and was released with the court's apologies. The judge was clearly of the opinion that Dr. Lee had been treated shamefully by the prosecution.
Don't believe every
Re:So much for stopping nuclear proliferation. (Score:3, Informative)
As it hasn't been said yet... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lehr said it is unfortunate the bombs were used for war.
Sooo, what were you expecting, thermonuclear noisemakers?
Seriously, whenever someone tries to justify something truely horrific, it always comes out as the most asinine comment one could make, under those circumstances.
Much like this one...
Re:As it hasn't been said yet... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:As it hasn't been said yet... (Score:3, Insightful)
If everyone just agreed, we wouldn't need lawyers, or politicians.
Re:As it hasn't been said yet... (Score:3, Funny)
Do I stay honorable and defend the public, or do I get insanely wealthy by selling out to the corporations? Well, I think I'll sell out!
See? There's compromise right there!
Re:As it hasn't been said yet... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:As it hasn't been said yet... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:As it hasn't been said yet... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:As it hasn't been said yet... (Score:3, Insightful)
Richard Feynman (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, whenever someone tries to justify something truely horrific, it always comes out as the most asinine comment one could make, under those circumstances.
This is a question that I have wondered for some time, as I have read his books.
It seems that many of the people who helped build the atomic bomb were later pushed out of any talk about how the bomb was to be used. Oppenheimer lost his top secret clerance and was labled a communist by the FBI. Some in government wanted to jail or kill him, they were worried he would defect to the Soviet Union in the 1960's. I think Senator McCarthy had public statements about wanting to see Oppenheimer jailed.
If there is a team of 3 or 4 that is 90% responsible for building the worlds worst weapon, should they have a say if it is used? Or do they lose that right when the finish making it? Without them, the bomb could never have been made. It seems like a huge burden to have for life, knowing your creation killed so many people.
And why did the USA need to drop 2 bombs on Japan? Didn't the first one do enough to scare the crap out of them? How far was Truman ready to go? Kill every Japanese person on the earth.
And didn't the USA during WWII jail every American citizen that looked Japanese by force, even if they never broke any laws?
Parent
Re:Richard Feynman (Score:5, Insightful)
1) marianas, iwo jima and okinawa. a friend's dad served on iwo and saipan. hell would be a gentle term. plus, i've read volumes. the fighting was unlike anything in the history of warfare. we'd have had 100X worse on japanese mainland. we expected 1 million allied casualties, and probably 10-20 million japanese. so it's lincoln's "terrible arithmetic" multiplied by 100.
2) russia. sure, we were their ally, but we all knew what they were, what they were going to do, and we wanted to send a message. if the rosenbergs (yes they were soviet spies) not given up the bomb, we'd have been in a totally different situation. we had to let them know they were well behind the curve. and yes we allowed many nazi scientists off the hook, that's not the point.
3) japan didn't surrender after bomb #1. and in fact, didn't after bomb #2. remember, the bombs were aug. 6 and aug. 9, they surrendered after the soviets invaded sakhalin and not until aug. 15. in fact, if you check, we actually had a bomber raid on aug. 10, and i believe aug. 12. ironic is that the communications were severed between the emperor (who wanted to surrender) and the military (who didn't). the militray was actualyl coming to the palace to arrest the emp and hold him so he couldn;t surrender. we didn't know this until much later. however, two nukes, two more B29 raids, and still no surrender.
4) politics. we were getting really tired of the war. europe was well over, domestic life was returning to normal, and yet 10,000 were dying on okinawa. how many more thousands were the public going to send? truman knew the war must end. and soon.
most of the second guessing has come from succeeding generations that had the luxury of self-relection that on;y peace can bring. like the greeks, it is our freedom that allows to us to be hyper-critical of ourselves (like a sophocles or aristophanes). we did much that we view as oppressive (japanese internement) yet at the time was wholly palatable by the large body of people. times change and so do cultures. but i think it is poor history and a worse morality play to go back and make assumptions about the bomb. look at japan today. not that 2 nukes are a tradeoff for a peaceful and free society (ah moral equivalency), but consider this:
40 years after the sedan the french were screaming revanche and we got ypres and verdun. 40 years after hiroshima, the japanese were not and we got toyotas.
