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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.'"
For thoes people who are interested in building their own, here is a primer
Good Luck
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!
"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.
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
"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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.