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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.
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.
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."
60 happens to be the base of the Babylonian number system and the second Unitary perfect number. You insensitive clod.
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.
Why do people feel the urge to tell a simplistic story of what happened? Claiming that the atomic bomb was seen as just another weapon simply isn't true. This doesn't have anything to do with hindsight, this has to do with the documents of the time clearly showing that this was not the case.
As a trained historian and scientist, this disturbs me. Very little was understood of radioactive substances in the 1940s. What was understood was that exposure to large quantities of exotic substances caused a kind of sickness - little more. This does not translate, scientifically or historically, into an understanding that a detonation would result in radiation deaths.
Without radiation deaths, the atomic bomb is just a really big bomb. That's it -- and that's what it was seen as by the US military and by Truman (who, if you'll recall, wasn't really in on the day to day goings on of the Roosevelt administration).
US troops on the ground after the detonations didn't know what the weapon did. Radiation poisoning was called "Disease-X" and we had no idea where it came from or how to stop it.
Ultimately, World War II was a total war. In such a war, great powers seek to destroy each other absolutely with whatever means are within their reach. Debating the morality of the atomic bomb in such a context is a historical error called anachronism - judging the actions of the past by the political, social, and scientific mores of the present. Debate the morality of total war all you like - but the atom bomb was just the latest and greatest in a series of hellish weapons developed by mankind.
Name one weapon before the atomic bomb - any weapon, so horrible that its use in warfare was taboo before it was ever deployed. Why should this case be different? What should have fired off in Truman's head saying that obviously this weapon is worse than poison gas, incendiary bombs, biological weapons and countless other innovations of human kind?
History is about more than just reading about the past -- it is about seeing the events and people of an era through their own eyes. If you fail to do that, you're not a historian.
Killfile(TGK)
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