#hans bethe

[breathetoseethetruth]

You watched Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" and now want to learn more about some of the scientists that were involved and the history of the Manhattan Project? Then I recommend "Pandora's Keepers" by Brian VanDeMark. The book takes a closer look at not just J. Robert Oppenheimer, but also Hans Bethe, Niels Bohr, Arthur Compton, Enrico Fermi, Ernest Lawrence, Isidor Isaac Rabi, Leo Szilard and Edward Teller. The book is a history book more so than a science book, most of the scientific explanations mentioned around the making of the bomb, aren't too complex to understand for readers who aren't experts on the matter.

[gregor-samsung]

“ Suo padre era su Campañia Hill con Oppenheimer al Trinity. Teller. Bethe. Lawrence. Feynman. Teller faceva girare la crema solare. Indossavano guanti e occhialoni. Come dei saldatori. Oppenheimer fumava come una ciminiera e aveva la tosse cronica e i denti guasti. Occhi di un azzurro folgorante. Un accento indefinibile. Quasi irlandese. Portava vestiti buoni ma che gli ballavano addosso. Non pesava niente. Groves lo ingaggiò perché aveva visto che non si lasciava intimidire. Tutto qua. Un sacco di gente molto sveglia pensava che fosse l’uomo piú sveglio che Dio avesse mai creato. Strano tipo, quel Dio. C’erano persone che erano scappate da Hiroshima per precipitarsi a Nagasaki e accertarsi che i loro cari fossero al sicuro. Arrivando giusto in tempo per morire incenerite. Lui ci andò dopo la guerra con una squadra di scienziati. Mio padre. Disse che era tutto arrugginito. Tutto sembrava coperto di ruggine. Nelle strade c’erano carcasse di tram distrutte dal fuoco. I vetri sciogliendosi erano usciti dai telai ed erano colati sui laterizi. Seduti sulle molle annerite gli scheletri carbonizzati dei passeggeri senza piú vestiti né capelli e con lembi di carne annerita appesi alle ossa. Gli occhi lessati nelle orbite. Labbra e nasi mangiati dalle fiamme. Ridenti sui loro sedili. I vivi vagolavano ma non c’era dove andare. A migliaia si precipitavano nel fiume e ci morivano. Erano come insetti: nessuna direzione era preferibile a un’altra. Gente in fiamme strisciava fra i cadaveri come una specie di horror in un crematorio gigante. Credevano semplicemente che il mondo fosse finito. L’idea che tutto ciò avesse a che fare con la guerra non li sfiorava quasi. Portavano fra le braccia il fagotto della loro stessa pelle come un bucato da non trascinare fra le macerie e nella cenere e incappavano alienati gli uni negli altri nelle loro deambulazioni da alienati su residui di suolo fumante, il vedente in difficoltà quanto il cieco. La notizia di tutto ciò non uscí dalla città per due giorni. Chi sopravvisse spesso ricordava quegli orrori come dotati di un certo valore estetico. In quello spettro fungoide che sbocciava nell’alba come un maligno fiore di loto e nella fusione di solidi fino ad allora ignota risiedeva una verità che avrebbe silenziato la poesia per mille anni. Come un’enorme vescica, dicevano. Come una cosa marina. Tremolava appena sul vicino orizzonte. Poi quel rumore terribile. Videro uccelli nel cielo albeggiante prendere fuoco ed esplodere silenziosamente e cadere in lunghi archi verso terra come cotillon in fiamme. “

Cormac McCarthy, Il passeggero, traduzione di Maurizia Balmelli, Einaudi (Collana Supercoralli), 2023; pp. 115-116.

[Edizione originale: The Passenger, Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 2022]

[denimbex1986]

“Genius is no guarantee of wisdom,” says government official Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. It could be the blockbuster’s banner statement. Since the release of Nolan’s thrilling, bombastic film, the culture has been caught in the firestorm about how to explain the personality of the eloquent, esoteric J. Robert Oppenheimer and his creation of the first and only people-destroying atomic weapon to be used against civilians. Where Hollywood traffics in Oppenheimer’s ambiguity as a historical character, two small but potent nonfiction forebears ask a more pointed question: what is the responsibility of scientists to their societies?

