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Science

I Am Not Doctor Strangelove 150

Posted by Roblimo from the hanging-out-at-the-atomic-cafe dept.
Amoeba Protozoa writes "Here is an amusing and well written interview with Edward Teller, atomic science history's own real-life Dr. Strangelove." It's in Scientific American. And at one point, Teller threatens to throw the interviewer out of his office if he mentions Dr. Strangelove "three more times."
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I Am Not Doctor Strangelove More

I Am Not Doctor Strangelove

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  • Er, the point of Scientific American is to be for non-scientists. It isn't a journal and doesn't try to be. Personally, of the "science for the masses" magazines, I think the British New Scientist is the best written.
  • Well, I try not to read it, because whenever I pick it up I find either lightweight journalism (like this Teller 'interview') or an article that misses the point of some 'new' development that I already read about a year ago, or an article that totally gets something wrong.

    It's true that most of their articles are harmless, but a couple of stinkers like that per issue makes me wonder about the articles I'm not qualified to judge.

  • Re:Genius or crazy scientist? (Score:4)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Saturday September 18, 1999 @01:42AM (#1675541)
    Genius, bar-none.

    How crazy was Project Chariot? Consider the fact that Bikini Atoll [bikiniatoll.com] is now one of the best sites for skin diving and sport fishing on the planet. (Read that as "lots of shipwrecks in pristine condition" and a nearly-undisturbed environment for the past 40 years.) The most serious radiological contaminant on Bikini is Cs-137, and the main reason it's a problem is because the local vegetation picks it up in place of potassium. It's a land problem, not a sea problem. Since a putative Alaskan harbor isn't a likely site for crop-growing, and since it would have been excavated with high-yielding thermonuclear devices designed to maximize explosive yield and minimize heavy radionuclide production, the residual radiation levels around the site would have dropped to habitable levels relatively quickly. (Of course, whether it would have cooled off in time to be economically viable compared to conventional construction, or even whether or not a harbor would have benefited the Alaskan economy is a question for economists, not physicists :)

    IMHO the best use for nuclear explosions would have been Project Orion [islandone.org]; a nuclear pulse engine. Another cool project killed by the ignorance of the public when it comes to things nuclear.

    Teller has every right to be bitter. It appears from the article that many people are unable to separate the man from the device he helped build. In an age in which the public is so frightened of the word "nuclear" that they argue to ban space probes like Cassini due to their RTGs, and in which people prefer the cyanide in apricot pits to chemotherapy "because it's the natural way to fight caner", it's not surprising that Teller's vision of the application of technology to build a better world is viewed as hubris, and his contributions are held in low esteem.

    Back to nukes. Anyone interested in the history of atomic weaponry should consider a visit to the National Atomic Museum [atomicmuseum.com] in New Mexico. The timing is great - the first weekend of October also marks the date on which White Sands Missile Range opens up the Trinity Site [oz.net] to the general public, allowing tours of the site of the first fission explosion.

    Finally - whatever your opinions on the horror of the bomb's use - the physics [fas.org] behind it was still beautiful. Anyone wanting more detailed information on the design is highly encouraged to read Carey Sublette's Nuclear Weapons FAQ [milnet.com] - a 14-part document also available at the FAS High Energy Weapons [fas.org] archive.

  • I would suggest that Dr. Strangelove used a number of Cold War figures, including Teller, Herman Kahn (the author of Mutual Assured Destruction, aka "MAD"), and a few of the other "nuke 'em back to the stone age" folk). Remember, it was made shortly after the Cuban missile crisis and in the very initial stages of the Viet Nam war. Another "ancestor" of Dr. Strangelove is the scientist in the 1926 film, Metropolis [paulist.org]
  • This is from a page of anecdotes by a friend of his, you can find it here [feynman.com]

    "A while back I was invited to a strange, but nevertheless interesting party. At this party there were all sorts of people from various professions. During the course of the evening, one very buxom woman came up to me and introduced herself. It turns out that she was a well-known stripper and actress in adult movies by the name of Candi Samples. When she found out that I studied physics she asked whether I knew a guy by the name of Dick Feynman. "Yes," I replied,. I must admit I was rather astonished to hear his name in this connection. "He is one of my biggest fans..." she said.

    A few days later I am in Feynman's office and we are talking when I say to him, "Hey, I ran into an interesting acquaintance of yours at a party the other night. Her name is Candi Samples."

    Feynman immediately smiled and said, "Hey, Al, look at this!" He went over to his file cabinet, which I thought contained all of his most important and intellectual works. It didn't take him long to pull out a black and white autographed nude shot of Candi Samples, inscribed, "To Big Dick, Love from Candi!" "


  • :) (Score:1)

    by hany ( 3601 )
    :)

    little stories like that were the reason why i like "surely, you must be joking ..." very much.

    now i'm hunting some more books about R.P.F.

  • Wether you hit a civilian target due to poor aiming or poor recon is quite uninteresting for the civilian casualties in question. And on the accuracy of bombs I distinctly recollect that there were several incidents where bombs whent off in a non-military area during the bombings in Bosnia. Don't believe all the news you are fed from CNN etc, some of those reports seemed to be sponsored by NATO. (And some I saw where apparently sponsored by Milosovech, so I'm not saying NATO are the bad guys here.)

    However I seem to have wondered OT a bit here, what I was really trying say was that you can't fight a war without civilian casualties. If you believe that you are even more stupid than people that think communism work. Particularly when you throw thermo-nuclear weapons into the mix.

    Furthermore I just loathe the (generally) American attitude that communism is the devil and root of all evil. Communism in itself isn't too be blamed more than christianity or democrazy for the bad things that have been done in their respective "names". Nazism is a different issue since it is based on anti-semetism. And for the record I personally use to debunk communists and "new-liberalist" in my surroundings for their naïve thinking, so it's not like I agree with communism.

    It does however seem as if we can agree on that Teller is a crazy old man. And that we should all be happy that his kind didn't get all of their ideas through. I just get so tired of all the "you would all be speaking Russian if it weren't for us!" attitudes that are predominant amongst them. Playing on people's fears should be a capital punishment when the entire world is at stake in your little game.
  • You're confusing the H-bomb with the atomic bomb. Yes, there are very good arguments that support the development of the atomic bomb under the Manhattan Project. Yes, I'm quite certain your father is right.

    The H-bomb, however, is an altogether different issue. It was developped after WW2 was won. It uses an atomic bomb as a trigger. The H-bomb never needed to exist other than a show of paranoia and power during the Cold War.

    There's a large margin between Openheimer and Teller. Openheimer opposed the H-bomb's development, and Teller denounced him as a Communist. This goes to show what kind of man Teller is.

    "There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."

  • Someone makes an overly-pessistic conclusion that would discourage someone to "press the button" and you find them to be idiots? I'd rather say that they used the same means as their opponents to counterbalance people like Teller. I agree with you that this isn't "good science" but perhaps sometimes "bad science" is better than global disaster? (Or more local as in the case of nuking Alaska.) This is also more of a political issue, and then lying is a way of life, sadly.

    And when Sagan is on the topic I think most people will agree that he has certainly ended up on positive karma. Or do you think it was because of faked results or poor predictions (Global weather is something we still can't simulate very accurately.) that the thouchdown spot for Sojourner was named after him?

    What's sick about making thermo-nuclear weapons? What do you think? No matter which country "won" that war humanity would most likely be better off speaking Russian. And considering the mentality of many politicians I don't doubt that some would be capable of launching even if they knew the situation was hopeless "Just because the other guys shouldn't win!" That may be appropriate behaviour in a sandbox. But hardly so on this scale.

    Finally, all nations have done atrocities in name of what they thought to be the truth. Do you think that the Soviet thought of themselves as the bad guys? Don't you think they also had some "save the world" motive? Or perhaps the US government patented that? All countries and societies have done horrible things, but when you are actually *proud* of it it get's really sad.
  • It does however seem as if we can agree on that Teller is a crazy old man.
    Nope. Old, yes. Crazy? Not hardly.

    And that we should all be happy that his kind didn't get all of their ideas through. I just get so tired of all the "you would all be speaking Russian if it weren't for us!" attitudes that are predominant amongst them.
    Tough. If it weren't for people like us,you would be speaking Russian. For you, it
    would have no doubt been a very educational, if somewhat lethal, experience.

