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Edward Teller: Father of the Hydrogen Bomb
pigrabbitbear writes "Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, had a thing for nuclear bombs. He wanted them bigger, smaller, faster, used in ways that no one had thought of before or since, and always more of them. He suffered no fools, and though he would be more vilified than any other American scientist in the 20th century, he always dismissed his critics as lacking in common sense or patriotism. Amid Cold War paranoia and fears of the Soviet nuclear program, the stakes were simply too high: for the free world, building the most powerful weapon in history was a matter of life and horrible death."
Now that Iran wants to have nuke, what would the opinion of Mr. Teller be?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The fact is that without the atomic bomb, WWIII most certainly would have happened between the West and the USSR. The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki raised the stakes of another general war between the remaining Great Powers so enormously that a war like WWII would no longer be possible.
As horrible as these weapons are, they stopped the most terrible war the world would have ever known.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Teller destroyed the career of Robert Oppenheimer for no damn good reason, after which his own graduate students shunned him.
I have no interest in anything to do about him.
...Paul Teller taught at UC Davis in the 80's and 90's(maybe still does). When I took his philosophy of science course(PHI 108), on the first meeting with the TA, he said "Don't ask him about his father".
Not necessarily. Suppose Iran used a nuke against North Korea? Would the world approve or disapprove? China would disapprove, but America might not. The UK probably would approve. Who would retaliate against Iran? Who would be allowed to bomb or even nuke Teheran? Overall, the question is difficult to answer, and that means there's a shade of gray.
Now let's say Iran used a nuke on some slightly less evil place, but still evil. Would that turn the *whole* world against Iran, or would the support be divided, with slightly more countries against than if it was North Korea?
At what point would the *whole* world unanimously support wiping Iran off the map? If Iran attacked America? If Iran attacked one of the former Soviet states? What if Iran attacked Zimbabwe?
Thank goodness, now that the Cold War is over we have the War on Terror, so we can still dismiss critics of more spending for unnecessary weapon systems as "lacking in common sense or patriotism".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Because of this:
What separates them is intent. Teller knew full well he was designing the weapons to end industrial civilization. Teller was deliberately designing stuff to kill people.
Thomas Midgley Jr. didn't know when he was developing the things he was developing that they were anything other than helpful to society.
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Yes, we think Ahmadinejad and the ayatollahs are that stupid. Plainly.
Next question.
You're being irrational. Suicide bombers are employed as a last resort against a technically superior enemy. I'm sure that if you go back in time, you'll find that all major religions have had suicidal fighters in one way or another. It has nothing to do with religion.
The fact that you conclude that the communists "undoubtedly wanted to wipe out their enemies" just shows how narrow you're thinking about this. The tragedy of an arms race like in the cold war is that both sides are building weapons out of fear of an attack. It's madness.
No. IAANP and that is hollywood fiction.
Rules of MAD don't apply to Islamic regimes the same way that they did to Communists. Sure, the Communists (Soviets & Chinese) were evil, but they were at least rational about it - while they undoubtedly wanted to wipe out their enemies, they themselves wanted to survive. Which is why deterence worked during the Cold War. During that time, there were a lot of espionage & terrorist acts pulled off by the NKVD/KGB, but how many suicide bombings does anybody remember that the Soviets did?
...
How short the memories.
During the Cold War the hysteria-mongers routinely argued that the Communists could not be deterred because they cared nothing for human life - arguments trotted out for this view were the tens of millions of deaths in the Stalinist and Maoist purges and engineered famines, the way life was literally thrown away in Gulags, and in WWII how millions of Soviet soldiers were carelessly sacrificed for negligible battlefield effect (and the same with Chinese and North Korean soldiers a few years later, and North Vietnamese and Cambodian soldiers decades after that). Various quotes by Lenin were commonly repeated (some of them fictitious*) to show the utter ruthlessness, and that their messianic belief in the inevitable victory of Communism made them indifferent to the possibility of nuclear war since Communism would survive.**
And most of the statements about Communist behavior were true. But a big difference is it was never the leadership, the state itself that was put at risk. Nuclear weapons change that completely. That alone makes the whole claim completely invalid.
*The favored fake quote, often repeated was this one: "What does it matter if three-fourths of the world perish, if the remaining one fourth are good communists?" attributed to Lenin.
**Counter-evidence, like Stalin's decision not to seize West Berlin, Khruschev's hasty back-down in Cuba, and the striking intolerance to taking casualties in the 1980s after the Afghanistan invasion were ignored.
This "Islamists are insane and are not afraid of nuclear war" is just a retread of the same Cold War tripe.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I was unaware the Japanese Imperial Navy indoctrinated their kamikaze pilots in Islam.
Nor the Viet Cong with their suicide bombers.
And that's just the conflicts I can think of off the top of my head involving the USA.