The Day After Trinity (1981) and The Strangest Dream (2008) evacuate the mythical tropes of the tortured genius biopic that Hollywood loves to rehearse in films like The Imitation Game, Hawking, and A Beautiful Mind. Now enjoying a renaissance, the films are neither unforgiving nor hardline, but offer sharper moral clarity to the Oppenheimer dilemma, presenting a more complex (and condemning) portrait of the father of the atomic bomb: a patriot, philosopher-king, skilled public administrator, scientific collaborator with military and government, emotional naif, egotist, and polyglot.

Nolan’s story arcs towards Oppenheimer losing his naivete upon realizing that he has given humanity the power to destroy itself. Designed to wrap around each filmgoer’s own worldview and politics, the film is as politically open-ended as you might expect from a major blockbuster. In his press tour, Nolan articulated a more explicitly conservative stance that chimes both with the Great Man theory of history (another biopic favorite) and the Cold War military doctrine that justified the development and use of atomic arsenals against civilians.

“Is there a parallel universe in which it wasn’t him, but it was somebody else and that would’ve happened?” Nolan said in the New York Times. “Quite possibly. That’s the argument for diminishing his importance in history. But that’s an assumption that history is made simply by movements of society and not by individuals. It’s a very philosophical debate…. he’s still the most important man because the bomb would’ve stopped war forever. We haven’t had a world war since 1945 based on the threat of mutual assured destruction.”

That’s also the idea behind the official policy of the nuclear superpowers: deterrence. Horror, in other words, was necessary to prevent even greater horror. The very same doublethink led to Harry Truman’s honorary degree, conferred for ending the war.

How reluctant was Oppie? In Jon Else’s The Day After Trinity, a documentary originally made for public television in 1980, Oppenheimer’s collaborators deliver ambivalent, guilty testimony to a static, non-judgmental camera. Screening on the Criterion Channel, Else’s doc points to the great pleasure its subject took in being appointed the leader of the grandiose bomb project, with the cosmic job title of “Coordinator of Rapid Rupture.” The lens pans patiently across grainy, grayscale photographs that have the natural air of science fiction; the film feels more of a piece with Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962) than a typical historical documentary. After all, Oppenheimer was not just the enabler of the weapons that could annihilate us all, but of the high-stakes hallmarks of modern spectacle itself. The awe-inspiring images of mushroom clouds over Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki are now instantly recognizable in the core visual grammar of contemporary entertainment and media. It’s hard to imagine an idea better suited to Nolan’s exalted, maximalist esthetic and his stories of obsessive male protagonists pressurized within towering patriarchal systems of power.

Oppenheimer positions the atomic bomb as the creation of a brilliant, creative personality. But The Day After Trinity revels in the administrative scale of the Los Alamos project necessary to make a mechanism to trigger, in a millionth of a second, a violent chain reaction with a flare brighter than a hundred suns. A walled city of six thousand staff, at a cost of $56 million. Seven scientific divisions: theoretical physics, experimental physics, ordinance, explosives, bomb physics, chemistry, and metallurgy. All of America’s industrial might and scientific innovation connected in this secret lab with its billions of dollars of military investment.

“Somehow Oppenheimer put this thing together. He was the conductor of this orchestra. Somehow he created this fantastic esprit. It was just the most marvelous time of their lives,” says Freeman Dyson, a rather eccentric theoretical physicist who became Oppie’s colleague at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. “That was the time when the big change in his life occurred. It must have been during that time that the dream somehow got hold of him, of really producing a nuclear weapon.”

In this vision of the A-bomb narrative, Dyson posits that Oppie’s aims switched from finding out “the deep secrets of nature” to producing “a mechanism that works. It was a different problem, and he completely changed to fit the new role.” We begin to see more clearly a portrait of an outsider with a wild desire to be at the center. All the work the whiz kids were doing over the years was always designed to contribute to the war. (All the films remove Oppie’s more demonstrably radical tendencies, his belief in a world government, for instance, which he mentioned offhandedly in the New York Review of Books in 1966.)