    Playing on people's fears should be a capital punishment when the entire world is at stake in your little game.
    It's only a game when you get to sit on the sidelines and let other people carry the burden.
    This will no doubt be moderated down as flamebait,but the fact is that the Western
    democracies and their authoritarian allies won, and the Soviets lost bigtime. No thanks to you,
    and people like you who can't seem to recognize evil when you see it.
  • If it is part of nature we should try to understand it.

    You mean to tell me that if you see a drop of water, you can't imagine an ocean. Socratic exploration of science is irresponsible.

    Are you going to tell me that if I measure 1 cm and 1 more cm and I find I get 2 cm and 1 more for 3 cm, I'm going to have to check 3cm + 1cm = 4 cm.

    How is it people can't abstract? I'm amazed.

    We already knew what was possible before it was built.

    How shallow can you get?

  • Sad really (Score:3)

    by jflynn ( 61543 ) on Saturday September 18, 1999 @01:57AM (#1675555)
    Teller is a brilliant and insightful person. But his insistence that scientists should not care about the consequences of their work is not a currently popular view. Personally I think he's half right -- you can't do science and worry whether you should know what you might find out. Too often science is serendipitous anyway, even if you tried not to, you could still discover the next horror weapon.

    But scientists have a very real obligation to help politicians wisely evaluate the consequences of scientific and technological breakthroughs. You can't make the H-bomb go away, but you can help control its use and production intelligently.

    When I hear of plans of h-bombing a new harbor into Alaska, to "mainline" it's economy, I have to think Teller is speaking as an expert in fields he knows next to nothing about. Bad advocacy -- creates two sorts of idiot -- those who are frightened of any use of nuclear energy, and those who really think it's a good idea to H-Bomb Alaska.

    Once we get into space, nuclear energy is likely to become much more useful. Without the high concentrations of people around reactors, risks are far less in comparison to benefits. Easy disposal of waste in the Sun makes it more attractive yet. Even bombs may well be truly useful tools for excavating or moving asteroids.

    Teller is nothing new in science. Someone who has truly contributed a lot to a difficult field, but whose opinions outside his field are somewhat inflammatory, if not arrogant. His work will be greatly appreciated next century, but his abrasive personality has cost him acceptance in his own lifetime.
  • Carl Sagan mentions Teller in his book "The demon haunted world" and his view of the guy isn't very positive. From that book I got the feeling that Teller was mainly interested in making it seem as if he was _not_ "Dr. Strangelove" and that was why he thought up all of these little projects.

    And not only did he partake in the development of the thermo-nuclear bomb, he was one of the major forces behind it. Using the everpopular "If we don't they will" mentality. Basically I think the world would be better off without any people like that, it's just a sick attitute.

    And when you say that "...Another cool project killed by the ignorance of the public when it comes to things nuclear...." I think it should be pointed out that many other leading scientists have a very justified fear of nuclear weapons, irregardless of their uses. It's not only the "ignorant masses". If that was the case then you would have your nice glowing bay in Alaska today. (And hey, you would get a tan on both sides of your body when you lie at the beach there, that would be geat, wouldn't it?)

    I trust people that say "It's perfectly safe" about as much as people that claim "This will hurt me more than you".

  • Moderator note: I consider this article to be at least a bit about scientific journalism, so I believe this to be an on-topic question.

    When I was 5, my parents bought me a subscription to ScienceX, where X is the set of current years, and contained at least 76, 77, 78. It was a great magazine, and sufficiently beyond my understanding (hey, I was 5!) that it made me want to learn about all of the new ideas I was exposed to.

    I currently subscribe to Wired and SIGACTNews, but barely have time to read them - let alone many other magazines. So, as much as I dislike it, I haven't had a good science magazine in about 10 years.

    What's out there now? I'm getting ready (well, s/I'm/Mywifeis/, actually) to have a child, and I'd like to get something nice and meaty to dig into, but which preferably doesn't require a postgrad degree in math or physics. To clarify, I'm a computer science guy. I have at least a basic understanding of higher math and physics, but don't find it relaxing or enjoyable to dig through the minutae. Plus, I'd like something for my kid to read that could have the same effect that ScienceX had on me.

    Any suggestions, Gentle Reader?

  • "We probably have bombs now that have such diminised radioactive effects that you couldn't tell if it was nuclear or conventional the next day."

    I doubt this very much.

    Nuclear excavating may actually have been a good idea. However, I have never read any numerical reports of how much fallout there would be from the cleanest H-bomb. If it is really low enough that humans could live on the new shore line immediatly afterwards with only modestly higher background radiation, then the only thing stopping us is fear of misuse. (Note that i am defining modestly higher as an increase that could be found by moving to an area with natural sources of increased background radiation.)
  • Who said anything at all about their civilian populations, or 'wiping out', for that matter?
    ---
    In addition, it was quite possible to fight communism effectively without 'killing children'. For example, the MX missile could find a target to an accuracy of 100 yards. This made it easy to choose specifically military targets.

    Yes, it worked real well in both Saudi-arabia and now lately in Bosnia, didn't it? I'm not proposing that you should believe everything that was blamed on NATO bombs, but some reports where apparently accurate. ("Err, sorry China.") And furthermore what do you do when you have a hospital or school on top of a bunker? Bit of a tricky situation woudn't you say? Don't think that will happen? Think again, war is war, if you don't do everything to win, you will lose.

    And if you do fight a nuclear war there will be tons of civilian casualties. (Hiroshima, Nagasaki) It's some bloody big bombs you are talking about here, designed to wipe out cities, keep that in mind would you? (And if you feel that nuclear weapons shouldn't be used then I don't see how it can work in defence of Mr. Teller.)

    And second, you seem horrified that "cummunism killed a lot of people". Does the fact that indians were killed during the US's early history make democrazy a bad idea? Or perhaps we should kill off all religious people, Christianity did after all torture more people to death than the total number of casualties during WWI and WWII. And that's just one religion.

    Finally there is nothing inherently wrong with communism, it's just too optimistic about human nature. The fact that Stalin was a crazy bastard isn't really something you can blame on communism.

  • Russian also looked at something like project chariot. They were planning to use multiple nuclear bombs to build a canal that would be used to reroute one of their rivers from running through Siberia and have it u-turn and go someplace useful for them.

    The US also had plans to use nukes to make a sea level canal through Nicaragua, and I've seen late 50's pro nuclear educational videos that discussed using a nuclear blast to blow a new ground level, i.e.. flat, pass through the Rocky Mountains for a highway.
  • Here's a link with more speculation on who Dr. Strangelove might have been, from the [krusch.com]
    alt.movies.kubrick FAQ
  • Scientific American seems to be one of the best written magazines to date. Always have quality stuff. Good interview too.
  • Teller was in it all wasn't he. It might have been a better world without him for awhile like someone has said near the end of the article, but someone would have come up with what he did sooner or later. Even with having a stroke this 91-year old man seems like he knows his stuff and what's going on. Rock On Teller!!!
  • Ouch. We need some clarity here. Making sure people understand that both sides were doing terrible things is important but you had better be careful when making blanket statements like For every 'provocation' the Soviets put forward, I can name one that we did right before or after on the same scale geopolitically. . Have you ever heard of the "Gulag archipelago"? or better yet seen it? Say what you will, even the slaughter in Vietnam compares favourably (if such a comparison is possible) to what the Soviets were doing to inhabitants of their own country as well as others.
  • You surely won't get far with your drop of water.

    My mistake. Water is massless.

  • ... (Score:3)

    by Signal 11 ( 7608 ) on Friday September 17, 1999 @11:55PM (#1675568)
    How odd. This man seems more concerned about the issues he championed than himself. He seemed determined not to promote himself. That's a very rare quality in today's world, and it shows through vividly in this interview.

    --

  • Teller still tries to defend the hydrogen bomb. (Score:4)

    by Derek Pomery ( 2028 ) on Friday September 17, 1999 @11:57PM (#1675569)
    Notice NONE of his ideas for peacetime use of the hydrogen bomb were remotely useful.
    The Soviets built a hydrogen bomb only because they knew the US was doing the same. While it's possible that building up a vast arsenal to wipe out all life may indeed have been the reason for the USSR's collapse, "vindicating" Teller's observation that we would all be speaking Russian and he would be in a concentration camp, it still seems that there could have been a more effective way to win the cold war then build up a vast arsenal capable of wiping us all out many times over.

