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60th Anniversary of the Atomic Bomb
An anonymous reader writes "On July 16, 1945, the world's first nuclear bomb exploded at Trinity Site, New Mexico, marking the beginning of the Nuclear Age. Manhattan Project veteran Herb Lehr has no regrets: 'In a lot of respects I felt as if I had done something worthwhile. I am in no way ashamed of what I had done in any way, shape, matter or form. I did what I was told to do. I did it to the best of my ability.' Lehr will return to Trinity Site for the first time since the explosion. He said, 'I'm just interested in going and seeing it and maybe getting some memories back. Los Alamos was a whole interesting experience. It was something unique. I worked very hard down there.'"
In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose. JRO
WTF!!!
Lehr said it is unfortunate the bombs were used for war.
Sooo, what were you expecting, thermonuclear noisemakers?
Seriously, whenever someone tries to justify something truely horrific, it always comes out as the most asinine comment one could make, under those circumstances.
Much like this one...
It's strange to see how he's arguing that he doesn't feel ashamed (a moral feeling) and he argues that he was instructed to do so, so that makes it morally legitimate? He must be a bureaucrat.
I wonder what will happen in the next 50 years, as most countries should have nukes by then. It will not matter how wealthy a country is, their diplomats will smile and say "Defended by Nuclear Weapons". We are already there with North Korea, all that is missing for them is long range missles to deliver those Nukes to far away places.
Imagine smaller nations nuking each other. Does anyone think that Iran and Iraq would not have nuked each other in the 1980's when they had a decade long war? Or what about Israel, how many different nations want to nuke them?? And how would foriegn policy of Israel be different if the palestinians had Nukes? Would the Israeli government treat them any better?
And I can see former soviet union states getting Nukes. It could get to be messy. What country keeps setting off bombs in Moscow? Uzbekestan or is it Checkizstan. The Chenyans I think. I am too lazy to look it up at the moment, but I believe they are the ones who took a theater filled with people hostage and then killed a bunch of them, and the same people who took a school of 1000+ hostage and killed half the elementary school kids. They held a bunch of 6 to 11 year olds for 4 or 5 days without water or food. If someone can torture another human like that, setting off a nuke probably would make them loose sleep.
Will there be no wars in the future if everyone has nukes, because everyone will be scared of starting a major conflict? Or will it be like the game Civilization where as soon as everyone has nukes, they use them?? At least our leaders have deep bunkers. In 20 years when the radiation clears, they can come out of the bunkers and start the game all over.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Had the US not developed and deployed the bomb, someone else would have been the first to use it.
Questions about our righteousness in nuking Japan (who themselves slaughtered even more civilians in Nanking than we killed with 2 A-bombs) will never die, but I'm confident that the US getting the bomb before China, the USSR and other nations, made it possible for us to scare everyone into not using them again.
We sure as heck could not have ended the war with harsh insults in Japanese... a direct invasion would have cost millions of lives and left Russia open to join in. Ask the Germans what happened when the Soviet men came into Berlin, and overlay that disaster onto Tokyo...
This isn't meant as a troll or flamebait, seriously, I think millions of lives were saved, perhaps billions.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
a world in progress...
How I hate the sentence "I did what I was told to do". Everybody should check the orders against his conscience, no matter where they come from.
It is this attitude that made WWII, or better the nazi regime, possible in the first place. And everyone living with that attitude is, in my eyes, a coward, who is too afraid to think for himself.
How else could you explain that, by order of the DOD, soldiers were forced to remain close to the detonation to check for its impact on human beeings, while it was well known for years that there were long-term illnesses caused by it.
The development of atomic and nuclear weapons was inevitable. The only question was who would develop them first. I'm glad we did, when we did. A land invasion of Japan would have have resulted in horrific casualties on both sides. We're just lucky that Hitler was too much of a fool to understand the military and strategic value of the bomb. Instead he had people like Werner Heisenberg working on fission reactors to produce power. Things could have turned out very differently.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Poor excuse, not acceptable in war crimes trials. Read some of the quotes here.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
"Please remember that Plutonium, especially pure, refined Plutonium, is somewhat dangerous. Wash your hands with soap and warm water after handling the material, and don't allow your children or pets to play in it or eat it."
or "Now hide the completed device from the neighbors and children. The garage is not recommended because of high humidity and the extreme range of temperatures experienced there. Nuclear devices have been known to spontaneously detonate in these unstable conditions. The hall closet or under the kitchen sink will be perfectly suitable."
definately have the end user in mind. It's these thoughtful tips that make this probably the best DIY WMD kit! /sarcasm>
Seriously, whenever someone tries to justify something truely horrific, it always comes out as the most asinine comment one could make, under those circumstances.
This is a question that I have wondered for some time, as I have read his books.
