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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.'"
It's going to be the bomb!
For thoes people who are interested in building their own, here is a primer
Good Luck
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!
"The Making of the Atomic Bomb" ISBN 0-684-81378-5
and
"Dark Sun - The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb" ISBN 0-684-82414-0
Both books are fascinating, containing depictions of both human elements and the physics/engineering side of the atomic weapons. As an example of the former, I found it very interesting to read about SAC nuts like LeMay and his concept of a Sunday Punch strategy.
The owls are not what they seem
"Thank God for the Bomb"
Ozzy Osbourne
--------------------
Like moths to a flame
Is man never gonna change
Time's seen untold aggression
And infliction of pain
If that's the only thing that's stopping war
Then thank God for the bomb
Thank God for the bomb
Thank God for the bomb
Thank God for the bomb
Nuke ya nuke ya
War is just another game
Tailor made for the insane
But make a threat of their annihilation
And nobody wants to play
If that's the only thing that keeps the peace
Then thank God for the bomb
Thank God for the bomb
Thank God for the bomb
Thank God for the bomb
Nuke ya nuke ya
Today was tommorow yesterday
It's funny how the time can slip away
The face of the doomsday clock
Has launched a thousand wars
As we near the final hour
Time is the only foe we have
When war is obsolete
I'll thank God for war's defeat
But any talk about hell freezing over
Is all said with tongue in cheek
Until the day the war drums beat no more
I'll thank God for the bomb
Thank God for the bomb
Thank God for the bomb
Thank God for the bomb
Nuke ya nuke ya
--------------------
(Ozzy Osbourne/Jake E. Lee)
Circumcision is child abuse.
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.
Poor excuse, not acceptable in war crimes trials. Read some of the quotes here.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
An interesting read. I wish I had mod points. On another note, the USA does not want other nations to have the nuclear capability because they (the USA) does not have a means to disable or defend itself against the weapon. We simply cannot stop a nuclear bomb's devastating effects. So we pump up the rhetoric to prevent others from acquiring these weapons. Remember, we do not destroy our own. By the way, is it true that the most deadly nuclear weapons are actually produced by Russia?
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."
The actual physics involved in building a bomb will be covered by any standard undergraduate physics course. Thats not the tricky bit. It gets difficult when the recipe called for a few kgs of U235 or Pu-239. Even if you could get your hands on some Uranium you would still have to process it to extract the fissile U235 from the U233, requiring all kinds of highly restricted and monitored hardware.
60 happens to be the base of the Babylonian number system and the second Unitary perfect number. You insensitive clod.
They have set us up the bomb all your base are belong to us
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
There was a news program on TV, maybe nightline, which went to Russia to ask how much of their nuclear program has been dismantled. The anwser was not much. It is expensive to take apart nuclear missiles and store the rods. Plus, it is an attractive target for thieves. It can get good money on the black market. Look at Osama, he is worth how much money? 100 million dollars. I am sure he would buy nuclear material if he could. How tempting is that for someone who works for Russia, you get your boss, maybe a security gaurd and another worker together, and split 60 million dollars 3 ways. Could someone who sold a nuclear rod, with 20+ million dollars dissapear off the face of the earth, to some carribian resort to live out their lives sipping mixed drinks while suntanning?
I don't think the USA will destroy their nukes in our times. But I think the USA nukes will become a problem. How are they controlled?? It takes an order from the president to launch an attack, but how is that order communicated? If someone figures that out, could there be an accidental launch? What if at a silo, a crazy Air Force colonel decides to take his silo into lockdown, no communication in or out. He then conveys a presidential order to launch. Can he get away with it? And what about nukes that are on air force jets, how are they launched? Could the pilot decide to launch his nuke? Or on a submarine. We have many of them with nukes. Remember the movie where the one sub gets its communications broken, but the skipper believes he is ordered to launch a nuke? Could that happen?
For every nuclear bomb the USA has, it must be very expensive maintaining that nuclear bomb and keeping it secure.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Herb Lehr set up us the bomb!
