Minoru wrote: > While it is considered by people who live there as a > champion of freedom, possibly because it is essentially > a society of immigrants who have to be opportunistic > to live, it has a tendency of being vulturous. So it seeks > similar nations to befriend with. Everything, particularly, > science and technology, serves as tools for maximizing > people's desire. Financial engineering is but one example. > Nuclear bomb is another. Nuclear bombs were developed > with a help of many recent immigrants there whose > personal statuses were rather shaky, e.g., Albert Einstein > and Von Neuman. They were allowed to live as citizens > only because of their peculiar knowledge and skills. > Nuclear bombs did not really won WWII, which was > won by deaths of many US citizens and conventional > weapons, did not serve as a tool to bring peace in the > world, either. Instead, nuclear bombs created a permanent > problem for the human society. >
A few points to correct in the above: 1. Albert Einstein did not work on the Manhattan Project. At the prompting of his fellow scientists (the key figure was Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard), he wrote a letter to FDR in the late 1930s about the possibility of a fusion bomb, and this was the start of the project. A major factor in the US development of the bomb was concern that Germany was actively working on a similar weapon. Einstein did not suffer from shaky personal status in the US either; he was a Nobel Prize winning physicist of great renown, and that is why FDR took his letter so seriously. I know less about von Neumann, but my impression is that he was a well-respected mathematician and physicist and had a very positive reception in the US, as did the vast majority of other refugees from fascism (which included Jews and others from many, many fields). 2. The Manhattan Project did in fact involve many scientists who were refugees from fascism in Europe. But these were not the only people who worked on it, and the head of the project was an American, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Whether the bomb could have been built with the involvement of refugee scientists is a good question. The answer is probably yes, but it would have taken much longer to complete. 3. Once again, it was Szilard who played the key role in organizing some of the physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project to try to persuade Truman not to use the bomb against Japan once Germany was defeated. However, Oppenheimer in fact signed off on the use of the weapon against Japanese cities, though he later had deep regrets about this. And many other scientists on the Manhattan Project had few qualms about the use of the A-bomb, which they saw as necessary to end the Pacific War. I actually attended a lecture by one of these scientists back in the early 1980s at the University of Washington, and he was quite adamant that use of the bombs was necessary and saved far more lives in the long run. It is true that the A-bomb did not win the war, but many people would argue that it shortened the war, and had the bombs not been dropped and the war continued into 1946 far more people (mostly Japanese civilians) would have died as a result, and mostly from starvation given Japan' s desperate situation. 4. The development of nuclear weapons was inevitable once fusion was discovered and understood. That was why the matter was so urgent in the 1930s when the true significance of the experiments conducted by scientists like Fermi, Hahn, Meisner and others was finally grasped by physicists, and Szilard and his colleagues prevailed on Einstein to write that letter to FDR. Had such weapons not been developed by the US during WWII, they would eventually have developed by an advanced industrial state; they can even be developed by relatively backward countries provided that these countries concentrate the scientific and industrial resources needed. The fact is, the technology may be costly and the calculations may be cumbersome and all that, but the basic principles of how to build a fusion bomb are remarkably simple, and lie at the center of modern atomic physics. The real issue posed by nuclear weapons is rather the one raised by the late Roger Shattuck in his book "Forbidden Knowledge" , that is, what forms of knowledge should human societies seek to obtain? This is not an easy question to answer, is a much larger issue than just nuclear weapons, and is certainly not a dilemma that confronts only the US. http://www.enotes.com/forbidden-knowledge-salem/forbidden-knowledge I do not know what any of the above says about the US more generally, other than that in a total war like WWII, the US will seek to develop the most devastating weapons and will use them to end such a war. Had Germany or Japan developed nuclear weapons during WWII, they would have not thought twice about using them against the UK or the US or even China, and against targets like Washington DC and London to boot. The US very consciously chose not to drop the bomb on Tokyo (and thereby decapitate the regime in Japan and also kill the Emperor) because of the long-term political consequences of such an act. I also do not understand what any of this has to do with the financial crisis afflicting the US and the world now. John M. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Persons posting messages to not_honyaku assume all responsibility for their messages. The list owner does not review messages, and accepts no responsibility for the content of messages posted. -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