The closest we get to Oppenheimer himself is his pale-eyed, doppelganger brother, Frank, who gives the impression of a visionary living in a purely abstract realm. He stammers a little when he speaks of the moment when he and Oppie heard on the radio of their great bomb in action. “Thank God it wasn’t a dud… thank God it worked… Up to then, I don’t think we’d really, I’d really, thought about all those flattened people.” He still seems stunned. If nothing else, Frank gives weight to the storytelling trope of scientists as hyperintelligent but flakey space cadets at a remove from the humanity of it all. “Treating humans as matter,” as Los Alamos collaborator Hans Bethe puts it appallingly. Another contributing scientist says he vomited and lay down in depression. “I remember being just ill,” he says. “Just sick.”

The doc swirls with clips accumulated from Los Alamos Scientific Laboratories, National Atomic Museum, American Institute of Physics, and Fox and NBC newsreels, while Paul Free’s authoritative narration hovers like an omniscient voice from the depths of the Cold War itself. Then, there is Oppie: a figure of stricken elegance in his rakish pork pie hat. Typical of documentaries constructed in a postmodern style, what it all means is never explicated. Ambiguity presides over clarity.

Most directive is Dyson’s testimony. “He made this alliance with the United States Army and the person of General Groves who gave him undreamed-of resources, huge armies of people, and as much money as he could possibly spend in order to do physics on the grand scale,” Dyson says with his flashlight perceptiveness. “We are still living with it. Once you sell your soul to the devil, there’s no going back on it.” Los Alamos, in this counternarrative, was not just an ivory tower but an irresistible paradise for genius-level scientists simply interested in new discoveries and mega-gadgets.

Dyson is a dubious fellow to emerge as the truthteller, given the inconsistency of his own legacy. His unorthodox theories are worthy of their own Nolan-esque treatment. He advocated growing genetically modified trees on comets, so that they might land on other planets and create human-supporting atmospheres, and eventually became a climate change denier based on his distrust of mathematical models. But his intelligence is irrefutable, and his distance from the Manhattan Project gives him a guiltless perspective and authority absent in Oppie’s other colleagues. Dyson, a greater antagonist than can be found in any mere Marvel movie, diagnoses Oppie as the self-induced victim of a “Faustian bargain.”

“Why did the bomb get dropped?” Dyson asks, his tie a little too big, his combover a little too combed over. “It was almost inevitable. Simply because all the bureaucratic apparatus existed at that time to do it. The Air Force was ready and waiting… The whole machinery was ready.”

Dyson also refutes the refrain of Oppenheimer’s responsibility for the catastrophe. “It was no one’s fault that the bomb was dropped. As usual, the reason it was dropped was that nobody had the courage or the foresight to say no.” Dyson pauses to let this sink in, then looks down and wobbles his head tragically. “Certainly not Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer gave his consent in a certain sense. He was on a committee that advised the Secretary of War, and that committee did not take any kind of a stand against dropping the bomb.” This measured oral history is fatal to the view of Oppie as a gentle humanist.

Dorothy McKibben, who ran the Manhattan Project’s office, chimes in with crystal clarity: “I don’t think they would have developed that [bomb] to show at a garden party. I think they were going to do it.” In archival footage, General Leslie Groves plays the role of plainspoken pragmatist: “It would have come out, sooner or later, at a Congressional hearing, if nowhere else, just when we could’ve dropped the bomb if we didn’t use it. And then knowing American politics, you know as well as I do, if there had been an election fought on the basis of every mother whose son was killed after such-and-such a date, the blood is on the hands of the President.”

Through these testimonies, the convention of the conflicted scientist and the myth of an A-bomb created in self-defense give way to a mantra of winning the war, and winning quickly. Valuing American lives over other lives. Avoiding a bloody invasion of the Japanese mainland. Months before Hiroshima, orders had been given to leave several Japanese cities untouched, to provide virgin targets where the impact of the new bomb could be clearly seen. Afterwards, a scientific team from the US was sent to Japan to study the effects. Footage rolls, in The Day After Trinity, of news clips of hospitalized burn victims.