It seems that many of the people who helped build the atomic bomb were later pushed out of any talk about how the bomb was to be used. Oppenheimer lost his top secret clerance and was labled a communist by the FBI. Some in government wanted to jail or kill him, they were worried he would defect to the Soviet Union in the 1960's. I think Senator McCarthy had public statements about wanting to see Oppenheimer jailed.
If there is a team of 3 or 4 that is 90% responsible for building the worlds worst weapon, should they have a say if it is used? Or do they lose that right when the finish making it? Without them, the bomb could never have been made. It seems like a huge burden to have for life, knowing your creation killed so many people.
And why did the USA need to drop 2 bombs on Japan? Didn't the first one do enough to scare the crap out of them? How far was Truman ready to go? Kill every Japanese person on the earth.
And didn't the USA during WWII jail every American citizen that looked Japanese by force, even if they never broke any laws?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Screw the FSM - Real geeks believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn
I'm fond of a certain commentator's comment that despite all of the "disarmament agreements" we've had, the only way to get rid of nuclear weapons is to use them.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
"Had the US not developed and deployed the bomb, someone else would have been the first to use it."
Ah, what a nice "argument". You can't of course know if someone else would have used it, but stating it as a fact seems such a great justification for US action, doesn't it?
Besides, I hope you never have to stand before a court of law, because believe me, these hypothetical arguments are not going to impress the judge.
"Questions about our righteousness in nuking Japan (who themselves slaughtered even more civilians in Nanking than we killed with 2 A-bombs) will never die, but I'm confident that the US getting the bomb before China, the USSR and other nations, made it possible for us to scare everyone into not using them again."
Gee, it's great that you are confident about it. I'm sure those who died because of the bombs would be delighted to hear it.
"We sure as heck could not have ended the war with harsh insults in Japanese... a direct invasion would have cost millions of lives and left Russia open to join in."
Jesus, at least get your facts straight. Russia did join the war against Japan which prompted Truman to his famous words, that that meant: Finis Japan!
About the bombs saving millions of lives, this argument has been refuted so many times already that it's really embarassing to bring it up again. The first problem with your argument is that it doesn't take the situatuion at the time into account. Japan was already trying hard to find a way to surrender. This was one of the reasons that people like Eisenhower thought it was a grave mistake, to say at least, to drop the bombs.
It also doesn't take into account that the estimates on which those who decided to drop the bombs operated in no way support the notion that millions would be killed should an invasion indeed occur. It's in fact quite funny that the estimates at the time were speaking of thousands of deaths (terrible enough, but not millions), then after the war the number of half a million lives saved was the official justification, only to be extended to a million and now to several millions.
"Ask the Germans what happened when the Soviet men came into Berlin, and overlay that disaster onto Tokyo..."
As I'm German myself I'm well aware of what happened when the Soviets came into Berlin and though a lot of things were terrible you can rest assured that people in Germany consider themselves very lucky to not have been subjected to the bomb.
Also, what does that have to do with the atomic bomb? Nothing?
"This isn't meant as a troll or flamebait, seriously, I think millions of lives were saved, perhaps billions."
Jesus, its not often that one has to read so much bullshit in one sentence. Billions? Yeah, sure....
Thanks mods for modding parent up, it really was an impressive posting.
I am in no way ashamed of what I had done in any way, shape, matter or form. I did what I was told to do.
As the son of a marine who fought in the Pacific, I'm glad we did it. The projected casuality rate
was at least 750,000 marines, sailors, and soldiers.
Not to mention the hundreds of thousands or even millions of civilian casualties that the Emporer would have sacrificed in defending the homeland.
Guess it's okay if their Emporer kills them, but not us.
Most of the men fighting in the Pacific wept with joy when the found out what happened. They knew they were going to live.
Why are their lives worth so much less then the lives of the civilians that where killed?
Every defense of the use of the atom bomb is built on "projections" of how many soldiers and civilians would have died otherwise, and on hypotheses about what the Japanese would have done.
These projections are made from unpublished source material, use unknown models, and those who make them have a strong need to publish projections that are at least a little worse than the actual reality that they themselves created (while sometimes not reminding people of the details of that reality).
The success of these defenses also depend on the dogmatic belief among their audience that since we are the Good Guys, when we burn thousands of children alive in their homes, we must be doing it for a good reason, while if the Bad Guys (e.g. Hitler, Saddam) were to do the same, there is no conceivable reason good enough to justify such actions.
I wish some people would be a little more critical and ask themselves were those projections come from, if their authors might have a strong bias toward a particular conclusion, how credible the theories about what the Japanese would have done are, and how good the moral defense of the mass murder of civilian families really is.
"If they are fighting a war with us it is okay to kill them."
Nope. It's both immoral and illegal to kill civilians, even if you are at war with their country. That is sort of the first law of war.
"Whoever said it was better we had killed Iraqi civilians then Saddam?"