    And the threat isn't over yet.

    Personally, I got the impression Teller was suffering in part from cognitive dissonance in an attempt to justify that his life wasn't completely wasted.

    "The bomb WAS good."
    "I thought of it, not Ulam."
    "Alaska would be much improved if we blew up half a dozen hydrogen bombs just off shore."
  • Given that he had invested his entire life in defending them against most of the scientific community.

    In some way, the ideas could be said to be Teller.
  • You take a look at the stuff this guy worked on and there is no doubt that he's a brilliant man (or was at least) who has made some contributions. But then you take a look at some of the other stuff... I don't know... it makes me wonder a bit. For example, that link to Project Chariot [uconn.edu] was rather disturbing. With what we all sort of implicitly understand and know about nuclear power and nuclear weapons, it seems as if it would be rather difficult to miss the downside of using nuclear weapons to excavate. For someone who helped design and create the technology, you'd think he would understand what the implication and long term impact would be on a harbor excavated with nukes.

    The article seems to make him sound like a crackpot obsessed with the power of the nuclear weapons he worked with, trying to use them for everything from geographical engineering to defense. The project chariot thing really disturbed me, though. If the account at the link above is true, then I worry that maybe he is a crazy scientist.

    On the other hand, maybe this was his way of coping with a truly awful weapon that he had a hand in creating. Finding a successful peaceful use might make him feel better.

    Sujal

  • taking things out of context (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There have been many plans for the use of atomic energy that seem unrealistic or needlessly dangerous today.

    The man is 92 years old, in his heyday the Bomb was considered a great way to convert a small amount of matter into a large amount of energy, and it does that pretty well.

    Any endeavor requiring large amounts of energy could possibly be converted to nuclear power. So he wanted to use bombs for excavating a bay, it's not all that crazy considering the time and place in which it was suggested (1958).

    This man saved the free world, and saying "someone else would have done it sooner or later" is quite probably true -- but it may well have been a russian or german, and we'd all be dead, or at least never born. If you don't believe that, your school tought you some shitty history, go find some WW2 vets and ask them about it before they die.

    The next 50 years should be pretty exciting. China has already sated publicly that they are going to take what we have, so let's hope our genetics research accelerates faster than theirs.

    There may be a genetic war on the horizon, and if one side has to win while the other loses, it might as well be the West than wins, rather than the commies.

    History repeating itself? nah....
  • Yes, it was Clinton, but no, it was this year.

  • Teller earned his place in history (Score:5)

    by LongShip ( 6698 ) on Saturday September 18, 1999 @03:39AM (#1675576) Homepage
    History isn't going to be very kind to Edward Teller. Here are some of the reasons why:

    • When Oppenheimer opposed the "Super" on the grounds that it was an unnecessary weapon of genocide, Teller skewered him. This was a very organized and deliberate maligning of another scientist only because he held an opposing opinion. Teller's words were used to undermine Oppenheimer's veracity in front of the AEC. In an era dominated by HUAC and Senator McCarthy, and in spite of all that Oppie had accomplished for the country, that was enough to destroy a very important person's life, career, etc. The impact of these events is incalculable.
    • Teller's version of the Super probably would not have worked--it was a likely dud. So say the other physicists surrounding the project, including Hans Bethe.
    • Teller wanted control of the Super project at Los Alamos, but nobody wanted to work with him. Norris Bradbury, the lab's director, had a choice. It was either Teller or two-thirds of his division leaders. Teller had to go. He refused to work under anybody and resigned in a huff in Sept., 1951 when Norris appointed Marshall Holloway to direct the project. This was right when the project got going. Teller wasn't even directly involved in development of the Super from that point on.
    • In March, 1951, Ulam saved Teller's design with his staged implosion design. In spite of these facts, Teller continues to take sole credit. How many people have heard of Stanislaw Ulam?
    • The Russians had a more advanced A-bomb on the drawing boards when they exploded their first A-bomb, a copy of the Nagasaki device. If spies hadn't turned over the design to the Russians they would have soon had an A-bomb anyway. They were working on the Super soon after their first atomic test in 1949.
    Teller is almost totally driven by his hatred of the Russians. This is a hideous concept on which to base one's existence. In my opinion, Edward Teller deserves his reputation as the much maligned enfant terrible of science. Dr. Stranglove, indeed.

    References:

    Rhodes, Richard. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. 1995. Simon and Schuster.

    Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. 1986. Simon and Schuster. Pulitzer Prize winner. A great book.

    Goodchild, Peter. J. Robert Oppenheimer: Shatterer of Worlds. 1985. Fromm International Publishing Corp.

  • It would actually by hard to send a payload (e.g. nuclear waste) into the sun, because when you start out in the earth's orbit, you have a great deal of angular momentum that you have to dispose of. Of course, it might be doable if the garbage scow is, say, fusion-powered. :-)
  • Carl Sagan mentions Teller in his book "The demon haunted world" and his view of the guy isn't very positive. From that book I got the feeling

    You can't quote Carl sagan and still be taken seriously. Have you ever heard of the TTAPS study? It faked speculative climactic results of a nuclear exchange. It was the work of Sagan (the 'S' in TTAPS) and some other left-wing scientists. (Of course, the idiots at SciAm bought the whole sack of bullshit.) It turns out they skewed a bunch of variables in their model to make the results come out the way they wanted. Ever the fool, he was heard before the Persian Gulf War, using the same faked model to predict global cooling as a result of oil fires in Kuwait and Iraq. It would be generous to have called him a crank

    The point is, Sagan was always one to put his ideological agenda before scientific truth. He was a fraud on this, and other occasions.

    Using the everpopular "If we don't they will" mentality...it's just a sick attitute.

    Why is it sick? It was certainly true. The Soviets were always trying to lull the West into complacency, and then they'd strike out unexpectedly and do things like... put missiles in Cuba, invade Afghanistan, invade central America (through their Sandanista proxies in Nicaragua), and spawn Marxist revolutions in Africa (Angola, Ethiopa) and Asia (North Vietnam). If you are under any illusions about the imperial nature of Soviet Communism, then you must've learned history from Soviet textbooks. Ask any citizen of Hungary or Poland about it - they'll be glad to tell you.

  • Thank You! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Anyone who lived under communism can tell you :

    you hear your neighbor's door crash down, you know they did nothing, you've known them for years, but they are dragged kicking and screaming to a gulag, never to be seen again. If you say anything, or even look out your door, you go too.

    This is a documented method of communist control -- mnipulating populations into sheep through fear, picking families at random for prosecution and imprisonment.

    China uses "Block Captains" everywhere, they "monitor" the "cells" for "unusual behavior", which is reported back to the police. The suspects are rounded up and placed in hospitals for "reeducation".

    Many posters are ragging on Teller. They have no clue what fear is, having been coddled their entire lives by western liberalism, and politically correct history books edited by some wacko history professor in the mid-seventies.

    I grew up with people from Rumania, they told me of their friends who were killed in the name of control.

    Note that the right-wing ultra conservatives are more than capable of the same behavior. Central America, anyone? Guatamala?

    The history books are getting oh-so-clean nowadays, and many of the posters here lapped it up like a kitten drinks a saucer of cream.

    Notice how quickly Russia has "detained" 11,000 people in the wake of the terrorist bombings? Seems rather efficient, old habits die hard, I guess.
  • He got very upset and angrily announced that a scientist's only responsibility is to science.


    For those interested in the ethics of science, I would strongly recommend finding anything written or presented by the late Jacob Brownowski.

    He was a leading military mathematician who visitied Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombs to study aftermath. He returned as a profoundly changed man, and pioneered a new field of ethics in science. His television series _The Ascent of Man_ is an amazing account of our history encompassing science, art and the human condition; and builds strong case for ethics in the practice of science. If you get the chance, see it. It will probably change your life.

    You can find out about the companion book at amazon [amazon.com].


    He was a great man. It would have been interesting to see what Brownowski and Teller would have said to each other if they were in the same room.


    - James.