Parent
Re:Richard Feynman (Score:5, Informative)
"Prof. Albert Einstein... said that he was sure that President Roosevelt would have forbidden the atomic bombing of Hiroshima had he been alive and that it was probably carried out to end the Pacific war before Russia could participate." --Einstein Deplores Use of Atom Bomb, New York Times, 8/19/46, pg. 1
"...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act.
"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..." -- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate for Change
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." -- Dwight Eisenhower, Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63
On August 8, 1945, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, [Herbert] Hoover wrote to Army and Navy Journal publisher Colonel John Callan O'Laughlin, "The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul." -- quoted from Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, pg. 635.
"MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed.
Parent
Re:Richard Feynman (Score:4, Interesting)
consider this as well: we killed far more in March over Tokyo with the firebombings than we did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In fact, it was LeMay who said that give him another month or two of bombing and there'd be nothing left in Japan to bomb. Now, we could have conceivably killed another 200,000 or more with more firebombing, and we'd not have the stigma of the atomic bomb. Fine. But I do think it's a little presumptuous for us to think that there lots of alternatives. I just don't there were many. Japan's moved on, perhaps we should too.
Parent
Re:As it hasn't been said yet... (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, thermonuclear weapons have been considered for use in civil engineering construction (like digging canals, mining, and underground cisterns) to aerospace (like spacecraft propulsion). Of course, that was back in days while the USA was still conducting above ground nuclear tests -- when nuclear radiation was compared to "sunshine units". Uncle Sam had an impressive "spin machine" back then.
Re:As it hasn't been said yet... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:As it hasn't been said yet... (Score:5, Informative)
Altough, actually most of the air raids with B-29's were done at low altitudes - japanese had 88 mm AA cannons, so they could not turn fast enough for low-altitude bombing. This saved fuel and allowed for higher payloads (and also prevented some engine troubles - flying at high altitudes caused overheating problems).
So yeah, that demo could have been done without any problems for subsequent real droppings.
Parent
His moral? (Score:5, Insightful)
Whenever I play a game of Civilization (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder what will happen in the next 50 years, as most countries should have nukes by then. It will not matter how wealthy a country is, their diplomats will smile and say "Defended by Nuclear Weapons". We are already there with North Korea, all that is missing for them is long range missles to deliver those Nukes to far away places.
Imagine smaller nations nuking each other. Does anyone think that Iran and Iraq would not have nuked each other in the 1980's when they had a decade long war? Or what about Israel, how many different nations want to nuke them?? And how would foriegn policy of Israel be different if the palestinians had Nukes? Would the Israeli government treat them any better?
And I can see former soviet union states getting Nukes. It could get to be messy. What country keeps setting off bombs in Moscow? Uzbekestan or is it Checkizstan. The Chenyans I think. I am too lazy to look it up at the moment, but I believe they are the ones who took a theater filled with people hostage and then killed a bunch of them, and the same people who took a school of 1000+ hostage and killed half the elementary school kids. They held a bunch of 6 to 11 year olds for 4 or 5 days without water or food. If someone can torture another human like that, setting off a nuke probably would make them loose sleep.
Will there be no wars in the future if everyone has nukes, because everyone will be scared of starting a major conflict? Or will it be like the game Civilization where as soon as everyone has nukes, they use them?? At least our leaders have deep bunkers. In 20 years when the radiation clears, they can come out of the bunkers and start the game all over.
Re:Whenever I play a game of Civilization (Score:3, Insightful)
Chechnya
Re:Whenever I play a game of Civilization (Score:3, Insightful)
You have a point, but the above quote says a lot too. Even for someone who presumably has some interest in history and international politics (you are playing Civilization), these conflicts are just vague blips on your radar.
The Chechens in Chechnya don't have it easy, and the kind of sick extremist terrorism that gave us the school bombing in Russia is the only thing you (sort of) remember.
