Manhattan links
Nov. 30th, 2014 07:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenak...related to the nuclear bomb project, that is, not the part of New York City. merry_maia, you're going to love this. Via nwhyte, I just discovered a blog by a historian about the Manhattan Project. After some cursory browsing, here are some of the intriguing entries:
Tokyo versus Hiroshima: But I depart from the standard comparison in two places. The first is the idea that since the atomic bombings were not original in targeting civilians, then they do not present a moral or ethical question. As I’ve written about before, I think the question of morality gets more problematic. If the atomic bombings were one-off events, rare interventions to end the war, then it might (for some) be compelling to say that they were worth the price of crossing over some kind of line regarding the deliberate burning of civilians to death en masse. But if they were instead the continuation of a well-established policy of burning civilians to death en masse, then the moral question gets much broader. The question changes from, Was it morally justified to commit a civilian massacre two times?, to Was it morally justified to make civilian massacre a standard means of fighting the war? I want to state explicitly that I don’t think, and I don’t want my phrasing to imply, that the answer to the above is necessarily an unequivocal “no.” There are certainly many moral frameworks that can allow for massacres (e.g. ends-justify-the-means). But I prefer to not dress this sort of thing up in euphemisms, whether we think it justified or not. Massacre means to deliberately and indiscriminately kill people. That is what you get when you bomb densely-populated cities with weapons that cannot distinguish between civilians and members of the military.
Oppenheimer and the Gita: analyses the context of the famous quote, and comes complete with a Youtube link to Oppenheimer discussing it in the 1960s, shortly before his death.
The worst Manhattan Project leaks: no, not Klaus Fuchs, but the press which published an article naming Los Alamos (complete with geographical description), Oppenheimer and Groves in 1944. Their guess as to what was actually being made there was wrong (though I like the death ray taking out German air planes idea, it's very comics-like), but given the correctness of much other info, I'm just saying this is why any dangerous German WWII spy is clearly fictional. Apparantly German intelligence couldn't even read American newspapers. Though Russian intelligence could. Which brings me to:
Photos and stories from the Soviet bomb project. Complete with thank you letter the scientists had to write Stalin and Stalin complaining the German scientist among them hadn't signed it.
merry_maia, you're going to love this. Via nwhyte, I just discovered a blog by a historian about the Manhattan Project. After some cursory browsing, here are some of the intriguing entries: Tokyo versus Hiroshima: But I depart from the standard comparison in two places. The first is the idea that since the atomic bombings were not original in targeting civilians, then they do not present a moral or ethical question. As I’ve written about before, I think the question of morality gets more problematic. If the atomic bombings were one-off events, rare interventions to end the war, then it might (for some) be compelling to say that they were worth the price of crossing over some kind of line regarding the deliberate burning of civilians to death en masse. But if they were instead the continuation of a well-established policy of burning civilians to death en masse, then the moral question gets much broader. The question changes from, Was it morally justified to commit a civilian massacre two times?, to Was it morally justified to make civilian massacre a standard means of fighting the war? I want to state explicitly that I don’t think, and I don’t want my phrasing to imply, that the answer to the above is necessarily an unequivocal “no.” There are certainly many moral frameworks that can allow for massacres (e.g. ends-justify-the-means). But I prefer to not dress this sort of thing up in euphemisms, whether we think it justified or not. Massacre means to deliberately and indiscriminately kill people. That is what you get when you bomb densely-populated cities with weapons that cannot distinguish between civilians and members of the military.
Oppenheimer and the Gita: analyses the context of the famous quote, and comes complete with a Youtube link to Oppenheimer discussing it in the 1960s, shortly before his death.
The worst Manhattan Project leaks: no, not Klaus Fuchs, but the press which published an article naming Los Alamos (complete with geographical description), Oppenheimer and Groves in 1944. Their guess as to what was actually being made there was wrong (though I like the death ray taking out German air planes idea, it's very comics-like), but given the correctness of much other info, I'm just saying this is why any dangerous German WWII spy is clearly fictional. Apparantly German intelligence couldn't even read American newspapers. Though Russian intelligence could. Which brings me to:
Photos and stories from the Soviet bomb project. Complete with thank you letter the scientists had to write Stalin and Stalin complaining the German scientist among them hadn't signed it.
