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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."
That's sad to hear. Though some might strongly disagree, as a military guy myself, anyone who advances the capability for the USA to protect and defend itself is held in high regard by me.
Thank you Mr Teller.
"Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world!?"
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Some will mourn the loss of a man who vocally advocated the a strong national defense and who made great contributions to the development of the hydrogen bomb. I'm sure as well that others will castigate the man for those very same achievements.
However, I remember myself as a geeky kid in Malaysia interested in science and technology, writing a letter to one of the 'great names'. I was quite amazed to receive a personal reply to my letter, typewritten but signed by hand. His reply was humble (he never put down any of what must have seemed to him to be naive and silly observations), encouraging (the words "I am pleased that there are children from all over the world like you who are interested in science." aren't much to an adult, but they sure meant a lot to me as a kid!) and inspiring.
That sums up the man in my mind, and I mourn the loss of that man.
It should also be said that he unfairly denounced another scientist, Robert Oppenheimer, as a comunist. Because Oppenheimer didn't think we should go for the H-bomb.
Not exactly a nice guy, glowing obituaries asside.
Gentoo Sucks
Their main task is to never be used, to just sit there and look evil.
That we have them to use discourages their use.
The world needs missiles.
Nope.
Eventually every nation, even the ones in Africa, will have nukes.
Yep.
"Nukes" are nuclear explosives, sometimes called "warheads". They do not need missiles to deliver them. Kamikaze terrorists are sufficient. A good ICBM shield does nothing against nukes.
An African nation that fired an ICBM at the US would have 80 missiles targeted to melt it into a puddle before their single shot even reached the Atlantic. Any non-suicidal African dictator who wishes to nuke America will transport the bomb by SUV, not ICBM.
Beyond a few well-worn platitudes, it's obvious that the interviewer is almost completely ignorant of the history surrounding Edward Teller's life - essentially, the key events of the 20th Century.
If it were not for Dr. Teller, there likely wouldn't be an Internet nor a Slashdot, because we'd all be too afraid of arrest by the KGB to do anything other than quote Marxist platitudes at one another at our jobs in Red October Tractor Factory #5 or whatever. And for this callow young woman to speculate that the world would've been better off without this man - the least technical of whose works she obviously has no concept of understanding, given her total ignorance of science and mathematics (it shows in the article) - and then to brand him as the incarnation of evil on this planet, ruminating on how the world would be a better place had he never lived, is boundlessly hypocritical.
Even if she had enough historical and/or scientific knowledge to be entitled to opinions on these matters, the fact remains that she demonstrates no appreciation of the fact that she met someone who was truly a great man. Not necessarily a good man (though I certainly believe him to be so), but one of those who has truly made a mark on the history of the human race.
Hell, Teller obtained his PhD under the tutelage of no less a personage than Heisenberg, himself. That alone ought to bring out a note of respect for the man.
It's truly sad that such a brainless nitwit wasted some of the ever-dwindling store of hours Dr. Teller had left to him.
That'd be a "blink and you missed it" kinda thing. What if the political leaders didn't happen to be watching? What if it was hard to judge distance, and they assumed a conventional bomb had nearly missed them? A blast over water doesn't leave tangible evidence behind (unless prehaps it destroyed some warships, but the Imperial Navy was already pushing up coral)
To make a good demonstration, you'd need to do it on lightly inhabited land so that nearby people can wander onto the blast area and gaze around in awe before reporting back to the emperor. And you'd want to telegraph a warning 24 hours ahead, to re-emphasize military superiority (proving that it wasn't some kind of natural volcano).
Mt. Fuji would've been an ideal target. Take a scared mountain and convert it into a scared gravel pit. That would be an undeniable show of force!
Guns don't kill people -- people kill people.
But the guns seem to help a bit. (apologies to Eddie Izzard)
Hiroshima was nothing, the cities of Dresden, Kobe, Osaka, and others were destroyed in a MUCH worse fashion by the carpet firebombing of the allies. My German teacher was a little girl in Dresden during WWII and saw firsthand the horrors of those attacks. The percentage of Hiroshima affected even by the fallout was small compared to the destruction wrought on those other cities.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I don't know if I am comfortable with the word "guessed" being used in that context.
