The Day After Trinity

[AdamSmith]

Riveting (if you like this kind of thing) 1980 documentary on Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project.

First segment:

[Guest NCBored]

Thanks for sharing - I'll have to watch the other parts to see if the question first posed here is ever ANSWERED - how could men with humanistic feelings involve themselves in the creation of weapons of mass destruction.

[AdamSmith]

Oppenheimer summed it up for reluctant scientists, more than once, by asking simply: "What if Hitler gets it first?"

Of course many involved had misgivings, during the project and then much more after Hiroshima.

Parts 4, 6 and 7 of this series go into these issues.

Afterward, Oppie led efforts to stop or slow proliferation, and especially to convince that development of the H-bomb would do great harm by accelerating the arms race, and would confer no added security. But the genie was out of the bottle, sped along by such as Teller.

This and a great deal else is documented in Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's superb bio American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

[AdamSmith]

Feynman discusses the morality of it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ah7f-1M2Sg&feature=player_detailpage

P.S. Delightful PBS bio of Feynman that the excerpt above was taken from...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlhInhfF3cc&feature=player_detailpage

[lookin]

- how could men with humanistic feelings involve themselves in the creation of weapons of mass destruction.

I'm with you. I'm not as widely read on this stuff as AdamSmith but, from what I have read, the folks who knew that nuclear weapons were likely possible and had the smarts to build them seemed to fall into several different camps. There were a very few who did not want to go down that path at all. There were those who figured we better do it before the Germans did. There were those who looked at it as a scientific exercise and could not resist seeing if they could turn theory into practice. And there were those who were interested in having and using the weapon. These latter folks either justified it on the basis that it would shorten the war and save lives, or else they didn't trouble themselves at all with the ethics of its use.

I also believe that the borders between these groups were crossable and some did switch camps, especially as 'progress' was made on the scientific and engineering challenges. I think, by the time the Trinity test was conducted, there wasn't anyone who didn't want to see if the bomb would work. When word filtered out about the extent of the blast, some of these folks moved from one camp to another. And the path to the hydrogen bomb was similar, although not everyone lined up as they did on the path to the first weapon.

My take was that the span of ethics for these scientists wasn't much different from the span of ethics for the rest of us, other than that they had much more insight as to the likely numbers of people who would be killed.

The guy who draws me in is Leó Szilárd. He was the first person who conceived of the idea that a nuclear chain reaction could form the basis of a bomb, and got Albert Einstein to co-sign a letter to President Roosevelt urging that one be developed, which led directly to the Manhattan Project. From the beginning, he saw it as a demonstration weapon to show the Germans and the Japanese that they could not win the war. He was especially distressed that Truman actually decided to use it after Germany had surrendered.

I can identify with him much more easily than I can with someone like Johnny von Neumann, another Hungarian and another fascinating character. But he seemed to relish his role as a macher and appeared little troubled by a hundred fifty thousand crispy corpses lying in the streets of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

We humans seem to have this amazing ability to compartmentalize, and to dissociate ourselves from the human consequences of our actions, especially when our actions and their consequences are separated by space, by time, by distance of relationships, and by intermediaries who convince us that we are merely 'following orders'. I think it may be the unusual human who can keep track of the direct links between what we do one day and what tragic results may follow the next. And I doubt that scientists are necessarily more likely to have stronger ethical links than the rest of us.

[MsGuy]

... Johnny von Neumann, ... appeared little troubled by a hundred fifty thousand crispy corpses lying in the streets of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Did it matter all that much to the corpses themselves (whether of Nagasaki or Hiroshima or Tokyo or Osaka or Hamburg or Dresden) that they achieved their crispy state through a nuclear firestorm or by means of one of more conventional origin?

[Lucky]

Having visited Hiroshima and the Peace Museum, with its scale model of the city post-bomb*, the magnitude of the event leads me to join the point of view that the crispy corpses, as defined hereto, cared one wit as to how the state was reached.

*Take a room-sized table, put up the model of the city, then wipe it all away, except for a stray building or two.

[lookin]

Did it matter all that much to the corpses themselves (whether of Nagasaki or Hiroshima or Tokyo or Osaka or Hamburg or Dresden) that they achieved their crispy state through a nuclear firestorm or by means of one of more conventional origin?

That may well have been the question on von Neumann's mind as he gave his advice. The question on Szilárd's mind was could there have been no more corpses at all if the power of the bomb was merely demonstrated. The question for me is what separates those who think about saving lives from those who don't.

[MsGuy]

I don't know, Lookin, I ain't that smart.

[RA1]

I agree that scientists have no stronger ties to ethical standards or knowledge thereof then anyone else. I also am aware of the pro and con arguments about whether the A-bombs did shorten the war and whether a demonstration would have been sufficient. Like most such arguments there are points on both sides.

My question is, what will we learn from what might have happened principally because the answer is unknowable without going back 69 years and doing it all again but differently?

There are a lot of things we can learn from the atomic age, to include learning to "live with the bomb" and, so far, limited proliferation. I consider both of these negative with unlimited proliferation among more negative possibilities. Unlimited nuclear war being the worst scenario, although numerous terrorist attacks using nuclear weapons would also be high on the negative list.

Isn't the best thing we can learn is what not to do, although that is not working so far either?

Best regards,

RA1