In films on the Manhattan Project, questions of conscience are commonly seen through the assenting viewpoint—that of the scientists who continued to work on the bomb, even after Hitler’s defeat. One essential perspective is obscured, black-holed in subterfuge, even. Physicist and European refugee Joseph Rotblat made crucial discoveries in the fission process, and went on to specialize in nuclear fallout. He moved to Los Alamos in 1944 but defected from the project on grounds of conscience upon learning that the Nazis could not build such a bomb. He was the only scientist to turn his back.

“If my work is going to be applied, I would like myself to decide how it is applied,” Rotblat says in the 2008 Canadian documentary The Strangest Dream. Streaming on the National Film Board of Canada’s platform, the film traces his renunciation of A-bomb development and his role in the Pugwash Conferences, where scientists and statesmen gathered to discuss the reversal of nuclear proliferation. The film renders a fairly straight treatment of its quiet subject, with the visually rich backing of a vertiginous collage of disparate forms, including spooky Cold-War era footage and clips of the Trinity mushroom cloud. Oppie is not in the film, but the narrative takes place in the fissures he helped wrench open; he lurks like an ever-present ghost behind the character of Rotblat, who stands as his angelic nemesis as he tries to transform physics into a humanitarian project. Like Oppenheimer, Rotblat was also accused of espionage, but he was eventually awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his contributions to the disarmament campaign.

Notably, Rotblat is entirely absent from Oppenheimer, despite being described as a brilliantly offbeat individual—a “mad Polish scientist”—by a former student in The Strangest Dream. It’s a curious historical erasure and a missed chance for a dramatic clash. Then again, perhaps Rotblat is too steady and untragic, incorruptible and unmemeable for his own big moment, let alone the blockbuster treatment. Oppie’s genius wasn’t just in his Faustian bargain but in the way that he spoke and the way he held himself, quoting Hindu philosophy and smoking till the end of time. I suppose film culture is more interested in the flawed, tortured luminary than the staunch, principled dissenter or the morally engaged scientist.

Prosecuting the melancholic drama of the ingenuous mastermind requires substantial historical selectivity. Most cinema narratives hew to the oft-cited rationale for the A-bomb’s development: its function as a deterrent to a Nazi explosive. But in his essay “Leaving the Bomb Project,” Rotblat wrote, “Groves said that, of course, the real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets… Until then I had thought that our work was to prevent a Nazi victory, and now I was told that the weapon we were preparing was intended for use against the people who were making extreme sacrifices for that very aim.” With more than a dash of elegiac melancholy, the working thesis of The Strangest Dream is that Rotblat’s moral strength insulated him against Oppie-style tragedy.

Insofar as the The Strangest Dream and The Day After Trinity position the Manhattan Project as an unholy alliance of physics and the openly violent arm of the state, they do so via the absent presence of Oppenheimer, who, flush with government cash, personifies the uneasy collision of science and military. Today’s ventures in AI offer the same science-ethics conundrum, and we don’t seem to be any closer to resolving it than at the moment of Oppenheimer’s mythic quandary. Looking at the images of the Los Alamos exertions, you can almost faintly hear the words of today’s STEM bros: disruption, innovation, brilliance. Wondrous and diabolical, the A-bomb is presented in these documentaries as the freakish outcome of public-bureaucratic entrepreneurialism. (They are weaker on the tangled history of superpower competition and atomic technology.) It all depends, of course, on what humans do with the technology we develop.

Given what we know about capitalist society at present, things aren’t exactly looking up. Just a decade after The Day After Trinity, the Cold War victory lap was being run at the box office. A new, end-of-history generation of studio filmmakers was writing a euphoric, Fukuyama-esque version of reality into pop-culture lore: in blockbusters like Independence Day (1996), The Core (2003), and Armageddon (1998), American pluck saves humanity from wholesale destruction; anxiety surrounding US dominance over the international order is undetectable, and the US military is either prominent or necessary. Before them all, The Day After Trinity suggested that technology’s triumph is the very crux of the problem.

