Hearing a lot about the "new nuclear threat" in Iran in recent weeeks in the news I dedided to inform myself at my local library. I eventually ended up borrowing a rather large and voluminous book titled "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", by Richard Rhodes. I still have to return it to the library and it's been 3 weeks. This book goes into great depth describing the Manhattan project as well as the whole history of atomic research. I will spare you the details. Suffice it to say that a background in quantum mechanics would have been helpful advance knowlege for getting through this book. Nevertheless, my less scientifically inclined mind was still interested by a lot of the historical aspects. Did you know, for instance, that our government spent over $2 billion dollars in 1945 (not adjusted for inflation) on developing the A-Bomb? Or that most of the lead scientists who played a part in the bomb's development were either Hungarian, Jewish German or from other countries? Or that we developed huge sprawling industrial complexes in remote places like Oak Ridge, Tennessee, or Hanford, Washington (which now has apparently become a Superfund Cleanup site) to extract the required "ingredients" (mainly enriched Uranium, and a derivative "new" element Plutonium)? That was besides the thousands of workers who were working at Los Alamos and even in Chicago (does "Fermilab" ring a bell?) A true national project.
I'm not going to argue that this wasn't a good thing that we developed the bomb and not somebody else. There was, after all, this little problem called Nazi Germany which was threatening to build the same bomb (a threat which turned out to be empty). Still, if you read this book, you will probably come to the conclusion, like I did, that we did not really need to use the bomb on Japan to get them to surrender. From the bombs we used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, over 300,000 Japanese were killed, either within minutes of the blast, or soon after from radiation. For that we got "faster" surrender. You can argue that this faster surrender saved American lives. Undoubtedly it did. But the facts as laid out in the book by Rhodes show that a large part of the reason we used the bomb... was because we spent the money, we developed it, we tested it and so we wanted to use it. You have to imagine there were many, many, months and years of labor on the part of thousands of scientists and laborers required to test the design, to build the nuclear accelerators, the develop and operate the plutonium production, the explosive components and of course to test the bombs themselves. Then you can understand why there was such pressure to use those bombs. And that to me is the whole sad thing about the military industrial complex. We spend the money and the effor developing the weapons. So, naturally, we want to use the weapons. It's like having a 4x4 Toyota Tundra, and never taking it off the road. (it's just an example, I have nothing against trucks)
Considering all the effort that goes into developing and testing nuclear bombs, I am amazed people can develop these bombs in places like Pakistan and India. Granted, most of the knowlege how to build the bomb is now documented and can probably be implemented by any fairly sharp team of physicists. But to get their hands on enough enriched Uranium and then to actually build and test and explosive device is no small feat. My bet is that Iran will not get there for awhile, especially now that the mullahs are taking over their universities. And if they do, their facilities will probably get bombed by Israel, which is another little war we can all look forward to watching on the news. Not that I'm anxious to see it happen.
Anyways, I thought this book was interesting enough to write about, and since I am my own editor, that's just what I did. Doubtless I've either bored you by now, or convinced you more than before that I really am a left-wing Californian. Well Yee-haw, I'll save my rants against the Bush administration for a later time. Got to get packing for this weekend's ski trip, which takes me Sierra bound again. Me and a buddy are going up to Donner summit, and from there who knows where. Hope this time my chains don't break!
