I Am Become Death, The Destroyer Of Worlds
16 July 2009
10 Comments
leave one →
About
Ubiwar is a blog on technology, politics and conflict by Tim Stevens.
"Deprived of space, war had spread into human Time" (Paul Virilio)
-
Recent Posts
- Still Here
- Fancy A Job With Information Warfare Monitor?
- UK Private Sector To Develop Government Cybersecurity Policy
- That Was Clever
- Exploring Incomplete Technological Futures
- Academic Writing Is …
- From The Cult Of The Expert To The Cult Of The Amateur
- Back From the Dead With A Podcast For Jerry Brito
- The Network Is Continuously Under Attack
- Dennis Hopper
- Cybersecurity in the US National Security Strategy
- Security Epistemology II
- Security Epistemology I
- Those Who Know They Don’t Know
- US Cyber Command Fact Sheet
Sources
- Bruce Schneier
- Clay Spinuzzi
- Conflicts in Cyberspace
- CTheory.net
- Current Intelligence
- CYB3RCRIM3
- Cyber Strategies
- CyberLaw
- Cybernitions
- Cybersecurity
- Cybersecurity & Internet Comms
- Cybertheorist
- Danger Room
- David Ronfeldt
- Dusan Writer’s Metaverse
- Epicenter
- Evgeny Morozov
- Future Crimes
- Global Guerrillas
- Guerre de l'Information
- Haft of the Spear
- Infopollen
- InfoWar Monitor
- IntelFusion
- Internet Haganah
- Jihadica
- John Postill
- Kent’s Imperative
- Kings of War
- Larval Subjects
- Making Sense of Jihad
- MetaSecurity
- Mike Innes
- Nart Villeneuve
- Of Bytes and Badges
- Opposed Systems Design
- Rethinking Security
- Ron Deibert
- Sean Lawson
- Secrecy News
- Security Debrief
- Selil Blog
- Serial Consign
- Shepherd's Pi
- Speculative Heresy
- Technology Liberation Front
- The Accursed Share
- The Cuckoo's Egg
- The Dark Visitor
- The End of Cyberspace
- The Firewall
- The Strategist
- The Technium
- Thoughts of a Technocrat
- Threat Level
- ThreatChaos
- USCYBERCOM Watch
- Virtualpolitik
- Zero Intelligence Agents
Search
-
Ubiwar by Tim Stevens is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. Other permissions, contact me.
Theme: Vigilance by The Theme Foundry.
I thought (judging my the title of the post) that you posted that clipping of Oppenheimer saying those words from the Gita.
The part on Oppenheimer’s eyes swimming with tears always hits me hard whenever I see that video. I have written four – five articles on him on my blog.
And though the video is different from what I anticipated check this out anyway.
- Shubhendu
That looks like a fascinating article – I’ll try and make time this weekend to leaf through it. I didn’t post the video you were expecting because I wanted to post a video of the explosion at the exact time it occurred back in 1945. Not that anyone noticed … :-)
Ah!
Now realization strikes! :(
Hehe. At least you understood the title of the post! I’m really surprised that nobody in this part of the blogosphere has written anything about Trinity today. It seems to me that it really was the day ‘things changed’, and we’re still dealing with the fallout (oops, unintentional pun, sorry) today.
Hey, I remembered Trinity. Actually, I worked for a company named after the test site, run by a retired Los Alamos nuke scientist and another guy who could dismantle them. I also worked at the US Dept of Energy for five years. DOE was built around the complex of labs initially used in the Manhattan Project. I guess I am a dissenting voice from the general opinion that the A-Bomb was “bad.” We tend to remember Oppenheimer (and we should), but there was a reason for the A-Bomb, and many of the other scientists who worked on the project were far more dispassionate years later, including Bethe and Feynman. Do they not hold any moral authority on the subject? And what does it say about the project that most of the scientists lived without Oppenheimer’s understandable regret?
I admire the US’s endeavor to build the A-bomb for the remarkable achievement of cooperation and mobilization that it is. Only six years separate Trinity from Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt (three for the entire length of the MP), and this was without the benefit of any of the technology we take for granted. The only computers at Los Alamos were the minds of the geniuses they had collected to work on the A-Bomb’s astonishingly complex problems. Those problems were solved in three years. Not bad for a bunch of guys working from chalk boards. Or even a bunch of high school girls adjusting knobs all day, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Calutrons_at_Oak_Ridge.jpg
Wow, Marisa, there’s lots there … First point, Oppenheimer was fucked in the head (and fucked by USG) afterwards. Edward Teller hated him. It makes me mad – his colleagues, von Neumann, Feynman, Fermi – hell, heroes. Didn’t help him much.
Oppenheimer wanted to reduce nucular levels to ‘sensible’ levels; Teller wanted to increase them to escalation proportions. Teller won out. Thanks – building down is a weird thing.
I Vote Oppenheimer. Genius. Served country – pilloried for it – history kinder – all to bed and quiet…
Tim, I agree with you on Oppenheimer. He was an early hero of mine. However, I’ve come to accept the spirit of that moment and give his more dispassionate colleagues the benefit of the doubt. Except Teller. Bethe, by the way, did testify on Oppenheimer’s behalf and never forgave Teller.
I think you may agree that the scientists on that team were involved in a one-of-a-kind endeavor and belong to their own “club,” much like the few men who’ve walked on the moon. It makes for compelling reading.
Guess I must do a lot more research before I will understand Teller’s statements of his views in his Memoirs. If he is known to have hated Oppenheimer, then he is a convincing liar in the book.
Passing Reader,
It’s confusing actually.
The most balanced opinion of Teller that I have read about is from Freeman Dyson. I was trying to look for a link. But no success, it was written as a review to Edward Teller’s Memoirs in the New York Review of Books. It is also a chapter in Scientist as Rebel. If you could grab a copy, it’d be great!
Thanks for the reference, ST.