This is unf
Lehr is right (Score:4, Insightful)
Questions about our righteousness in nuking Japan (who themselves slaughtered even more civilians in Nanking than we killed with 2 A-bombs) will never die, but I'm confident that the US getting the bomb before China, the USSR and other nations, made it possible for us to scare everyone into not using them again.
We sure as heck could not have ended the war with harsh insults in Japanese... a direct invasion would have cost millions of lives and left Russia open to join in. Ask the Germans what happened when the Soviet men came into Berlin, and overlay that disaster onto Tokyo...
This isn't meant as a troll or flamebait, seriously, I think millions of lives were saved, perhaps billions.
But you are wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, what a nice "argument". You can't of course know if someone else would have used it, but stating it as a fact seems such a great justification for US action, doesn't it?
Besides, I hope you never have to stand before a court of law, because believe me, these hypothetical arguments are not going to impress the judge.
"Questions about our righteousness in nuking Japan (who themselves slaughtered even more c
Re:But you are wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do people feel the urge to tell a simplistic story of what happened? Claiming that the atomic bomb was seen as just another weapon simply isn't true. This doesn't have anything to do with hindsight, this has to do with the documents of the time clearly showing that this was not the case.
As a trained historian and scientist, this disturbs me. Very little was understood of radioactive substances in the 1940s. What was understood was that exposure to large quantities of exotic substances caused a kind of sickness - little more. This does not translate, scientifically or historically, into an understanding that a detonation would result in radiation deaths.
Without radiation deaths, the atomic bomb is just a really big bomb. That's it -- and that's what it was seen as by the US military and by Truman (who, if you'll recall, wasn't really in on the day to day goings on of the Roosevelt administration).
US troops on the ground after the detonations didn't know what the weapon did. Radiation poisoning was called "Disease-X" and we had no idea where it came from or how to stop it.
Ultimately, World War II was a total war. In such a war, great powers seek to destroy each other absolutely with whatever means are within their reach. Debating the morality of the atomic bomb in such a context is a historical error called anachronism - judging the actions of the past by the political, social, and scientific mores of the present. Debate the morality of total war all you like - but the atom bomb was just the latest and greatest in a series of hellish weapons developed by mankind.
Name one weapon before the atomic bomb - any weapon, so horrible that its use in warfare was taboo before it was ever deployed. Why should this case be different? What should have fired off in Truman's head saying that obviously this weapon is worse than poison gas, incendiary bombs, biological weapons and countless other innovations of human kind?
History is about more than just reading about the past -- it is about seeing the events and people of an era through their own eyes. If you fail to do that, you're not a historian.
Parent
obligatory Ozzy quote (Score:5, Interesting)
Ozzy Osbourne
--------------------
Like moths to a flame
Is man never gonna change
Time's seen untold aggression
And infliction of pain
If that's the only thing that's stopping war
Then thank God for the bomb
Thank God for the bomb
Thank God for the bomb
Thank God for the bomb
Nuke ya nuke ya
War is just another game
Tailor made for the insane
But make a threat of their annihilation
And nobody wants to play
If that's the only thing that keeps the peace
Then thank God for the bomb
Thank God for the bomb
Thank God for the bomb
Thank God for the bomb
Nuke ya nuke ya
Today was tommorow yesterday
It's funny how the time can slip away
The face of the doomsday clock
Has launched a thousand wars
As we near the final hour
Time is the only foe we have
When war is obsolete
I'll thank God for war's defeat
But any talk about hell freezing over
Is all said with tongue in cheek
Until the day the war drums beat no more
I'll thank God for the bomb
Thank God for the bomb
Thank God for the bomb
Thank God for the bomb
Nuke ya nuke ya
--------------------
(Ozzy Osbourne/Jake E. Lee)
Einstein (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Einstein (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Einstein (Score:5, Insightful)
While I'm not going to say that the use of the atomic bomb was immoral, given the circumstances, the construction of the atomic bomb was not what caused Japan or Germany to lose the war. As advanced as it was, I really don't believe that Japan's atomic bomb project would have been able to offer Japan any kind of shot at victory.
Perhaps the bomb ended the war a little faster.
Perhaps if the resources that went into building cyclotrons had gone for conventional bombs and planes instead, the war would have ended quicker.