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.
"The development of atomic and nuclear weapons was inevitable." Says who? You? Why? Besides: Judge, if I hadn't done it someone else would won't get you to far in court. "A land invasion of Japan would have have resulted in horrific casualties on both sides." Ah, the old narative of how dropping the bomb saved lives. The only problem is that it's nowhere near certain that an invasion would have been necessary and the question of how many people such an invasion would have killed is very much up for debate, to put it mildly.
Natural uranium contains U-238, U-235 and a TINY amount of U-234. U-233 is an isotope of uranium created by neutron bombardment of thorium and is not present in natural uranium. Above should read seperating the U-235 from the U-238.
Well, the USSR's Tsar Bomba has the biggest yield of all bombs. At 27 tons though, it was damn hard to deliver. Anything large enough to carry it would be easily shot down well before it made the target. The deadliest is probably the Trident II. It has eight compact half megaton warheads and decent range.
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.
Your scenario has little merit. It literally takes 2 people to do it. In subs and silos, 2 people must perform an action simultaneously. Turn keys, for instance. Seperated by a dozen feet or so. 1 person physically can't do it. And that is only after getting the proper codes from the NCA(National Command Authority. President or Joint Chief, etc).
In aircraft, it would take dozens of people. They're not flying around loaded anymore, so you'd have to get the weapons out of storage, load them, take off, etc. And then still have to get the proper arming codes from the NCA.
A rogue colonel can't do it, because he doesn't have the proper codes. It's far more than the president calling someone up and saying "Launch".
Yes, I happen to be german. So what? Last time I checked, there were no german war crimes committed after the day I've been born, and so I cannot possibly be a part of those non-existant crimes. I therefore do not see how my nationality should change the way I think about war crimes. Especially if they are targeted at civilians.
Screw the FSM - Real geeks believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn
...pretty much everyone signed the NPT. Including N. Korea and Iran. There are provisions for a country to back out of it, but N. Korea is the only country to ever do so.
No country has the ability to defend against a nuclear attack. Not just the USA is in that position.
"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.
Nukes do NOT have "rods". They have highly machined components of Plutonium, the exact size, shape, weight is classified. The first bomb had two hemispherses of Uranium that were polished smooth.
LOL, the Russian mob is more likely to sell you the material than the boss/workers concept. Anyway, after the material was transferred I doubt there would be anyone left alive to tell the world what the deal was. No witnesses means no messy loose ends that lead back to the source of the funds.
There are all sorts of sites out there that describe launch procedures, and it's a lot more complicated than you think. Accidental launches CANNOT happen with an armed warhead. This was all figured out in the 1950's and 60's . If the missle is launched w/o pre-arming the weapon all you have is MAYBE a "dirty bomb" where the impact would spread radioactive materials but no detonation of the weapon would occur.
A lot of Uranium is actually found in Copper Mines. The problem is you are looking for Uranium ore that has a high percentage of the fissle U-235 that can be seperated. The normal ratio is about 500:1 but some ores are higher. Uranium is found many places in the world, Africa, the former Soviet Union and even in the USA. Read about the projects and technologies they used to seperate U-235 and U-238, it is interesting how they did it then had to scale it up 1000 fold to get enough for ONE bomb. This was before they learned to bombard the leftover U-238 with neutrons to turn it into Pu-239 which is what "breeder reactors" did. The Pu-239 was a much better bomb material.
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?
The first bomb had two hemispherses of Uranium that were polished smooth.
This is slightly inaccurate the first bomb (Gadget) did indeed consist of two hollow hemispheres, but it was two nickel plated plutonium hemispheres (with some gold foil added to smooth it out after the nickle blistered) and not uranium hemispheres.
The first uranium bomb (Little Boy) was a gun type system with a cannon firing a bullet of uranium into a barely subcritical mass of uranium.
This is not to say that a bomb can't be made with two hemispheres of uranium, but this was not done with either the first bomb or the first uranium bomb. The idea of converting the Little Boy bomb into an implosion design (with two hemispheres of uranium) was raised after the Gadget test as it would permit more efficent use of the uranium, but it was decided not to as this would delay the use of the weapon.