  • research about (almost) anythink can teach us a lot. that's why i don't like when scientific researches are canceled for "political" reasons.

    sure some things can wipe us out (like DNA tempering, nuclear reactions, ...). but banning such projects can cause just grater probability of such dead result.

    we should not ban research. we have to pay attention at who researches such things (and how).

    like any other information: information is not good or bad. the use of such information can be good or bad.

  • Would we have the H-bomb without Teller? I think certainly yes. Most likely not a quickly as we did. Would the Russians have had it first? Don't know... Although that thought does frighten me, just like the thought of the Nazis having the A-bomb first.

    The thing is that just about any immoral/self-destructing/bad-for-the-world scheme can be justified when there's fear involved. Ideas like Project Chariot (or draining the Mediterranean to make farmland, or... the list goes on) all have one thing in common: they're boldly outlandish, potentially helpful to humans, but we don't fear what might happen if we don't do them.

    The H-bomb was invented because of our fear of Communism. If the thought of fusion never occurred (which is unlikely), then it might just as well have been a giant A-bomb on giant rockets. Think of all the other outlandish ideas which failed. H-bombs just happened to work.

    Disclaimer: I don't agree with Teller's politics at all; I'm just trying to make some observations of the world in general.

  • back in 40s when nuclear bomb have been developed at los alamos (i hope i remember it well :) scientists there were asked to patent every idea related to use of nuclear power.

    there were a lot of ideas

    for example richard p. feynman comes with nuclear airplane.

    while talking about richard p. faynman: there is a book with his memories. it is very good while it is funny and it teach something at the same time.

  • You Are Ignorant (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    My father was a bomber pilot over Japan. He's tired of telling people of the terrble death toll the West would have suffered if an invasion of Japan was necessary.

    Japanese culture demands death before surrender. Ever heard of Iwo Jima? Not even japanese soil, and they would not surrender until the very end. Japan is just a bit larger than Iwo, wouldn't you say?

    Enjoy your fake history all you want, there was no serious blackade plan. It was "Surrender, or be invaded", and the bomb let the Japanese surrender in the face of its might.

    Even the Japanese leadership admitted they would not have surrendered, thus forcing a terrible land invasion, were it not for the Bomb.

    Teller is a hero of the free world. He saved countless Japanese, American and allied citizens from a terrible death fighting on Japanese soil.

    Truman made the right decision, there was no other choice but a massive death toll on all sides.

  • Wasted Interview. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    SA interviews a Brilliant Mind for several hours and gives us a few trivial quotes that the interviewer has elicited for the sole purpose of trashing the man in an attempt to score a few political/philisophical points. Instead of giving us a decent interview, we get to read about the interviewers feelings, his recognitions while walking down Palo Alto street, and other outpuring of HIS genius.

    That article makes me proud that I've only bought 4 or 5 SA magazines this decade. I used to by 9 or 10 a year, but they started filling the front and back of the mag with left-wing Globalist-Socialist editorial rants. Occasional reviews at the grociery store reveal that it has only gotten worse. They've ruined a once-great American Intitution.

  • Re:Hello neutron bomb (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is exactly what a neutron bomb does. It has be explosive power to blow up a car, at best

    Well, yes and no. The determining factor in the amount of radioactive fallout generated by a multi-stage thermonuclear device and the duration of its persistence is primarily the material used in the tamper surrounding the final fusion fuel and fissile sparkplug. If the tamper is constructed of a fissile material (e.g., enriched uranium), then the fission of the sparkplug and fusion burn of the compressed final stage fuel can be significantly augmented by fission of the tamper itself, to the point where the majority of the device's energy is from fission, not fusion. In such a case, a good deal of fallout is generated from this tamper fission.

    If the tamper is not fissile (e.g., contructed of tungsten), then the device can be designed so that the majority of the energy comes from the fusion burn (although the total yield will be less without the contribution of the fission of the tamper.) In such a case, it is possible to make a themonuclear device that will have minimal and shortlived radiative aftereffects.

    If, on the other hand, you salt the tamper with materials (e.g., Cobalt-59) that will generate highly radioactive and persistent fallout when they absorb neutrons from the final stage detonation, then you can create some truly nasty dirty bombs -- sufficient even to wipe out all life on earth.

    Finally, a "neutron" bomb is designed to not contain the high speed neutrons from either the primary or later stages of a device (and thus it cannot have a fission reaction in a tamper and is of comparatively low yield), but to allow them to escape early from the bomb casing. Beside their intended anti-personnel effect, these neutrons will also have a variety of radiative effects on bombarded materials. Some of these effects (such as on steel armor) can be of fairly long duration.

    In any event, a neutron bomb still has to have at least a primary fission component, so I rather suspect that it is impossible to build one that only has sufficient explosive yield to destroy a car.

  • The author also didn't mention that the DoD and DARPA funded the "robust North California economy" and not the other way around.


    And I'm suprised at the ignorance of history here; noone has yet mentioned the real-life inspiration of Dr. Strangelove: Robert McNamara.

  • It's an interesting point, though: how much must scientists predict the morality or immorality of what they're doing?

    I mean, in the case of nuclear research in general, the long term moral worth of nuclear power, for example, is a lot harder to qualify than nuclear weapons research. Should people have researched nuclear power? If not, how far back would you stunt the research, given a chance? Would you deny any nuclear research at all, including such things as Positron Emission Tomography, an occasionally vital medical tool?

    I hope I'm not drifting too far off-topic with this -- although I don't think general scientists' morality (as opposed to scientific morality, of which Teller might be justified in getting huffy about the suggestion) can be off-topic when you're talking about the Father of the Bomb -- but surely any scientist is, at the same time as being a scientist, a human being and must therefore be responsive to the morality of his situation?

    Possibly not: many jobs require the employee to withhold e.g. compassion, or pity. Or does morality stand apart from that, as a fundamental way in which we can ever be part of a race, not merely a society?

    (Of course, I have chosen a DPhil on the cooling of ions in quantum computers, which at least for now holds no ethical problems unless you're against the wilful confinement of innocent calcium ions...)
  • I grew up in Russia, parents of my grandparents were killed in Civil War of 1917 and Stalin repressions of 1937.

    And those 11,000 people were Moscow's visitors and it's completely legal to be able to detain them from the capital (I'm not saying it's good but it's perfectly legal).

    And Russia isn't living in horror.. in poverty - yes but not horror.

    Next time, know more what you talk about.
  • Well, Scientific American is a good start. So is New Scientist, as another poster mentioned. Physics Today has some cool stuff aimed at the educated nonexpert.

    For the younger enthusiast, there's the weekly Science News.

    Discover and Popular Science are the scientific equivalent of People. OK for kids, I suppose.

    Don't bother with any of the nonjournal chemistry rags. Chemical and Engineering News, for example, is only useful if you want to read badly written hagiography about executives at chemical corporations.


    If you're really looking for meatier material, I suggest Science and Nature. They have a mix of science gossip, generalist articles, and specialist articles. If you feel you don't have the background to read the specialist articles, read the lighter stuff for a year--you'll be surprised at what you pick up. And don't bother inquiring about their overpriced subscriptions, just go to your local college library.
  • I should work this out on paper before posting and possibly looking dumb, but it seems to me that you only need to get rid of all the angular momentum if you need the garbage to go straight to the sun. If you don't mind it spiraling in, it shouldn't be much of a problem.
  • you don't happen to know Feynmans opinion of Teller? My HS physics teacher showed us some interviews of the guy (F) and I read a couple of his books, by far one of the coolest geeks of the century. I would respect his opinion. (that reporter was way too biased, especially after being intellectually bested by a 91-year old stroke survivor with one foot)
  • If I remember correctly, the Soviets started work on their Shloka (sloka?) hydrogen bomb long before the US started serious H-Bomb work.

    One must remember that Laventia(sp) Beria ran the Soviet atomic bomb project during the Stalin years. He was not going to wait around for the US to build one first.

    Even without the espionage it would only have been a few years until they can up with the idea of staged ignition.

    We also have to remember that fission bombs can only grow so far. They basically top out at about 700 Kt. Whereas fusion bombs have no pratical limits.
  • > How is it people can't abstract? I'm amazed.
    > We already knew what was possible before it was built.

