On Sunday 06 Feb 2011 8:20:08 am Udhay Shankar N wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 7:46 AM, ss <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> http://www.slate.com/id/2283469/pagenum/all/
> >
> > Reminds me of Arundhati Roy. This long article has so many holes that
> > need to be ripped open to allow the rubbish to spill out freely that I am
> > not going to bother spending time on it.
>
> As a matter of interest, can you point out a few of these holes?
>
> Udhay
>
Udhay, Stephenson, like Arundhati Roy and like all great fiction writers builds
up an elaborate strawman by the use of subtle untruths hidden among reams of
facts.
There is far too much that is debatable or just plain wrong in that. The
folowing long post deals with only the first four paragraphs - which are used
to set the stage to cook up more rubbish later. I refuse to spend time writing
any more. In fact I will stick to 3 paras - the fourth alone requires a
separate message as explained below.
The author builds up the impression that large rockets ("hitherto unimagined
size") were the brainchild of the sytem created by Hitler. That is wrong. All
the elements were in place before Hitler. he "father of spaceflight" might have
been Tsiolovsky - who in turn was inspired by Jules Verne. Both rocket planes
and large unguided rockets had been built outside of Germany before the Hitler
era. But none was in America,
Stephenson then passes off the following personal judgement as accepted fact.
At best it is debatable, if it isn't complete nonsense:
>These rockets, which were known as V-2s, were worse than useless from a
> military standpoint, in the sense that the same resources would have
> produced a much greater effect had they been devoted instead to the
> production of U-boats or Messerschmitts.
But that paragraph sets the stage perfectly for what he goes on to say next
using same language that I use to fudge facts - by noting in words that are
difficult to argue with:
>Accordingly, the victorious nations showed only modest interest in their
> development immediately following the war.
"Modest interest". Humph! That language is perfect for saying something and
then pretending that it almost wasn't said.
Both the US and USSR actively started testing captured V2 rockets immediately
after the WW2.
Stephenson says:
>It is reasonable to suppose that little more would have been done with them,
> had it not been for another event, happening at the same time, even more
> bizarre and incredible than the seizure of absolute control over a modern
> nation-state by a genocidal madman. I refer, of course, to the sudden and
> completely unexpected development of nuclear weapons, undertaken over the
> course of a very few years by a top-secret crash program atop a mesa in New
> Mexico.
Completely unexpected? That is baloney of the first order.
The real history of nukes is available form various sources, with Wiki being
as good as any. I quote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_nuclear_weapons#Physics_and_politics_in_the_1930s
"In 1934 the idea of chain reaction via neutron was proposed by Leo Szilard
who patented the idea of the atomic bomb. The patent was transferred in secret
to Britain's Navy in 1936. In a very real sense, Szilárd was the father of the
atomic bomb academically."
and:
"As the German army marched first into Czechoslovakia in 1938 and then Poland
in 1939, beginning World War II, many of Europe's top physicists had already
begun to flee from the imminent conflict. Scientists on both sides of the
conflict were well aware of the possibility of utilizing nuclear fission as a
weapon, but at the time no one was quite sure how it could be done. In the
early years of the war, physicists abruptly stopped publishing on the topic of
fission, an act of self-censorship to keep the opposing side from gaining any
advantage."
The development of nuclear weapons in the United States was as much of a quest
for an ultimate weapon by the forces of "good" (read USA) as the development
of the V2 by the forces of evil (read Hitler)
Paragraph 4 is another paragraph of cooked up self-servong nonsense from Neal
Stephenson:
>Atomic bombs turned out to be expensive, dirty, controversial, and of
> limited military use (it was difficult to find targets sufficiently large
> to be worth using them on). So they might have fizzled out, were it not for
> the fact that there just happened to be another victorious nation,
> controlled by a dictator, every bit as evil as the V-2 maker, but not so
> crazy, who insisted that his nation, the USSR, had to have atomic bombs
> too. Moreover, the conditions existing in the USSR then were such as to
> enable the development of that bomb in near-perfect secrecy. The United
> States could only guess at what the Soviets were doing; and given the
> stakes, they naturally tended to make the scariest guesses possible. The
> military logic of nuclear warfare forced them to develop the hydrogen bomb.
Excuse me? Dirty? Controversial? "Limited Military use". This guy does not
have a clue what he's talking abut - so busy is he cooking up tripe. This
paragraph deserves special treatment because the man has surpassed himself in
talking crap.
I could write an entire long critique of this paragraph alone to show how this
Neal Stephenson character cooks up stuff to make what he writes later sound
good. But I will stop here.
I will critique this paragraph in amother message if anyone is interested -
it will be another long message just to point out the amount of ignorance
and/or lies that can go into the writing of one cleverly worded paragraph.
shiv