... 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.
PREVIOUS MONTH'S COLUMNS
1. Let's Make Test Tube Babies! May, 1979
2. Let's Make a Solar System! June, 1979
3. Let's Make an Economic Recession! July, 1979
4. Let's Make an Anti-Gravity Machine! August, 1979
5. Let's Make Contact with an Alien Race! September, 1979
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
What if at a silo, a crazy Air Force colonel decides to take his silo into lockdown, no communication in or out. He then conveys a presidential order to launch. Can he get away with it? And what about nukes that are on air force jets, how are they launched? Could the pilot decide to launch his nuke?
Then you''ll just have to send the recall code prefixed by a combination of the letters "POE". And if *that* fails, there's always the limestone mineshafts you can flee to in order to preserve the human race.
No sig
"It literally takes 2 people to do it. In subs and silos, 2 people must perform an action simultaneously. Turn keys, for instance. Seperated by a dozen feet or so. 1 person physically can't do it."
Phew, thank goodness we live in a World where crimes are always ever commited by one person.
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.
yeah. This is just a leetle bit harder than two guys deciding to rob a bank.
The biggest detonation by the U.S. and her cronies was the 15 MT Castle Bravo shot, which was actually an accident. It was only supposed to be about a quarter of that. Because it was bigger than it was supposed to be, it created a fallout disaster, including dosing up some Japanese fishermen on a vessel ironically named "Fifth Lucky Dragon" (it appears to have been fatal to one of the fishermen). Marshallese islanders also got heavy doses.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
The Sandia National Laboratories ham club is operating a special event station from the site. I just talked to them using 35 watts.
See here.
A few tokens of my tourist experience:
1. There is a rock shop right outside the gate, with a big sign advertising "Trinitite for Sale." If you are a rockhound, they have a nice shop, with lots of interesting stuff, but their prices are a little high. You can get Trinitie cheaper on Ebay all day long.
2. Removing Trinitite from the Trinity site is considered theft of government property, but they don't watch you too closely. :) There's still quite a few chunks of it around the back fence.
3. If you see old people visiting the site, there's a good chance that they are locals, who remember the blast. Seek them out and talk to them.
4. To me, there really wasn't all that much to see there, and yet, there was an amazing sense to just *be* there. The most impressive physical sight to me was the bowl-shaped depression in the soil, a few hundred yards in circumference, caused by the force of the blast compressing the soil.
5. Try to get a room in Socorro. When they say that the site is "near Alamogordo," they lie. You will enter from the NORTH side of WSMR.
Not quite. The Nuclear weapons Archive story about it has this to say.
The Tsar Bomba (referred to as the Big Bomb by Sakharov in his Memoirs [Sakharov 1990]) was the largest nuclear weapon ever constructed or detonated. This three stage weapon was actually a 100 megaton bomb design, but the uranium fusion stage tamper of the tertiary (and possibly the secondary) stage(s) was replaced by one(s) made of lead. This reduced the yield by 50% by eliminating the fast fissioning of the uranium tamper by the fusion neutrons, and eliminated 97% of the fallout (1.5 megatons of fission, instead of 51.5), yet still proved the full yield design. The result was the "cleanest" weapon ever tested with 97% of the energy coming from fusion reactions. The effect of this bomb at full yield on global fallout would have been tremendous. It would have increased the world's total fission fallout since the invention of the atomic bomb by 25%.
There was some bickering as to weither it had a yield of 50 or 57MT. The designed yield was 50MT, but the americans believed it was 57 based on what fallout they managed to sample, and shortly thereafter the soviets started using this figure as well.
I recently heard an interview with the youngest person on the manhatten project (he's now 85). Reminds me of hearing techno-babble on Star Trek except this stuff is real.
It can be found here
There's also a legnthy discussion about the life of times of the father of the A-bomb, Oppenheimer.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.