    So? (I assume your argument is that the decision to build was wrong because building things that go BOOM is Morally Naughty for sufficiently-loud values of BOOM :-)

    Suppose that the Pentagon had looked forward and decided not to build - or that the physicists at the Manhattan Project had forseen the destructive power of such a device and "gone on ethical strike", perhaps by pretending not to have figured out the theories of radiation hydrodynamics that ultimately became the Teller-Ulam device?

    Do you honestly believe that Stalin, (being the wonderfully-enlightened pacifist we know him to be from his historical record), would have made the same abstraction, and decided not to direct his scientists to build it?

    Teller's sense of "build it first, let the ethicists worry about what to do with it later" may offend you, but IMHO his judgement with respect to the Soviet regime's intentions at the start of the Cold War was bang-on.

    A deeper question: If Teller was wrong in his support for development of the H-Bomb to counter a perceived Soviet nuclear weapons development threat, was Einstein wrong when he wrote his famous letter (Page 1 [atomicmuseum.com] and Page 2 [atomicmuseum.com]) to Roosevelt in August of 1939, prompting the Manhattan Project as a counter to a possible Nazi bomb? It's not because we were at war with the Nazis - World War II wouldn't start for another month.

  • Interesting, yes. Well written, no.

    The author, Gary Stix, seems to have an all-too-common bias to his writing: peace-loving hippies good, hard-headed scientist bad. This can be entertaining, even endearing, when applied to relatively trivial subjects, but here it comes off as biased, naive, and peevish.

    The Cold War was the conflict of the century, and Teller played a pivotal role. The world was at stake, literally. Stix is either innocent about whether the world would be better off with Soviet domination or Edward Teller, or he is outright wrong in his preference.

    In his remarks about hubris, Stix shows himself to be one of the small-is-beautiful gang, opposed to any plan that might mean digging a big hole or generating a lot of energy. Apart from being narrow-minded, this point of view is ignorant of history. It is likely that our grandchilderen will have machines that make our industry look as if we are hauling coal out of mines with donkeys. Unless we consider things that appear on the surface as "hubristic," we will miss opportunities to give succeeding generations better lives.

    Overall, the article is a huge missed chance to create a significant historic document.

  • *grin* Just poking fun..

    There's no such thing as a spiral orbit; barring perturbations from third bodies, all orbits follow conic sections (ellipses, circles, parabolas, hyperbolas) around the center of mass of the system. To send something into the sun, you need to put it into an elliptical orbit whose perihelion will be inside the sun's radius... which basically means killing most of it's initial velocity.

    If you figure you're already in orbit around a planet, you can probably get a free couple miles per second by boosting on the right half of your orbit, and maybe you can do a gravity assist or two... but most of the 25 miles per second delta V you'd need to send something into the sun would have to come from your own engines.


    But who wants to send nuclear waste into the sun anyway? If you've got cheap spaceflight, pick a spot on the moon, dump or bury it all there, and forget about it. It won't hurt anybody, and it'll be useful someday.
  • But who wants to send nuclear waste into the sun anyway? If you've got cheap spaceflight, pick a spot on the moon, dump or bury it all there, and forget about it. It won't hurt anybody, and it'll be useful someday.

    Yeah, but September 13, 1999 has already come and gone.

  • (Of course, I have chosen a DPhil on the cooling of ions in quantum computers, which at least for now holds no ethical problems unless you're against the wilful confinement of innocent calcium ions...)

    Actually, I can think of one definite problem. Quantum computers can be used to factor numbers much more quickly that normal computers. If I remember correctly, the time to factor a number using Shor's aloroithm is O(n) with respect to the number of bits in the number. By comparison, I think the fastest current method using a classical computer (i.e, the one in front of you) is O(2^n^(1/3)). The complexities might be wrong, but the point is that a quantum computer is faster by orders of magnitude.

    The point of all of this is that a working quantum computer could be used to used to factor a large number relatively quickly. Since many modern public-key (and probably others; I'm a bit ignorant at some of this) encryption methods use prime numbers, privacy would take a bigger hit that any of the recent moves against it.

    If that's not an ethical issue, I don't know what is...

    -ElJefe

  • Well... (Score:1)

    by Wah ( 30840 )
    Finally there is nothing inherently wrong with communism, it's just too optimistic about human nature.

    Communism is WAY too optimistic about human nature, IMHO. Which actually does make it inherently wrong, at least as a form of government. Maybe "wrong" isn't the correct word, "useless" fits better.
  • > Using the everpopular "If we don't they will" mentality.
    > Basically I think the world would be better off
    > without any people like that, it's just a sick attitute.

    In terms of game theory, I viewed the Cold War as a high-stakes game of Prisoner's Dilemma. The optimal strategy in PD is tit-for-tat. If your opponent doesn't defect, neither should you. If your opponent does defect, you should respond on the next turn with a defection. Reinforce good behavior with good behavior, and bad with bad. Eliminating your ability to defect - and telegraphing this elimination to your opponent in advance of a game of PD - is poor strategy indeed when you have reason to believe your opponent won't be as high-minded as you.

    Let the truth be known, I agree with you - the world would be a better place without the "If we don't they will" people. (Of course, it'd also be a better place if cold beer ran from my faucets instead of water, spammers were nonexistent, the Feds had a clue on crypto and privacy issues, and if Bill Gates had spent less time studying and more time partying in high school.)

    Unless you've developed a mechanism for detecting and eliminating "if we don't they will" people on both sides of an incipient technological arms race (if you do have such a mechanism, activate it now before they find out about it! :), I'm afraid both sides will continue to need them.

  • This post seems to be an example of a common misconception. This misconception is the same one that the "No Nukes" proponents in Vancouver (and elsewhere in the US and Canada) were so fond of stating in the 80's. This is the misconception that the Russians would not have invaded whether or not the US had its atomic arsenal. The Russian people did not want a war with the West (what ordinary working person wants war?). But the men in power in the politburo knew what was the greatest risk to their uncontested power, and would have taken what steps they saw as necessary to maintain that power if the price had not been so high.

    In spite of the revisionist history in the Sci Am article, the Cold War was won by Star Wars. The Russian economy was not capable of sustaining an equivalent program and that is what caused the downfall of the Soviet Union - they knew that they could not match the US in such a development. The Apollo lunar program is what gave the US the credible possibility of achieving such a program (assuming it was technically feasible).

    Now, it's true that what made the work on Star Wars possible was the US' free market economy and the electronic industry in California and elsewhere. But it's possible to argue that the US economy would not have been capable of that development if it were not for the 40 (mostly) peaceful years they were blessed with since the end of WWII. Although I don't want to belittle the war experiences of anybody in Vietnam or Korea, let's face it, 50 thousand US casualties in Vietnam are minor compared to the millions in WWI, WWII or the deaths that would have occurred in a confrontation between the free West and the Soviets.

    So the question is "Would just the atomic bomb have been sufficient as a deterrent to keep the Cold War cold for as long as it did, or was the orders of magnitude greater power of the hydrogen bomb necessary?". Either way, the Star Wars program, advocated by Teller and the President's Advisory Council on Science and Technology (including Jerry Pournelle, and many members of the scientific and military communities), is what delivered the final uppercut to Soviet Communism.
  • I'm trying to remember, was Gary Stix the guy who also did the character-assasination article on Drexler and the Foresight Conference a year or two back? As somebody else commented earlier, I too have stopped collecting SA due to these editorial soapbox rants being touted as scientific journalism.

    The survey issues (where they collect articles from the last few years on a given topic) like the ones on space missions or biotech are still worth buying as general starter reference but that's it. Haven't seen one in a while though, maybe the signal to noise ratio has gotten so bad the publishers are having a problem finding enough wheat among the chaff.
  • McNamara seemed more like a General Ripper to me, not a Doctor Strangelove...
  • I agree with almost everything you say but one minor point - ". Easy disposal of waste in the Sun makes it more attractive yet. " While this may sound reasonable and desirable now, this is a horid (sp?) idea. Nuclear waste while not useful now - is likely to be a valuable resource in the not to distant future. Us launching it into the sun is the equivalent of the oil barons burning off the high octane part because it wasn't useful for oil, but is now used for making jet fuel.

    LetterRip

  • Weapons (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    When it comes to weapons, there are three groups of people:

    1. Those who want weapons to control other people.
    2. Those who want weapons to defend themselves against the first group.
    3. Those who want nothing to do with weapons.