The unofficial
Is this accurate or not?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
(Nobody should mod you down for that. Real flamebait looks distinctly different)
I might add that the Japanese military would have shown no similar sense of honor.
Some would question whether avoiding potentially useful targets, which prolongs the fighting and endagers your own troops, is really "honor". What does it mean to value some rotting wooden buildings over human lives?
Others might ask if commanding a single pilot to kill 100,000 helpless civilians simply to impress the USSR is honorable.
But let's not get into that.
Sorry.. the "Star Wars" program died when the Soviet Union did. It was ostensibly meant to counter their massive ICBM threat. What is was really meant to do was (kind of a re-vamp of the 70s moon program) to force them to spend billions of rubles on developing their own counterpart (or a way to defeat it). They started this, and then finally, at long last, fell bankrupt under their own stagnation.
It was the best non-deployed weapons program ever conceived.
And it should stay that way.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
I'm not sure what you mean by your comments, but Kyoto was then and is still a very beautiful city. Many of Truman's war planners wanted to "poke a hot cinder into the eyes of" the Japanese by targeting Hiroshima, but he decided it was just too dishonorable, even for an opponent as despicable as the WWII Japanese. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen because they were largely untouched to that point and they had significant manufacturing and logistical facilities. They weren't just filled with helpless civilians. If you think that we dropped those bombs merely to impress the Soviets, you're quite mistaken. 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.
Keep in mind that the Japanese of today bear little in common with those who ran the military of WWII. To understand why we dropped the bombs on them the way we did, you have to go back and study what the WWII military did to the countries around them in the '30's and '40's. I assure you that there were very few tears shed by the peoples they butchered when those bombs exploded.
The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank.
-- Scotty.
No one would accept the army following the logic, "The enemy has guns, so we could buy bulletproof vests for our soldiers, but if we did that the enemy would just sneak up on them and use knives or bombs instead, so let's not bother with the bulletproof vests and let our soldiers get shot to pieces."
Who's to say that there won't be a suicidal/insane dictator in Africa? Or more likely, what happens if the US decides to invade N. Korea? (Perhaps on a mistaken belief that they don't really have long range missiles, or perhaps for other reasons) In that situation the leader of N. Korea might decide that he's fucked anyways, and decide to launch against the US.
If the US has no antimissile defense, it's going to be in a tough spot. The fact that we can turn N. Korea into a parking lot afterwards won't make those of us on the west coast feel much better about the situation. There's even a slight chance the US won't feel that launching a counterstrike is politically viable. Our friends in S. Korea wouldn't be too happy about all the radiation right next door, and although i would expect internation opinion to be on our side, the way the US has been treating it's allies lately, who knows?
If the US had an antimissile shield on the other hand, N. Korea's nukes get blown up in flight, and the ground invasion grinds on.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
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.
The submarines were undirected, unfueled, and helpless. The kamikazes left in the "air force" were Tsurugi, a kind of wooden plane built after running out of steel. They were never known to hit a single target- they rarely had enough petrol to take off.
The losses on Okinawa were serious, but they were from light-infantry attacks- the kind of thing that could be avoided entirely by prudently deciding against occupying enemy territory with ground troops.
There was no way that we could end the war without elminating the Japanese military completely,
Well that really depends on your perspective. The US could've stopped fighting and gone home at any time, and the war would've been over for them. (Various nations from Southeast Asia would've eagerly volunteered to invade Japan within a year or two).
The only reason they couldn't stop fighting is the US public wanted a conclusive, total victory. If you accept that mental state as a given, then it's true they couldn't stop fighting.
But going down the path of "I was powerless to do anything besides what I wanted to do" seems silly (although it is more valid when looking at a nation than for discussing individual motivation).
Once the option of withdrawing to an anticlimatic technical victory is eliminated, then the only choice left for the US President was overwhelming force- the atomic bomb. Truman couldn't have withstood counting the families that would be sundered by pouring American troops into Japan for a whole other year of violent invasion, while knowing he'd possesed a resource that hadn't been used. Not only would US casulties be high, but the Japanese dead would quickly outnumber the populations of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
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.
