Video Edward Teller: Father of the Hydrogen Bomb 352
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pigrabbitbear writes "Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, had a thing for nuclear bombs. He wanted them bigger, smaller, faster, used in ways that no one had thought of before or since, and always more of them. He suffered no fools, and though he would be more vilified than any other American scientist in the 20th century, he always dismissed his critics as lacking in common sense or patriotism. Amid Cold War paranoia and fears of the Soviet nuclear program, the stakes were simply too high: for the free world, building the most powerful weapon in history was a matter of life and horrible death."
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:They Saved The World (Score:5, Informative)
It served two purposes:
1. It demonstrated to the Soviets, who had massive forces amassed in Eastern and Central Europe that the West now possessed a weapon deliverable by high altitude bomber that could kill thousands.
2. It prevented the Soviets from seizing large parts of Japan by forcing a quick surrender to the Americans. An invasion of the main islands would most certainly have taken long enough that the Soviets could have moved to occupy Japan themselves. As it was, the Russians seized the northernmost parts of the Empire proper and hold them to this very day.
3. It stopped the war very quickly and forced an unconditional surrender. There was even less game-playing that the fragments of the Third Reich had tried to play.
As to the larger point you try to make, the Japanese leadership's actions even after the first H bomb were hardly singular in wanting to surrender.
Re:They Saved The World (Score:5, Informative)
It's not the same China. The government that we saved in WWII lost control of the mainland in 1949. The government that we saved is now commonly known as Taiwan, and in comparison to the PRC they are quite friendly.
Wrong bomb (Score:3, Informative)
As to the larger point you try to make, the Japanese leadership's actions even after the first H bomb were hardly singular in wanting to surrender.
A bomb != H bomb. The U.S. dropped two fission bombs on Japan. Thank heavens we haven't dropped any Tellar-Ulam, a.k.a. fission-fusion, a.k.a. hydrogen bombs on anyone.
Re:Teller and Oppenheimer (Score:5, Informative)
First of all, even if he opposed it that doesn't mean you get to accuse him of being a communist.
But in reality the situation was more complicated than that. Oppenheimer (and others) also opposed Teller's design because they thought it wouldn't work. Teller took it personally and set out to destroy them. But those others were right and in the end the H-bomb that Teller help built was based on a design of Ulam's.
Re:They Saved The World (Score:5, Informative)
Actually the Japanese were trying desperately to negotiate a surrender even before the FIRST use of WMD against them.
The surrender effort didn't have credibility. Sure, some Japanese were trying desperately to negotiate a surrender, but other Japanese with more considerable authority were preparing for a brutal and bloody defense of the Japanese homeland at almost any cost. Those who would surrender not only had to negotiate with the US, they had to do so with their own people who advocated a war of attrition.
The atomic bombs tipped the scale decisively in favor of those who advocated surrender. The US demonstrated a weapon that could kill countless Japanese soldiers and civilians at little cost to the US. No war of attrition could succeed against that.
And one sees a difference in results. Instead of powerless officials making secret and irrelevant appeals through diplomatic back channels, the Emperor of Japan radioed a nationwide order to cease fighting and lay down their arms, and that order was obeyed. That's the difference that the use of those two atomic bombs wrought.
Re:I'm sure the man was brilliant (Score:4, Informative)
actually, you get more fallout. much more.
the fusion part of the design doesn't provide the lion's share of the yield - as proved by Castle Bravo. it was designed as a ~3Mt design, but thanks to the U238 tamper and all the very fast neutrons the fusion stage provided, they ended up with 15Mt that they were quite unprepared for.
most of the yield comes from fissioning the U238 tamper, which gives a ton of fallout. Pu239 fission initiates the fusion stage, which provides craploads of neutrons which will fission the U238.
Re:I'm sure the man was brilliant (Score:4, Informative)
Well, it the hydrogen bomb was a bomb that could be scaled up to as large an explosion as one wanted, as the Soviet Union proved with the Tsar Bomba. They replaced the U-238 tamper with lead, and still got an explosion of 50 megatons or so, the largest man-made explosion in history. Had they kept the uranium, it would have been around 100 megatons. Unlike fission weapons, where the fission of the uranium or plutonium in a chain reaction will cause the supercritical mass to blow apart after only a fraction of the material has fissioned (up to perhaps only 20% fission for implosion-type weapons, as low as 1% for gun-type weapons like the Little Boy bomb used on Hiroshima), limiting the size of the explosion, a hydrogen bomb can become as big as one would like, provided the raw materials are available.
Re:They Saved The World (Score:4, Informative)
No. Japan was losing the war badly, but vowed to fight to the last person rather than surrender. I'm no fan of nuclear weapons but I have to admit that the overwhelming show of force saved millions of lives.
Yeah, after seeing the movies of Japanese civilians on the islands (Saipan?) jump off cliffs with their babies to avoid capture by the Americans, the thought of an invasion of the home islands really makes you shudder.
And the Japanese were reinforcing the area where the landings were planned, bringing a number of divisions back from the mainland, IIRC.
Tradition says the US was expecting to take a million casualties. Heaven knows how many they would have inflicted.
Re:They Saved The World (Score:4, Informative)
This is quite far from a "fact", in fact, the facts point in the completely opposite direction. By the end of WWII, the USSR was not in a position to fight another world war, or even a local war. It was, in fact, not in a position to fight any wars except proxy skirmishes until about the end of the 1970s. The evilness of the regime towards its people aside, the country was devastated by WWII, its male population decimated or worse, its infrastructure heavily dependent on Western aid, and on top of that the USSR had to support extending communism in half of Europe. If you believe that was free, you're wrong.
By many accounts, the real reason for the huge nuclear buildup on both sides of the iron curtain had, after a while, not so much to do with the threat that was addressed by the nuclear weapons, but more to do with the prestige and the resource allocation benefits that manufacturing nuclear weapons brought. In other words, it was a classical case of a principal-agent problem where the goal of the principal (maximizing safety) was not aligned to the goal of the agents (maximizing power of nuclear arsenal).
I believe this is also known as not allowing a mineshaft gap.
Re:They Saved The World (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is you deliberately targeted civilians in both cases. There were plenty of military only options, plenty of sparsely habited areas that would have been equally effective demonstrations.
Those civilians were innocent. Caught up in a war they didn't want. Their slaughter cannot be justified.
Re:Communists != Muslims (Score:5, Informative)
I was unaware the Japanese Imperial Navy indoctrinated their kamikaze pilots in Islam.
Nor the Viet Cong with their suicide bombers.
And that's just the conflicts I can think of off the top of my head involving the USA.
Re:Communists != Muslims (Score:4, Informative)
No religion had suicide bombers - except Muslims.
We also ignore nominally secular organizations like the LTTE (the "Tamil Tigers") in Sri Lanka who conducted hundreds of suicide bombings.
but the same mindset that inspires individual suicide bombers to blow themselves up where they can cause the maximum damage also applies to the leadership of countries who are willing to let countless of their own people die if they can wipe out their enemy in the process.
Or doesn't. There's plenty of reason to suspect hypocrisy in the upper ranks of Islamic-themed terrorist organizations.
Re:Salami tactics (Score:4, Informative)
I am not the author. There are two follow-ups in the same thread:
http://homepage.mac.com/msb/163x/faqs/nuclear_warfare_102.html [mac.com]
http://homepage.mac.com/msb/163x/faqs/nuclear_warfare_103.html [mac.com]