    I despise the first group, respect the rights of the second group, and try to ignore the whining of the third group.

    The fact that you are in the third group does not make the first group go away. It just makes you dependent on the second group.

    There are people in the world who want what you have. They are willing to hurt or kill you. Saying that they don't exist does not make them go away. Wishful thinking is a poor defense strategy.
  • It is interesting that nearly all comments (positive or negative) on the quality of Scientific American have been moderated down to 0 as Offtopic.

    This article makes some definite value judgments about Edward Teller and his acomplishments. If the article was objective, then I could understand the moderation as offtopic. However, since the article does make value judgments, is it offtopic to submit it (and by extension the magazine that elected to publish it) to similar value judgments? I think not.

    Perhaps one of the permanent moderators is concerned about the legal liability of slashdot. I don't think it applies in this case since it is possible to establish a history of articles in SA articles that make similar value judgments or ad-hominem attacks. This is a legitimate assessment of a magazine which purports to present objective scientific information, or objective reporting on the history of science.
  • How many lines were quotes from the interview, and
    how many were ramblings of the author? I used to
    find Scientific American interesting, but this is
    just another example of fluff wrapped around the
    barest hint of an interview.
  • IANAAP (I Am Not An Atomic Physicist), but it would seem to me that blowing up six H-bombs would leave behind a considerable amount of radiation, rendering the harbor thus created unusable except by remotely-controlled robots or lead-skinned aliens.
  • You bet! Us analysists were predicting that we would have to kill around 30% of the Japenese population before they would surrender, thats millions of their lives alone, plus millions of Allied lives would be lost in that process. So the use of those two bombs saved over 100x as many lives as they cost, 50x the number of japenese lives that were lost.

    The Japenese were training their civilans to man the beaches with spears and axes for gods sake! Which would have been better, to mow down millions 'armed' civilians with artilary and machine guns, or the nuclear weapons?

    Regardless, in terms of raw total damage, the firebombing of Tokyo did much more damage than the nuclear fireballs did.

  • Uh, hello? Did you read the article? Teller didn't mention any kind of fallout-less bomb. He suggested using an H-bomb. Other than that, you made a couple decent points.
  • russia's dead hand system is scary, especially with the state of their economy. the deadhand system is set up so if a nuclear blast is detected a full barrage of nukes would be launched, survivablitiy is what makes MAD work, the goal is even if we're all dead you die to, i ask you what happens if something happens to that system... we'd all die. read bruce blair's global zero alert. he was a missileer during the cold war and the capabilities freaked him out, now he champians the something called de-alerting, basicly you do something that makes it so the missles c/n be launched immediatly, be it removing the guidence chips, storing the warheads off site, removing the launch pin, you still have the nukes but there is a cool down period. read jonathon schell's the gift of time for a more extreme but incredible well research proposal of nuclear abolotion. we are very lucky nothing has happened yet with how close we've been to the brink
  • I have been to the museum at Los Alamos. There are not too many places where one can see a full scale mock up of Little Boy and Fat Man, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not too many museums have the nose cose (or was it the payload) of a MIRV hanging from the ceiling.

    If you want to see a really good nuclear weapon museum, then I strongly recommend the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. It shows what happens after the big boom. After I visited that one, I couldn't eat lunch. The only museum that matches the one in Hiroshima for impact is the Holocaust Museum in DC.

    BTW, other ppl that worked on the A- and H-bombs have afterwards done okay in the eyes of the public. Bethe, Fermi, Ulam, Sakharov, and von Neumann to name a few. However, Teller blinded by his immense hatred and mistrust of the Ruskies has used his position to espouse a philosphy of fear and loathing. There is a fairly old book, The Legacy of Hiroshima, that Teller wrote about 40 yrs ago. Worth reading if you can find it. It is a cold war classic.

  • When I submitted this article, I made no claim as to the "scientific" content or accuracy of this article or the magazine it was published in. The article just happend to make me read, and read some more, laugh, feel a little empathy (both for the interviewer and the interviewee), and then I got on with life. Sure I do feel that the author was using the magazine as a platform for his personal dislike of Teller, but that is American media. Accept it, or actively promote to change it.

    Besides, on the whole, it was just an entertaining article: worth the read just to be able to quote Teller as saying, "'I am not Dr. Strangelove!'"

    I would hope for most people that they don't care if Scientific American is read by, "real scientists," but that they get all the entertainment and content out of it to justify the cover-price or their subscription rate. Why let peer pressure influence your decision? It is your mind: fill it with whatever you want.


    -AP

  • I'm not going to argue with your other points, but if you think the US is any less imperial than the USSR was, you're way off. Remember El Salvador? Chile? Vietnam? Cuba (before Castro)? The list goes on. Hell, why do you think we hate Castro so much? Because he's so terrible? In that case, why are we such great buddies with Singapore and China, neither of which has what you'd call a terrific civil and human rights record? It's because he stole Cuba from US Fruit. See Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent. It is true that the Soviets had nasty tendencies, but we are no better.
  • But Teller just explained to us how non-fissile H-bombs suck.
  • After watching the interviews with Teller in the Atomic Bomb Movie and reading about him in Dark Sun...I really got the impression that he was quite mad.

    I never thought of him as Dr. Stranglove...but now I will always think of him like that.

  • Of course Teller wasn't Dr. Strangelove. Strangelove was a parody of a combination of Werner von Braun (the ex-Nazi missile designer) and John von Neumann, who besides being one of the fathers of modern computers, was a rabid anti-Communist who believed that nuclear war was not only inevitable but winnable for the nation doing the first strike.
  • Reading some of Teller's ideas - excavating a harbor with nuclear explosions, counteracting global warming with sulphur dioxide particles in the upper atmosphere, I can't help but wonder if Teller would have caught fish by throwing a grenade in a lake.

    Let us not forget that brilliance in one area doesn't necessarily imply it in other areas. He may have been a top-notch nuclear physicist, but I'd say he'd have made a lousy civil engineer or environmental scientist.

  • Re:...Edward Teller (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is not an interview with Teller... it is a use of Teller's name to attract attention to the journalist's own bloody pulpit. Such is that state of journalism in 1999 America. If you want to hear Teller's own views, watch out for a TLC documentary from some years ago. Teller is an interesting person, whose views deserve much more attention than the few paragraphs given by the self-promoting writer of this shabby Scientific American article.
  • When you're an incredibly successful physicist, and you have been helping to shape vital Cold-War defense policy of the United States, maybe a bunch of half-educated weenie journalists yapping "Dr. Strangelove! Dr. Strangelove!" seem annoying and stupid.

    It seems Teller was lucky to have had such strong formative experiences in Hungary, seeing that fascist and communist regimes were so abhorrent and morally indistinguishable that they must both be fought at all costs.

  • What has Teller contributed to the world? He is lying (or at least delluding himself) when he says the hydrogen bomb won the US the Cold War. His arrogance towards nature is typical of the 1950's, where we didn't consider the earth yet as a careful balance; there are consequences to upsetting the balance which he does not even consider (sulfur dioxide to block sunlight??? what a vision of hell!)

    So, no, Teller hasn't brought the world anything worthwhile except fear, paranoia and a god complex. It would indeed have been a better place without him.

    "There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."

  • Dr. Strangelove was modeled after Henry Kissinger.
  • You mean to tell me that if you see a drop of water, you can't imagine an ocean.

    If all I've ever seen are drops of water, there is no way I could imagine an ocean, let alone understand an ocean.
  • The numbers I've heard are around 1-5 Kt...

    Induced radiation (from the neutron flux) can last several weeks. However, the effected area is quite small.

    A bigger worry in the modern world is what effect such bombs would have on tanks and other vehicles using depleted uranium armor...
  • The concept of screwing up our environment in order to fix the fact that we've already screwed up our environment is pretty stupid. About as stupid as the idea of building a harbor in alaska with hydrogen bombs. I'm not even going to go into the insanity of building massively destructive weapons and calling it an effort at defense, deterrence and peace.

    It sounds to me like Teller's socio-political world view was totally defined by a couple of events relating to the Fascists, the Communists, and both of them mistreating his father. Which just goes to show that people whose world views are formed by catastrophic circumstances become either inherently conservative (if the circumstances they are in are OK... like Isreal right now) or revolutionary (if the circumstances they are in suck... like Lebanon for the past 20 years).