Probably without nukes at the end of WWII, the cold war would have proceeded differently.
The US would have wanted to enlist the help of the Chineese and Russians in invading Japan, which those nations would have eagerly given after all the death and shame Japan had visited upon them.
More than anything, without the bomb the Japanese would probably be speaking Pu Tong Hua or Russian.
Things could have gone differently, sure.
But the bomb was not what made Japan or Germany lose the war.
Parent
Do what you are told to do (Score:5, Insightful)
It is this attitude that made WWII, or better the nazi regime, possible in the first place. And everyone living with that attitude is, in my eyes, a coward, who is too afraid to think for himself.
How else could you explain that, by order of the DOD, soldiers were forced to remain close to the detonation to check for its impact on human beeings, while it was well known for years that there were long-term illnesses caused by it.
Re:Do what you are told to do (Score:3, Insightful)
It's easy to get self-righteous when you have the benefit of 60 years hindsight.
"I did what I was told to do." (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"I did what I was told to do." (Score:3, Insightful)
Thank you, I hadn't thought of it that way.
One Big Birthday Candle (Score:4, Funny)
They have set us up the bomb all your base are belong to us
Different Scientists Had Different Reactions (Score:3, Insightful)
In one of his memoirs, Richard Feynman recalled learning from John Von Neumann the notion that you are not responsible for the world you're in. That sustained him during the Manhatten Project years, but after he returned to civilian life as an instructor for Cornell, he went into a nihilistic type of depression:
The best quote comes from Kenneth T. Bainbridge on the morning of the Trinity test. After congratulating project leader Oppenheimer on the spectacular success of the project, he then stated "Now we are all sons of bitches."
Everyone likes atom bombs now? (Score:3, Insightful)
Comparison to Auschwitz (Score:3, Insightful)
Link. [nathanmallory.com]
Man can render unspeakably terrible things to his own kind. Death walls and gas chambers are only ghastly instruments that remind us of what mankind is capable. Is it some twisted part of the human condition? Is our psychology so simple to manipulate? Is this capacity for moral distortion within each of us?
Atrocities are not unique to the Nazis. My father likes to remind me of Japanese war crimes committed against POWs. There is no cause so noble or philosophy so infallible that human cruelty has not made a foundation from it. Even today well meaning people of conscience are drawn to polar opposites and debate whether President Bush is a righteous man or a war criminal.
The scale and efficency of the Nazi killing machine is what shocks us so, but it reenforces what we already know: this kind of holocaust can never happen again. Even though it does, and like lemmings we turn a blind eye. Rwanda? Somalia? And how many people are unconsciously hardening their hearts against Americans on one side and Arabs on the other, or the Israelis against the Palestineans? If the dam were to break, would we again see organized slaughter of the Nazi kind?
I think far more dangerous than the mind-numbing horrors of which the preserved Nazi implements of death remind us are the horrors that even reasonable men justify. One and a half million people died in Auschwitz and Birkenau, but more than four hundred thousand human beings died in blast and fallout from the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is tragedy in every life lost, but where they differ is in how they are both seen fifty years later.
Aside from a few isolated fools, the Holocaust is condemned by every soul the world over. But sentiment on the two bombings remains divided, even met with passioned approval by entirely reasonable people. War is a harsh thing, and military strategy is a long way from genocide. But tell me, were the women in line at the bank in Hiroshima and the children in the schoolhouse in Nagasaki any less innocent than those who perished in the gas chambers?
Re:60? (Score:5, Funny)
60 happens to be the base of the Babylonian number system [wikipedia.org] and the second Unitary perfect number [wikipedia.org]. You insensitive clod.
Parent
Re:War criminal (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Recommended books (Score:3, Informative)
>>
>>"The Making of the Atomic Bomb" ISBN 0-684-81378-5
>>and
>>"Dark Sun - The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb" ISBN 0-684-82414-0
>
>"100 Suns" by Michael Light (ISBN 1400041139) is an excellent collection of "terrifyingly beautiful" nuclear test photographs.
I'll see you those three books and raise you one museum.
The next time you're in Las V