Slashdot Mirror
Edward Teller Passes Away At 95
Lord Prox writes "Edward Teller, one of the 20th Century's greats in physics, died Tuesday afternoon at his home in Stanford. He was 95." Newsforge.com also has one of the final interviews with Teller, who was "a principal architect of the hydrogen bomb, [and] passionate advocate of nuclear power and antimissile defense."
By Richard Rhoads.
It's a fantastic book about the creation of the Atomic Bomb -- from when scientists first realized the possibility, through the manhatten project. It's set against the backdrop of political events of the first half of the century and provides a fascinating account of the entire experience, including the actions of Edward Teller.
I'd highly recommend it.
Here a link to an interesting interview with Teller along with some video clips: Teller Interview
IIRC, there was a website slipup where obituaries for people who weren't dead yet suddenly appeared in a code glitch. I think Ronald Reagan was one of them... pretty amusing how poignant they read.
-=-This sig brought to you by The Cheat; and by Viewers Like You.-=-
"Did anyone notice that the obituary in the New York Times was written by someone who himself is already dead?"
l et .srv?si=81
Tis a standard journalism practise to have canned obituaries at the ready for notable people. Walter Sullivan did some of the best. Here an excerpt of one of my personal favourites.
http://www.gbn.com/BookClubSelectionDisplayServ
The amazing thing wasn't that some ships sank, it was that of the 100+ ships in the bay that ONLY 13 sank in TWO detonation! (the first one ABLE was above ground and sunk 5 ships, the second underwater test BAKER sunk 8). Btw the scrap ships used for the test would have qualified as the world's 8th largest navy if they had been owned by another country and the support staff occupied another 115 vessels.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
A history of U.S. atomic testing can be found here:
m l
http://nuketesting.enviroweb.org/hew/Usa/index.ht
Plenty of pics and interesting stories about how many of the tests went awry.
Ever heard of Project Chariot? Dr. Teller and his pals wanted to try atomic excavation by detonating 4 devices at Cape Thompson near Point Hope on the Chukchi Sea in Northwest Alaska, creating an artifical harbor.
It was the Eskimo's against the AEC, and the Eskimo's won, Thank God.
Teller had the support of the Alaskan business community and the University of Alaska.
As it happens, Project Chariot ended up being subject to the very first environmental review of any federal project, and eventually they (AEC) gave up.
Teller didn't and shot off SEDAN, one of the dirtiest shots ever and the largest cratering experiment done at NTS.
Dan O'Neil's book The Firecracker Boys tells the whole story in fine fashion.
Many Japanese still believe that Kyoto was never bombed out of respect for that city's cultural importance. One version of the story has it that there was that there was a tacit agreement between the U.S. and Japanese militaries that bombers would ignore Kyoto as long as there was no antiaircraft artillery there. The reality is that Kyoto was the very first city on the list of atomic targets, and was only spared by bad weather, which caused the attack to be diverted to Nagasaki.
Pretty cold, I know. I think you before you get all self righteous either way ("day of infamy" versus "atomic genocide"), you have to remember that millions of people had already died on both sides. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as bad as they were, were distinctive only for the means by which they were destroyed. In terms of people killed and human suffering, they were minor affairs.
On the other hand, the whole "was it justified" debate is rather pointless. The bombs didn't end the war (that was done by a coup in Tokyo that was already underway), nor did they raise the level of atrocity more than a notch (previous firebomb raids had killed hundreds of thousands without any atomic stuff). I find it rather ironic that Teller himself went over to the "we should have demoed the bomb first" camp just before he died. That's a cop-out. If you invent nasty weapons, they will be used.
The Japanese were still a formidable threat, and it was essential that we defeat them utterly. To allow them to regroup and rebuild without eliminating the elements that led them into the war would have been utter folly.
No they were not formidable. They had no Navy left at all. Japan has zero natural resources (iron, coal, oil), and had no stockpiles left. There is no way to "rebuild" a 20th century army from rice and wood. They could not have harmed any American serviceman unless he set foot on their island and got stabbed.
The only thing separating them from utter defeat was a thousand heirloom swords and a million sharp pieces of bamboo.
I assure you that there were very few tears shed by the peoples they butchered when those bombs exploded.
I concur that humans quickly lose the ability to cry after being butchered.
Unless you recognize the name, you'd have no way to tell [Hiroshima] apart from any other gleaming Japanese city.
Except for the Genbaku (Atomic Bomb) Dome sitting right squat in the middle of the city. That is still as it was 58 years ago, and is probably what the original poster was referring to. Seeing that symbol of destruction really makes you think (and if not, then with all due respect you've got problems).