  • Teller has every right to be bitter. It appears from the article that many people are unable to separate the man from the device he helped build. In an age in which the public is so frightened of the word "nuclear" that they argue to ban space probes like Cassini due to their RTGs, and in which people prefer the cyanide in apricot pits to chemotherapy "because it's the natural way to fight caner", it's not surprising that Teller's vision of the application of technology to build a better world is viewed as hubris, and his contributions are held in low esteem.


    Teller has no right to be bitter; he was ostracized (and rightly so) by the scientific community for YEARS.

    Read about Oppenheimer, and you'll generally find Teller in the background, interested only in his own status and power. The man played petty politics under the guise of "science", and apparently is still doing so.

    McCarthyism shouldn't be forgotten so soon. :(
  • The Soviets had more than plans... They performed several Plowshear-like operations. They used nuclear explosions to re-vitalize several oil and gas fields, and excavate underground holding caverns.

  • The Rand institute applied game theory models for years to the super-power race. The whole reason for nuclear subs is to insure the "tit" ability, that is, retaliatory attack.

    Otherwise, first-strike ability could wipe you out before you had a chance to respond.

    Great books on the subject are Power's "Prisoner's Dilemma", and the fictional David's Sling.

  • What incidents are you referring to with regards to missile accuracy vis-a-vis Saudi Arabia and Bosnia? As for what happened with the Chinese embassy in Serbia, your snide comment is off-base -- the missile accurately did what it was supposed to do, which was to hit that specific building.

    Also, your comments relating Communism with the U.S. killing of Indians are unwarranted, and you know it. Every country has some dark moments in its history, whether it's the U.S. killing Indians, England's treatment of the Irish, or slavery, that enlightened people today find hard to imagine a mindset that would make such things completely acceptable back then. The fact is, though, that during the time of the Cold War, the United States government was no longer engaged in policies of killing Indians, while Communist countries throughout the world were still actively engaged in oppressing their own people and killing or jailing those who dare speak up against such policies.

    While I do think that your post is wrong-headed, I disagree with the lazy moderator who, instead of taking the effort to explain why he obviously didn't agree with you, simply and wrongly marked your post as "flamebait."

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • Nuclear bombs are also quite useful for propulsion. The concept is called "Orion." You take a large (and I mean quite large) ship with a heavy parabolic pusher plate at the rear end. Then you set nuclear bombs off at the focal point of the plate... One can make voyages to the outer planets within one human lifetime using such a system.

    As to your other point...there really isn't any reason to send nuclear waste into the sun. Not only is it seriously hard to GET to the sun, nuclear waste is almost always useful for some purpose. Plus you have a huge ammount of empty storage space available in which to stash it until it's needed. So just stick it in solar orbit somewhere, then you can at least go get it again if you want at some future date,
  • Comments on the quality of Scientific American are on-topic in that this is one example of the general problem with establishment media: it has become a closed system in which generally anti-Western, anti-capitalist journalism schools pump out PC scribes that go on to pen pap like the article on Teller. The contrast with with the comments here - even the ones that forthrightly disagree with Teller - indicate it is Scientific American that needs its head examined, not Edward Teller.

    Exploring this contrast between jouranlism as a profession and journalism as it is practised on the Web, with Slashdot as a prime example, is clearly worthwhile. The failings of the artictle on Teller are illustrative of a wider malaise. And the data provided by the well-articulated criticisms in this discussion are a keen diagnosis of what is wrong. Let's have more of it!

  • Ok, you're right, I was silly to mention the sun, suffice it to say disposal won't be the problem it is now. If you dump it on the moon, you'll have to contend with the Lunatics, of course.

    I've read a little bit about Orion, and after you get over the shock it's a very interesting plan. It's the thought of using it for taking off from the Earth's surface that most people find objectionable, and reasonably so. I'm not sure the plan's authors ever claimed that was wise, only possible, but you can't expect media to report a story like that straight!
  • Try and find a copy of _Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Explosions_. A fun read, if you're in the right mood. Project Chariot was one of the more innocuous ones they came up with. There was Gasbuggy, which was actually tried in Mississippi, an attempt to free natural gas from a tapped-out field. Didn't work that well.

    I can't find my copy of the book (yes, I do have a copy here somewhere), but my favorite one was the proposed "new Canal," to replace the Panama Canal. The idea was to evacuate a few hundred thousand people from a hundred-mile wide stretch of Nicaragua, then set off a couple of hundred thermonuclear bombs, digging a hundred-yard wide trench across Central America.

    Not to mention, of course, "make a new pass in the mountains near Needles, California, to cut thirty miles off of the route of Interstate 40." This one almost got adopted. The Mojave Indians might have objected, but what the hey...

  • The explosive effect of a neutron bomb is not tiny. It is simply small in comparison to that of some other nuclear devices. The primary component of the bomb is still a fission reaction, so the initial explosion will be about the same as the bombs we dropped on Japan. I belive that the misconception that it is some kind of magic no-explosion-but-kills-everything device comes from the fact that they were being designed around the time when large H-bombs were being tested.

    As others have mentioned, the radiation doesn't magically dissapear either, tho it might decrease faster than a regular fission bomb.
  • Oh, on the contrary. I thought it was very well-written; albeit biased.

    The two are not mutually-exclusive.

    -AP
  • I did a search and, yes, he appears to be the same Gary Stix who trashed nanotech. I notice how people like this author never seem to take the time to trash the people behind such frauds as nuclear winter, or power lines causing cancer (this latter one a topic Stix has written on, but in rather kinder tones than about Teller). Nanotech people say some pretty wild things, but they do not go out of their way to commit scientific fraud for some political cause. There are more deserving targets of a good hatchet job.

  • Teller is a brilliant man (Score:4)

    by Upsilon ( 21920 ) on Saturday September 18, 1999 @12:47AM (#1675662)
    Teller has been treated extremely poorly by history and by the press. Just look at this interview for crying out loud! The fact of the matter is that he is a brilliant man. A lot of his proposals would work, and could really help our society if it wasn't for the fact that the general public is too afraid of something they don't understand to take advantage of it.

    And if you're so concerned about nuclear weapons, here's a thought: nuclear weapons have saved far, far, more lives than they have taken. The only time they were actually used in combat was at the end of WWII, and while it is true that many were killed, and actual invasion would have cost many more lives on BOTH sides. And the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union were caused by political differences, not nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are the reason it was a COLD war, if it wasn't for nuclear weapons it may very well have been WWIII between the two most powerful nations in the world. The death toll would have made WWII look like a day in the park.
  • Blow up Alaska to bring it into the economy. While I agree nuclear physics will in one way or another get us off this rock and maybe you'll really see what Alpha Centuari looks like- people used to think Venus was full of plant life and marvelous landscapes- I'm appalled that sensationalism is what still convinces some people that an item is useful. This inability to come with an elegant simple solution to a problem is disturbing. But of course that explains why there are more sub atomic particles than elements. Why we spend billions of dollars to find the tiniest thing that will confuse people enough to accept a theory for the next thousand years. Anybody who has ever studied complexity, sociology, and chaos theory would see a certain arbitrary man-made quality to the new zoology we know as particle physics. Or that other crackpot science: Genetics. It isn't the technology that bothers me as much as the people involved. From some of the things I hear them say, I can't help comparing geneticists to script-kiddies. I mean what is the Human Genome Project, but a worldwide port scan of human DNA? Reminds me of the "I just wanna make some money with puters without learning a whole lot" sysadmins I run into sometimes. In fact, it is the same high-technology enchantment that convinces him of salvation that is also the enchantment of those who would rather blow up people. It's sad people can be so blinded by hype. So many believe that enrichment of the sciences means enrichment of people. Now some people might say, "Let them read textbooks." I'm not talking talk-show addicted morons who can't bother to take a walk to the library. Nor am I saying that some minority is disadvantaged when it comes to computers. There was an article on that a few weeks ago. However, you can't empower people with science until you give them the access. Invention is only half of it. Science, technology, computers, the Internet, space... all these things are put out of reach of the average person. One day Reno's going to ban encryption. Another some newscaster is going to report on "virtual gangs" as if the Internet were the embodiment of evil. The closest anyone ever gets to technology is becoming dependent on a product that their boss tells them to use because they won't ever search the net in fear that the word root bio in biotechnology will bring up some porn star's career profile. And worst of all Reno, the media, and Co. will tell you that technology is making the world a better place. Reminds me of, "There were probably millions of shoes produced while half of Oceania went barefoot."
  • I have been around Physicists and Chemists for over a decade and have never heard anybody reading or discussing that magazine. Like Discover, Scientific American is for half-educated wannabes. Their 'news' is always something we've known of for months or years, and their depth of understanding is usually low.