Today, Oppenheimer reifies a political crisis—superpower competition for atomic arsenal—as a conundrum of personality, tech, and naive genius, even as it centers the wild fraternity of science, military, and government vital to create the A-bomb. But the political arrangement of power and resources seems like more of an objective, inevitable fact about the world in The Day After Trinity and The Strangest Dream. If there’s such a thing as sober, mournful spectacle, these films manifest it.

Oppenheimer is long gone, but his legacy—the capacity of a self-destroying humanity, and the late-capitalist spectacle of that mushroom cloud’s bright flash of light—lingers. He did not sign the Einstein-Russell Manifesto against nuclear war. He never apologized for his role in bringing the bomb to life. Atomic technology is now standard. The world’s nuclear powers currently possess an estimated 12,512 active warheads. More than enough to wipe out the planet.'

[tenth-sentence]

He appeared very depressed after this long-distance conversation.

"Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists" - Robert Jungk, translated by James Cleugh

[thebrownees]

"Oppenheimer" has more Nobel Prize-winning characters than any movie in Hollywood history. Who are the actors who play them (and the spy Klaus Fuchs)?

[whats-in-a-sentence]

The change is evident in the report of an eye-witness, Gordon Dean, then Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission:

We had at that meeting in June of 1951 every person, I think, that could conceivably have made a contribution. People like Norris Bradbury, head of the Los Alamos laboratory, and one or two of his assistants. Dr Nordheim, I believe, was there from Los Alamos, very active in the H programme. Johnny von Neumann from Princeton, one of the best weapons men in the world, Dr Teller, Dr Bethe, Dr Fermi, Johnny Wheeler, all the top men from every laboratory sat around this table and we went at it for two days.

Out of the meeting came something which Edward Teller brought into the meeting with his own head, which was an entirely new way of approaching a thermonuclear weapon.

I would like to be able to describe that but it is one of the most sensitive things we have left in the atomic-energy programme . . . it was just a theory at this point. Pictures were drawn on the board. Calculations were made, Dr Bethe, Dr Teller, Dr Fermi participating the most in this. Oppy very actively as well.

At the end of those two days we were all convinced, everyone in the room, that at least we had something for the first time that looked feasible in the way of an idea.

I remember leaving that meeting impressed with this fact, that everyone around that table without exception, and this included Dr Oppenheimer, was enthusiastic now that you had someone foreseeable. I remember going out and in four days making a commitment for a new plant . . . we had no money in the budget to do it with and getting this thing started on the tracks, there was enthusiasm right through the programme for the first time. The bickering was gone. The discussions were pretty well ended, and we were able within a matter of just about one year to have that gadget ready.

"Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists" - Robert Jungk, translated by James Cleugh

[jdunlevy]

By the time Enrico Fermi jokingly took bets among his Los Alamos colleagues on whether the July 16, 1945, Trinity test would wipe out all earthbound life, physicists already knew of the impossibility of setting the atmosphere on fire, according to a 1991 interview with Hans Bethe published by Scientific American.

[otterandterrier]

Illustrated by Sophie Li and written by Beth Revis, Someone Who Loves You will re-tell the moments of Han and Leia’s wedding ceremony on Endor after the Rebel’s victory over the Empire—taking moments already told in Revis’ earlier novel and rendering them in beautiful, painterly new scenes, as the doting newlyweds-to-be explain to curious Ewok children just what love is, and what Han and Leia mean to each other. [x]

There’s a scene in The Princess and the Scoundrel where Leia, bedecked in her gorgeous gown and clutching wildflowers, steps into the tree temple, but no one’s noticed yet. No one but Han. While every single person is watching him, at the front of the crowd, he’s only got eyes for her. Of course, in the novel, I had to expand the ceremony. Where are Chewie, Luke, Mon Mothma? What are they doing and seeing? What threat is happening in the background that will propel the story, and how might they face it? But in this book, I was able to pull it back in. Yes, there are woklings running around, causing chaos. But it’s so clear—Han and Leia have eyes only for each other. In every image, no matter what’s happening, their love is at the center. We are back in that private moment, that personal time, where there’s nothing more important than their love.