Note that 100% of Japanese cities were bombed flat in WWII, so all buildings are less than 50 years old (even without the bombing, earthquakes would keep destroying them).
Wrong on all counts. Plenty of Japanese cities (though granted mostly smaller ones) escaped being bombed, and even the ones that were bombed were not "bombed flat"--even Tokyo has a fair number of buildings lasting from before the war. Besides, Japanese buildings are built to withstand earthquakes; one wooden temple building in Kyoto (Sanjusangendo) has been standing for over 700 years.
They still had operating submarines and they still had an operating air force, most notably the kamikazes. The U.S. sustained quite heavy casualties during the Okinawa campaign from these and other forces. And invading the main islands would have been hugely costly in American lives. And I think you need to go study the historical record a little more closely. Their defense of their homeland would have been formidable indeed, and without the atomic bombs, we would have paid a steep price to conquer them.
There was no way that we could end the war without elminating the Japanese military completely, and that meant invasion and occupation. Just look at what happened when the winners of WWI left a vacuum in Germany. We were not about to make that mistake again.
Besides, the Soviets were eager to join the war against Japan and had we not invaded the Japanese main islands, they would have. As it is, they took the northernmost islands (Northern Territories?) and still hold them until this day, nearly 60 years later. We turned over our control of Okinawa, the last part of Japan that we occupied, about three decades ago. With our guidance and assistance after WWII, we helped Japan transform itself into a responsible member of the world community. And the Japanese are better off because of it.
Your last comment is not up to the standards of the rest of your commentary. I don't think you appreciate fully just how much hatred the Japanese military sowed around the western Pacific. They were a bunch of racist thugs who needed to be beaten to a pulp. I'm sorry, but that's just the way it was.
FWIW, I have lived for two different years on a U.S. Marine Corps Air Station in Iwakuni, about 30 miles south of Hiroshima. The Japanese I met were wonderful people and I enjoyed my time there immensely. I'm glad that the history we're discussing is exactly that -- history. I admire the modern Japanese very much and I hope to travel there again. I was a jet pilot, so I have already traveled fairly extensively throughout (and above) the country. It has many wondrous sites.
The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank.
-- Scotty.
It should be noted, that more people were killed by the absolutely unnecessary bombing of Dresden (done with conventional bombs)than in Hiroshima.
As for nuclear power stations: people like to forget how much damaging are the conventional coal power plants (and they DO emit much more radioactivity) - and nuclear ones replace mostly these, not solar cell farms.
And finally, it should be noted, that his name is Teller Ede, since he was Hungarian.
Real life is overrated.
> There is no obvious good utility for an atomic weapon of
> any kind.
Look up something called Project Orion.
That Orion never got off the ground (pun unintended) for stupid political reasons is truely a crime against science and the human spirit.
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
However, hydrogen bombs are design to kill millions of people in one go. There is no obvious good utility for an atomic weapon of any kind.
Not only that. I think it was Oppenheimer, who opposed the H bomb, who pointed out that America was a better target for H-bombs than the USSR because it was much more urbanised. That was why he opposed it. Teller thought that if the US developed it the Russkies would take ages to catch up .... no prizes in hindsight to see he was wrong on that.
At least Teller gave us the Arms Race and many kool end of the world SF movies. Oh wait that's a negative thing isn't it....
Bitter and proud of it.
Hiroshima was in around 15 kilotons, not "barely a kiloton".
For good or bad, Teller wasn't the only father of the hydrogen bomb.s /giants/teller .html
From:
http://www.phy.bg.ac.yu/web_project
----
Teller and his colleagues at Los Alamos made little actual progress in designing a workable thermonuclear device until early in 1951, when the physicist Stanislaw M. Ulam proposed to use the mechanical shock of an atomic bomb to compress a second fissile core and make it explode; the resulting high density would make the burning of the second core's thermonuclear fuel much more efficient. Teller in response suggested that radiation, rather than mechanical shock, from the atomic bomb's explosion be used to compress and ignite the thermonuclear second core. Together these new ideas provided a firm basis for a fusion weapon, and a device using the Teller-Ulam configuration, as it is now known, was successfully tested at Enewetak atoll in the Pacific on Nov. 1, 1952; it yielded an explosion equivalent to 10 million tons (10 megatons) of TNT.