    This article is typical modern solipsistic journalism. We get to hear about the author's own memories of the Cold War, and his musings as he walks down the street (is this why I would read SciAm?). Then there is the obligatory that-building-is-phallic comment about some tower at the Hoover Institute. (I'm glad to see our author took Psych 101 - 'Half-Assed Fruedian Commentary For The Poorly-Educated'. I wish that Isidore I. Rabi had instead mused that 'It would have been a better world without Freud')

    The most absurd part of this article is the suggestion that the USSR lost the Cold War because the US makes Macintoshes, biotech, and Pentium computers. The Soviets could never compete with America's electronic weaponry he says, forgetting that a handful of Soviet ICBM's could wipe California off the planet. Teller was working to make that less likely. The Soviets never needed to surpass the US technologically, they just needed sufficient technology, which they happily stole.

    This journalist doesn't know his ass from a Nuclear Crater in the ground.

  • I'm not going to defend him or defend his ideas but there is something that's worth pointing out. As a society and probably even as species, our psychology has changed. 55 years ago we couldn't destroy ourselves. Now we can. When Teller was born, humans didn't have that capability. We've grown up not just knowing about it, some people grew up with nightmares about it (in some places they made you do bomb drills at school!) and with it implicitly labeled as evil. We even second guess the actions which ended WWII in Japan, which is good so that we can learn from what we've done but shouldn't and can't pass judgement on those actions simply because we have such a different perspective and the benefit of hindsight. We think differently now.


    Then when you think of something like nuclear excavating, it sounds like an absolutely insane idea. You think of fallout, radiation contamination, etc.. Teller's job for a good portion of his career was to make nuclear bombs more dangerous and more deadly. There are bombs with low radiation and very low fallout, there are also bombs that use special isotopes (salt bombs) that have less explosive power but have extended levels of radiation and fallout that lasts for milleniums. We probably have bombs now that have such diminised radioactive effects that you couldn't tell if it was nuclear or conventional the next day. We already know that these nuclear weapons were built, we just don't know how many (look at the w70 warhead.) At that point, you're practically excavating with TNT, aren't you? It's still not a very comfortable idea, I certainly don't want them doing that anywhere near me, but I don't think Teller was insane.



    He's just got a much different perspective, we've been raised to believe everything nuclear is evil. He made a career out of harnessing the power of it all. Are you convinced that there is absolutley no peaceful use of nuclear weapons? I respect for at least trying to find some.

  • Excellent point. This was nothing like the sort of interview one would want with somebody as interesting as Teller. One gets the impression that he didn't last long in Teller's office.
  • Amazingly enough, the patent on radiative compression of thermonuclear bomb was filled by Klaus Fuchs (russian spy) and Von Neumann. The name of Teller is not mentioned in patent application. He however immediately saw the benefits of the idea and pushed for it real hard.

    I'd recommend book by Richard Rhodes Dark Sun: The making of Hydrogen Bomb to everyone interested.
  • Keep in mind that you'd be killing children who have no clue about your ideology.

    Um, excuse me, but. . .so what?

    In war, absolute victory is the only option, or else don't bother to fight--you'd just be wasting lives to no good end (see Vietnam for a perfect example of this--and IMOHO, we should never have gotten involved in that situation in the first place). The object of war is to kill as many of the enemy as you can--men, women and children--until they surrender. The idea that there can be "laws" of war or "rules of conduct" is a sham--war is just organized slaughter that must be conducted as ruthlessly as possible until one side or the other is victorious. To believe otherwise is just limp-wristed self deceit.

  • It was a war, if you recall, and a war that Japan instigated

    Lemme put this straight --
    1. Japan goes to war with China in 1936.
    2. In 1941 we tell Japan that if they don't give up all the territory they've won in the last five years from China, we'll cut off their oil.
    3. The nearest supply of oil to Japan is in Indonesia.
    4. The sea routes from Indonesia to Japan go right by the Phillipines, a U.S. colony, making it a trivial task for the U.S. to interfere if the U.S. retains the Phillipines.
    5. While we're at it, the U.S. has cut off Japan from many other raw materials, including scrap iron, seized Japanese assets in the U.S., and impounded Japanese merchant ships in U.S. ports.


    Now, if you're the Japanese leadership, you've got a choice here.

    1. Give in to U.S. demands to sacrifice gains won in five years of bloody fighting.
    2. Invade the Dutch East Indies and hope the U.S. doesn't decide to take active measures where passive measures have failed.
    3. Give the U.S. an ultimatum to back down and thus give an openly hostile state the time to prepare for a war.
    4. Seize the Phillipines and smash the U.S. Pacific fleet, hoping that afterwards you can get the U.S. to accept the fait accompli.


    While those who understand the psychology of Americans realize that #3 would have worked best, anyone who understands the psychology of 1930's-40's Japan can see that #4 is the most likely response.

    Now, despite all that, I think the destruction of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified on both military and humanitarian grounds, and that the U.S. government of 1941-45 was morally superior to the Japanese government of the same time period that practiced the horrible atrocities in East Asia.

    However, don't tell me Japan instigated the U.S.-Japanese conflict in 1941. FDR was doing everything he could to drag the U.S. people into WWII. Discussing joint war aims in 1940 with Churchill, giving Britain free weaponry, impounding Axis ships and assets, and blowing up German vessels on the Atlantic didn't work -- but FDR finally found something that did.

  • I wonder what would have happened if, say, Czechoslovakia had tried to order Soviet troops out of their country like France did to the U.S. Oh, you mean they did, and the Soviets ran in and crushed them? Then, since we're no better, I assume we killed DeGaulle?

    Of course we worked with nasty regimes during the Cold War. We worked with Stalin during WWII -- was that an endorsment of Communism? The enemy of my biggest enemy is my friend, no matter how nasty. Note U.S. pressure switched directions in 1990 in Chile, El Salvador, Angola, etc. -- when the Soviets left, we did, too.

    Chomsky's left-wing anti-corporate fixation aside, the reason the U.S. hated Castro during the Cold War was that he was a Soviet ally. The reason we "hate" him now is that the Cuban expat vote is important in Florida and Florida is important to Presidential campaigns, and there isn't a big pro-Castro vote anywhere in the U.S.

    Politicians care about those Cuban expat votes. They don't give a damn about any principle, and certainly nobody gives a damn about what somebody nationalized forty years ago, except a handful of people who court John Birch Society votes.

  • I met him once... (Score:5)

    by Scott Ransom ( 6419 ) <sransom AT nrao DOT edu> on Saturday September 18, 1999 @01:06AM (#1675682)
    in an pseudo-interview with about 6 other students. I asked him if it ever bothered him to be the "Father of the H-Bomb" since his "baby" could be used for such evil and/or immoral purposes.

    I thought he was going to jump out of his chair at me.

    He got very upset and angrily announced that a scientist's only responsibility is to science. The possible uses of a discovery should not even be considered by the researchers -- that is someone elses business. And because of this, he did not feel even the slightest bit of remorse for his work on the bomb.

    And then he upbraided _me_ (since I was on my way to grad school to become a scientist at the time) for thinking that a scientist _should_ worry about the moral implications of his/her work.

    Needless to say, I didn't ask any more questions. ;)

  • You obviously don't read Scientific American.

    And to imply that "real scientists" don't read it either is totally wrong.

    The articles are at just the right level for a technically adept reader to see what's going on in science _outside_ of the readers area of expertise -- stick to peer-reviewed journals and pre-prints for the latest in your own field. And as far as accuracy is concerned, they are written by the preeminent researchers in their respective fields.

    I, and many of my "real scientist" friends, believe that SciAm is one of the highest quality magazines out there for the intelligent reader.

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