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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.
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
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.
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.
(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.
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
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.