----
Extract from Times Obituary :
"He was later to say that, unlike Oppenheimer, he was opposed to the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, and would have preferred a demonstration of the new weapon's power to Japanese scientists. Nevertheless, in his memoirs, published in 2001, Teller admitted, while continuing to believe that Oppenheimer's opposition to the H-bomb was wrong, that the hearings had been a mistake, and that he himself had been unwise to testify."Read the Venona transcripts. Teller was right, Oppenheimer *was* a communist sympathizer at the very least.
"...we can say for certain that Oppenheimer did in fact knowingly supply classified information on the atom bomb to the Soviet Union." While he directed the Manhattan Project, it was known that J. Robert Oppenheimer's wife, brother, and sister-in-law were all members of the Communist Party. The fact that he regularly gave a large portion of his salary to the Communist Party was also common knowledge among government officials overseeing the project. This should have made him at the least a security risk for a project with such deep ramifications for national security. It didn't. In Venona, Oppenheimer is identified with the code-name "Veskel." One message instructs agents to "re-establish contact with 'Veskel'...as soon as possible." In 1994, a year before the deciphered Venona cables were released, the man in charge of Soviet spying on America's atom bomb project revealed that Oppenheimer had supplied the Soviets with classified reports on atom bomb development."
Teller was spot-on, and was/has been pilloried for DECADES by leftist sympathizers for his integrity.
(quoted from http://www.academia.org/campus_reports/2000/novem
-Styopa
No they were not formidable. They had no Navy left at all. Japan has zero natural resources (iron, coal, oil), and had no stockpiles left. There is no way to "rebuild" a 20th century army from rice and wood.
I believe you need a history lesson. america had to invade mainland japan to win the war, or force them to surrender. the japanese were willing to fight untill EVERY and I mean E. V. E. R. Y. damn one of them was dead. they had 6 million people in training (civ's, children, old people, EVERYONE!) to fight off the coming american invasion. hell they even had propaganda campaign's trying to get more support. there was literilly no other choice but to nuke them. it SAVED countless millions of lives. I trully dispise reading such uneducated garbage on slashdot, we're supposed to be the geeks, the ones that payed attention in school.
Well, whenever I read these arguments about Hiroshima I'm often stunned by some of the arguments that the anti-bomb crowd throw out, simply because they are based on some factual mistakes. Note that there are still some excellent arguments about how the bomb was used (why no demonstration drop? why not more time before the 2nd bomb? etc) but those seem to rarely get brought up.
Anyways, on to the mistakes:
Q) Japan was already defeated, so why invade?
A) The vast majority of the territory conquered by Japan (China, Manchuria, Korea, ect) was still occupied by Japan. The only major population area in the Japanese empire that the US invaded was the Philipines. The rest of the areas the US had invaded were small and/or sparsely populated islands. The Japanese Empire, as a whole, was still in existance and operating in 1945. Albiet at a reduced level.
A lot of people seem to have this huge misconception that Japan had been beaten back everywhere across Asia and only had the home Islands left. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Q) Isn't it true they had nothing left to defend the Home Islands with and we'd just do a walkover?
A) *sigh* Okay, a 2.5 Million army + 20+ Million militia + thousands (yes thousands) of planes now counts as "nothing"?
Q) Yeah, but wouldn't they just surrendor knowing they couldn't win?
A) Throughout the war the Japanese had often found themselves in hopeless positions and not once did they surrendor. The cultural taboo against surrendor was so incredibly strong that almost all battles were to the death. Logically, the Japanese should have surrendered. Most of the top brass knew they couldn't win. But in no way does that mean they would have surrendered, because the decision to fight was more emotional/cultural than logical.
If the US had invaded and the Japanese continued to fight the Japanese would have lost. But the casualties (mostly Japanese) would have been on a scale the world had never seen, dwarfing the use of the bomb.
Rather than just reading about them, view actual footage of many nuclear tests as well as extensive interviews with Teller in Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie
It is a very moving documentary chronicling the development of atomic weaponry.
The ABLE bomb was dropped off target, a tail fin on the bomb failed. That is why so few ships were sunk. Although the BAKER test did sink more ships, the water plume that was created was very radioactive and if the ships had been manned, there would have been serious radiation issues for the crew. For more information : Operation Crossroads or buy the Atomic Archive CD-ROM
I recommend two books that detail the wartime and postwar efforts to build the bomb. Teller's roles, both in the technology and the politics, are covered. So are the roles of many other players, including Germans and Russians.
The making of the atomic bomb and Dark Sun - The making of the hydrogen bomb, by Richard Rhodes.
Rhodes won a Pulitzer for the first volume and I daresay it is the better. Both are not without fault (in particular the second was not universally acclaimed in the physics community), but I found them intriguing.