I know this is just a meme, but I'm going to take the opportunity to talk about something I think is super interesting. Physicists didn't build the bomb (edit: nor were they particularly responsible for its design).
David Kaiser, an MIT professor who is both a physicist and a historian (aka the coolest guy possible) has done extensive research on this, and his work is particularly interesting because he has the expertise in all the relevant fields do dig through the archives.
It’s been a long time since I’ve read him, but he concludes that the physics was widely known outside of secret government operations, and the fundamental challenges to building an atomic bomb are engineering challenges – things like refining uranium or whatever. In other words, knowing that atoms have energy inside them which will be released if it is split was widely known, and it’s a very, very, very long path engineering project from there to a bomb.
This cultural understanding that physicists working for the Manhattan project built the bomb is actually precisely because the engineering effort was so big and so difficult, but the physics was already so widely known internationally, that the government didn’t redact the physics part of the story. In other words, because people only read about physicists’ contributions to the bomb, and the government kept secret everything about the much larger engineering and manufacturing effort, we are left with this impression that a handful of basic scientists were the main, driving force in its creation.
That's how it is in almost every field, isn't it? The ones who designed the space shuttle were not the same ones turning wrenches and welding on the actual vehicle.
Well, I should've said "build or design," maybe.
But yes, this should be obvious when you think about it, because it's just how things work. Still, in our culture, we regularly refer to physicists as the people who made the atomic bomb happen. Kaiser writes about this too, and the influence it had on McCarthyists, who regularly panicked that physicists were secretly communists because they associated physicists with building the atomic bomb.
It had other weird influences on culture too. For a couple decades after the Manhattan project, being a physicist was considered mainstream cool. Social magazines ran articles with pieces about how no hip dinner party is complete without a physicist.
The whole thing is a super interesting cultural phenomenon and I highly recommend anything he's ever written.
Nuclear bombs are actually extremly simple from a physics standpoint.
Make Uranium dense. Boom.
Sort of but ,its also reasonably well promoted that 130,000 people worked on the project. I suppose people think they are all physicists?
I think people see it the same way a movie is made by the director, even though a ton of people work on it, and, according to Kaiser, that is a misunderstanding of how it happened based on the information made available by the government.
In my mind, Oppenheimer figured out this when he said that:
are you really both-sidesing the literal nazis?
We never nuked the Nazis...But even if we did, are you saying that the Nazis being Nazis would've justified vaporizing every civilian man, woman, and child in a city or two?
Whether or not you'd say it was justified is a different beast altogether than having to be the one that made it possible in terms of responsibility.
Tangentially, many firing squads will have only one person have a real bullet(s) while the rest have blanks so that they don't all have to feel responsible for ending a life. Even that is setting justification aside.
I've read somewhere that he never regretted building the bomb, because he believed it prevented more wars/deaths from happening. Maybe I can find the article
Edit: Found it. https://12ft.io/proxy?&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.derstandard.de%2Fstory%2F3000000180215%2Fzehn-fakten-ueber-j-robert-oppenheimer It's german though. He even sued an author who wrote a play where oppenheimer was struggling with his doings
I think he was right in that belief. Invasion of Japan by US forces would be far more deadly and devastating to both nations in terms of lost lives.
Apparently the purple hearts manufactured in anticipation of such an invasion during WWII are still awarded today with about 120k still in stock.
I read somewhere the shock was more due to the bomb being way more powerful than anticipated... I am not certain though.
I can imagine him saying that, and I can imagine long drunken nights staring into a mirror before he did his best to move on.