Someone from the Bush administration who was being interviewed in BBC's Hard Talk a few months after the Iraq war started said that, yes, thousands of civilians had been killed, but if America hadn't attacked those people might have been killed by Saddam anyway (so basically it doesn't matter). I realize that this excuse is so stupid it doesn't really demand or deserve a response, but since it appeared again in this thread ("if we hadn't killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, their Emperor might have killed them anyway"), I thought it worth a mention.
In one of his memoirs, Richard Feynman recalled learning from John Von Neumann the notion that you are not responsible for the world you're in. That sustained him during the Manhatten Project years, but after he returned to civilian life as an instructor for Cornell, he went into a nihilistic type of depression:
The best quote comes from Kenneth T. Bainbridge on the morning of the Trinity test. After congratulating project leader Oppenheimer on the spectacular success of the project, he then stated "Now we are all sons of bitches."
Almost every post here is a defense of the nuclear attack on Japan or of atom bombs in general (while almost every one is written as if this was a very radical and unique position). It gets me a little worried. Slashdoters used to be computer nerds and computer nerds used to be humanitarians. Does everyone also believe that making "small, tactical nukes" is a good idea? After all, terrorists could make a devastating attack on a major city and kill millions, so according to that projection, killing a few tens of thousands of people to prevent that would be more than worth it. You can always conjure up some "projection" to defend any number of casualties...
Link.
Man can render unspeakably terrible things to his own kind. Death walls and gas chambers are only ghastly instruments that remind us of what mankind is capable. Is it some twisted part of the human condition? Is our psychology so simple to manipulate? Is this capacity for moral distortion within each of us?
Atrocities are not unique to the Nazis. My father likes to remind me of Japanese war crimes committed against POWs. There is no cause so noble or philosophy so infallible that human cruelty has not made a foundation from it. Even today well meaning people of conscience are drawn to polar opposites and debate whether President Bush is a righteous man or a war criminal.
The scale and efficency of the Nazi killing machine is what shocks us so, but it reenforces what we already know: this kind of holocaust can never happen again. Even though it does, and like lemmings we turn a blind eye. Rwanda? Somalia? And how many people are unconsciously hardening their hearts against Americans on one side and Arabs on the other, or the Israelis against the Palestineans? If the dam were to break, would we again see organized slaughter of the Nazi kind?
I think far more dangerous than the mind-numbing horrors of which the preserved Nazi implements of death remind us are the horrors that even reasonable men justify. One and a half million people died in Auschwitz and Birkenau, but more than four hundred thousand human beings died in blast and fallout from the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is tragedy in every life lost, but where they differ is in how they are both seen fifty years later.
Aside from a few isolated fools, the Holocaust is condemned by every soul the world over. But sentiment on the two bombings remains divided, even met with passioned approval by entirely reasonable people. War is a harsh thing, and military strategy is a long way from genocide. But tell me, were the women in line at the bank in Hiroshima and the children in the schoolhouse in Nagasaki any less innocent than those who perished in the gas chambers?
... I strongly identify with the attitude and goals of the people of Los Alamos during the Project. The interviewed scientist has my sympathy for having to endure a lifetime of harassment from those who condemn the creation of technology and progress.
Many of the comments here demonstrate a disturbing lack of forethought... The Bomb would have been built eventually, by somebody, no matter what. Scientific progress is, in itself, not a moral matter. The bureaucrats and politicians that made the decision to use the weapon upon two intentionally preserved non-military cities are the ones you should be pointing fingers at... The physicists were left out of the decision making process; even Oppie was quickly hustled out of the government when he was no longer necessary to them.
Scientific progress brings no evil. Evil uses scientific progress for its means, as it always has. This is not a logically valid reason to suppress innovation... (.i.e. think of all the incredible research that cascaded out of the Project that contributed to our greater understanding of the Universe.)
Ranting aside, I'd highly recommend the movie "The Day After Trinity" (title based on an Oppie quote). It's easy to find and provides a lot of insight into the people and politics associated with Los Alamos.
Additionally, I'd recommend that you make an effort to visit Trinity Site in NM/USA. I visited last year and it was an awe-inspiring experience.
As one of the Americans whose grandfather would have most certainly died on the shores of Kyushu during Operation Downfall, I would like to send the men and women of the Manhattan Project my heartfelt thanks.
I'm sure that one of the millions of potential children and grandchildren of those who were burned alive by American firebombs would love to give their opinions on this, but alas... That's one of the upsides with killing people: you don't have to hear them complain afterwards.
The moral, in fact, is a different one: If you start a war of aggression, you will reap what you sow.
Not quite. Rather, if political leaders start a war of aggression those ordinary people who happened to be born in that country will face the consequences while those leaders might at worst be deposed after spending some time confined to an apartment watching TV. Or they may never face any consequences at all.
If it's righteous to burn Japanese civilians alive because Japan had gone to war, then it must also be righteous to blow up Israeli civilians if you believe that the Israeli government is occupying Palestinian land. But of course, this idea that civilians are just targets in warfare is in complete opposition of ethics and international law. Let's hope it stays that way. But that means some people need to come to terms with their history.