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by contubernio
21 days ago
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My grandfather was a student of Kistiakowksy and worked on the simultaneity part of the firing unit and was present at the assembly of the bomb and to watch the detonation. He recounted being quite nervous that his contribution would fail (as it had a short while before the final test) and the test would be a dud, but no one involved seriously in the scientific and engineering part of the building of the bomb had serious doubts that it would work once the technical issues were overcome, and none of them worried that it would ignite the atmosphere, because they knew enough to know that was silly. They'd all been working on this and doing thousands (!) of tests for months or years at that point. During the test he was given what he called the "chicken switch" that could abort the test at the last moment, and he always said that his biggest worry had been that he would stupidly abort the test in a moment of panic (surely this was exactly why he was given the switch). He described the actual explosion as the most beautiful thing he saw in his life. When one looks at the history one needs to remember that these were scientists and engineers who behaved as such. My grandfather, for example, was the sort of person who always loved blowing things up. He'd nearly blown up the family home as a kid when given a chemistry set ... and he studied chemistry because he liked blowing things up ... and he wrote a PhD thesis about the shock waves generated by blowing up a really big (conventional) bomb. It all gets dressed up as studying shock waves and so forth, but it's really kids blowing things up. They get caught up in the challenge of it. The consequences, political, moral and otherwise, are not forefront in the thinking of most. None of them are innocent, but some have misgivings or second thoughts. Others are more cynical and ambitious and even sinister. There are Oppenheimers and there are Tellers. |
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