My whole point is that the US had no military need to conquer them. Japan had been knocked out of the fight; it presented no threat. Occupying the islands had to be evaluted as an opportunity for future profit, not as a defense measure against an attack.
(But it wasn't logically "evaluated" at all- as I said, the US public had long since decided that only a total victory would satisfy them. They were in no mood to think of pros and cons)
Your last comment is not up to the standards of the rest of your commentary.
Just being a literalist-nazi.
more people were killed by the absolutely unnecessary bombing of Dresden (done with conventional bombs)than in Hiroshima.
If you count slow death by radiation poisoning, then the Hiroshima deathcount surpassed Dresden's within 10 years.
When you need nukes, nothing else will do. For things like building a 50 man moon base and flying it from Earth to Moon in one go or taking humans to outer planets in a few months or sending probes out of solar system that will reach their destinations in a lifetime, nothing except Orion will do. That still is the case and I don't see how that can change given the physics of propulsion. It could have worked, and it still can work. Instead of writing it off as an insane idea and staying on this planet I would rather see the technology developed and used until we have an alternative.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
"Numerically, twice as many people died in 1 second at Hiroshima as did in one day at Dresden. Some people might say the amount of pain they suffered makes some difference; I don't"
What an absurd way of using statistics. Even if accurate, your figures are useless. More people died in Dresden than in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
"It didn't help that I was also in Tokyo when they had their nuclear "accident"."
IIRC, it was less than a cubic foot of radioactive steam that was released.
Your knee-jerk, poorly-reasoned reaction to seeing that (immediately thinking of a multi-kiloton nuclear blast) is why neither Japan, the US, and most other countries that know how to build nuclear power plants will never be able to take advantage of the clean and efficient source of power that such reactors are.
Just to put things into perspective, compare that cubic foot of steam to the pounds (in some casses tons) of greenhouse gasses continued reliance on fossil fuels for power production fossil such plants put out in the course of normal operation. But I guess panic-mongering over inhaled carcinogens isn't as sexy as fearing something with the word "radioactive" in it, no matter how utterly insignifigant it really is.
There are a lot of threads here, some of them old and ugly.
1. With regard to the Middle Eastern Mess; it's, well, a mess. None of the Ugly anti-semitic, anti-jewish/anti-arab arguments, slurs, conspiracy theories--ancient and modern-- and what have you are anything like necesary.
Really, save yourself the energy; borrow a page from Witgenstein and, instead of making meaningless statements, why not just say that sickening generalizations aren't worth your time? Really, they aren't and can't be when playing with a yo-yo for the time it took to think up the biggot-stuff would at least have the fact that it built motor coordination to recommend it.
2. Concerning the star wars/anti star wars arguments, it's a nasty can of worms to have opened. Now that that it's in the world, the people who like it seem to hold it in a similar light to that which is usually reserve for questions of religious faith. Star wars just won't die and that's too bad, considering how short life is. I obviously fall on the 'anti' side when it comes to the issue and I think my reasons are good.
Long thoughtful books have been written on just what crap the whole notion of missle defense is. Missile screens are vastly expensive and, like the Maginot Line, limited by their specialization. Worse still, If nothing else, the September 11 attacks clearly and unequivocally demonstrate that the traditional 'nuclear deterrent' enjoyed by the great powers is itself ineffective and is rapidly becoming less so because every small nation that gets nuclear arms and aims them at anything important get to thumb its nose at the great powers that have them. Current affairs in North Korea, suggest that if Saddam Hussein had had them, he'd be smoking a cigar in Baghdad right now.
Real, effective, missile defense is decades and tens, if not hundreds of billions away and even if it had been up and running, running perfectly, from some spotless control center two years ago, it would have been meaningless against 20 guys in the right place armed with ten bucks worth of boxcutters.
In the world of fantasy and need, a simple, single solution like star wars is a magic bullet. Magic bullets aren't like the real world's compromises and partial successes; magic bullets solve all known old problems and create no new ones. When people imagine a magic bullet, hope blows away common sense, in this case, at an unimaginable cost.
Star wars is expensive. Boxcutters are cheap, but real, sustainable peace is cheaper still.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
You don't outrun a firestorm, unless you have muscle tissue that doesn't run by oxidation.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.