[fiatluxillustration-portfolio]

“My father was good,’ Leia thought, but in her mind she pictured Bail Organa, not Darth Vader. Thinking of Bail made her think of Breha, her mother. Of her home. Of everything she lost.” 

-The Princess and the Scoundrel

[go-see-a-starwar]

Star Wars: Someone Who Loves You written by Beth Revis and illustrated by Sophie Li - coming Dec 3 (x)

[bluedaisy312]

˗ˏˋ my favourite characters ´ˎ˗

Red Dead Redemption 2:

Arthur Morgan, John Marston, Mary - Beth Gaskill, Hosea Matthews

Harry Potter:

Hermione Granger, Harry Potter, Blaise Zabini

Star Wars:

Anakin Skywalker / Darth Vader, Han Solo, Leia Organa

House of Dragon:

Jacaerys Targaryen, Rhaenyra Targaryen, Alicent Hightower, Aemond Targaryen

[lesbiansusanpevensie]

buck will tell maddie who will tell chimney who will hear eddie happily say he ran into tommy and buck at dinner the next day at work and chimney will assume he knows it was a date and spill the beans

[remotelyvague]

[denimbex1986]

'Just saw the Oppenheimer film and hungry for more?...

American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. “The film is about Oppenheimer, not the project and afterwards. If you want to go deeper, I recommend you read the book the movie was based on and think more broadly about the impact of the Manhattan Project.”

“The Oppenheimer Issue” of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s National Security Science magazine has lots of great stories about Oppenheimer and the laboratory.

Plutonium 1943–1945, by Los Alamos Historical Society....

The Day After Trinity, “an Academy Award-winning documentary, which can be viewed for free on the Criterion app, is an excellent first-hand account with interviews of key scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, who knew Oppenheimer closely. This 1981 documentary is a very good complement to the movie, Oppenheimer. Some of the interesting figures interviewed extensively are Robert Oppenheimer’s brother, Frank; the Nobel laureate Hans Bethe; and Freeman Dyson, who were all part of the Manhattan Project. Their recollections of that important period and the underlying debates are invaluable oral histories for researchers and the general public.”...

Hiroshima “This short book, by John Hersey, is based on what was initially a lengthy article in the New Yorker and was published a couple of years after the atomic bombing. It gave Americans their first description of the actual effects of dropping the bomb. This helps make up for what many critics have felt was an omission in the movie.”

The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes, “is the definitive book account of the Manhattan Project and the science and engineering behind the bomb.”

The Winning Weapon, by Gregg Herken, “is a historian’s review of how the U.S. approached the questions of arms control and a possible arms race in the years right after World War II.”

The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb, by Herbert York, “is a good account of the dispute between Oppenheimer and Teller over whether to build the H-bomb, which became a key factor in the hearing that led to Oppenheimer losing his security clearance.”...

Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World, by Lesley M.M. Blume, “is a good companion book of John Hersey’s Hiroshima and was published on the 75th anniversary of the bombing.”

“If you want to add some perspectives from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I would definitely recommend the Hiroshima Memorial Museum Online and the recently developed online No More Hiroshima and Nagasaki Museum.”

“The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Oppenheimer Collection has many good articles with various perspectives.”...'

[tenth-sentence]

Bethe finally played a decisive part in the ultimate production of the bomb he himself so feared and hated because of his outstanding erudition and systematic work.

"Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists" - Robert Jungk, translated by James Cleugh

[garadinervi]

Richard Tuttle: Twenty Floor Drawings, Institute of Contemporary Art, Amsterdam / SDU Publishers, Den Haag 1991 [BOOKS@, Amsterdam. © Richard Tuttle]

Text: Susan Harris Editor: Beth O'Brien Translation: Nelleke van Maaren Photograpoher: Paternoster, Amsterdam Design: Hans Bocking (UNA) Typesetting and Printing: Drukkerij Roskeek, Nuth

Exhibition: Institute of Contemporary Art, Amsterdam, 1991