tag:theconversation.com,2011:/au/topics/manhattan-project-42817/articles
Manhattan Project – The Conversation
2024-03-11T20:05:54Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/225304
2024-03-11T20:05:54Z
2024-03-11T20:05:54Z
As ‘Oppenheimer’ triumphs at the Oscars, we should ask how historical films frame our shared future
<p><a href="https://variety.com/2024/film/news/christopher-nolan-oppenheimer-post-franchise-movie-era-1235894688/">Box office</a> receipts for Christopher Nolan’s <em>Oppenheimer</em> had already approached the billion-dollar mark worldwide before the 2024 Oscars ceremony.</p>
<p>To this financial success, along with film awards for Best Director, Cinematography, Editing, Sound, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, <em>Oppenheimer</em> garnered Nolan his first Academy Award for Best Picture. </p>
<p>In larger Academy Award history, this raises the tally for historical film wins to 52 over 96 competitions, according to research by <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/historical-film-9781847884978">film scholar Jonathan Stubbs</a> and records at the <a href="https://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies">Oscars website</a>. There is a reason why people call big-budget historical <a href="https://collider.com/oscar-bait-movies/">films “Oscar bait</a>.” </p>
<p>The glossy spectacle of this genre often brings attention to its makers. And yet, as I argue in my new book, <em><a href="https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/making-history-move/9781978829770">Making History Move: Five Principles of the Historical Film</a></em>,
because the genre has such an outsized effect on spectators and their sense of historical reality, it’s important to think about and understand how historical films are constructed.</p>
<p>With <em>Oppenheimer</em> having received so much commercial, critical and Academy success, we have an opportunity to think about critical criteria for viewing historical film — and what we are owed by historical filmmakers. </p>
<h2>Highly influential medium</h2>
<p>This genre of film represents much more than a bold quest to win the most sought-after prize at the most celebrated labour union awards in history. These films look to the past to offer us a story and argument in an effort to see ourselves in the present — and to make decisions toward the future. </p>
<p>The genre combines a bookish status, conveying data and the sense of learning about the real world. Facts are served up with a wallop of emotion, excitement, adventure, terror and tears, to large and diverse audiences. </p>
<p>Although far from the most trusted medium for history, a recent <a href="https://www.historians.org/history-culture-survey">large-scale survey</a> of Americans published by the American Historical Association found that historical documentaries and films are the top two sources for information about the past for the public.</p>
<p>Unlike with pure fiction, when we watch a historical film (such as other 2024 Best Picture nominees, <em>The Zone of Interest</em> and <em>Killers of the Flower Moon</em>) we have the sense that we are seeing and hearing the past as we learn details about historical people and events. </p>
<p>These films speak to shared intergenerational and foundational experiences and legacies. We interpret historical films in ways that feel personal. </p>
<h2>Partisan cultural bubbles</h2>
<p>We are well into the experiment of the internet age when social media platforms sort people into tribes. </p>
<p>In the words of Renée DiResta, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory, people are living in discrete spheres operating with distinct media, norms and frameworks of facts — their own <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/opinion/political-reality-algorithms.html">“bespoke realities</a>.”
These information silos spawn political convictions and perspectives that reinforce separate interpretations of present and past. </p>
<p>The result creates multiverses of meaning. We exist in partisan cultural bubbles, abandoning the tussle over an objective sense of the past in favour of
ever-expanding and contradictory subjective narratives. </p>
<p>As this happens, mass media platforms, like feature films, gain precedence. They cross boundaries impermeable to history books, museums, university lectures and social networks, speaking to a shared sense of identity at vast communal scales.</p>
<h2>Just a movie?</h2>
<p>Our ability to keep what we are watching at a critical distance is less robust than we may assume. Neuroscience illuminates a central aspect of film’s power to captivate, enchant and convince. </p>
<p>As professor of psychological and brain science Jeffrey Zacks writes in his book <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/flicker-9780199982875?q=jeff%20zacks&lang=en&cc=ca"><em>Flicker: Your Brain on the Movies</em></a>, our brains operate by building neural models to understand our direct experience: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“[W]hether we experience events in real life, watch them in a movie or hear about them in a story, we build perceptual and memory representations in the same format [in our brains].” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>He further explains that “it does not take extra work to put together experiences from a film with experiences from our lives to draw inferences. On the contrary, what takes extra work is to keep these different event representations separate.”</p>
<p>Now consider what happens when we make models of the past that we code as historical and non-fiction.</p>
<h2>5 principles of historical films</h2>
<p>For these reasons it is critical that we engage these films as more than mere diversion and amusement. Drawing on philosophy of history, literary and film theory, I have isolated five key principles to grasp and understand their construction, including:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>narration, the stories they choose to tell and how they tell them;</p></li>
<li><p>evidence, the sources and use of data that represents the past;</p></li>
<li><p>reflexivity, the use of <a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/engaging-the-past/9780231165754">rupture techniques</a> that pull the audience out of their immersion in the story, reminding them of the structuring process of history;</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674008212">foreignness</a>, the extent to which a film shows the richness of differences in ideas, beliefs, and material realities of the past, rather than creating a pantomime of contemporary people in fancy dress;</p></li>
<li><p>plurality, whether a film presents us a range or new perspectives on the meaning of events through their selection of people as characters.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>These principles help us consider the creation, role and impact of historical films. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/visiting-the-trinity-site-featured-in-oppenheimer-is-a-sobering-reminder-of-the-horror-of-nuclear-weapons-210248">Visiting the Trinity Site featured in 'Oppenheimer' is a sobering reminder of the horror of nuclear weapons</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<h2>About envisioning futures</h2>
<p>What makes historical films so compelling and so difficult is they have to fictionalize and imagine narratives around real people and events.</p>
<p>Filmmakers working with realities of the past are charged with making an interpretation of historical data — and a judgment about what it means to us today, in a way that engages and entertains us as spectators. </p>
<p>To be true to that contract, such films should not simply make things up. They need to strive for accuracy and objectivity, while performing a deft sleight of hand to enthrall and captivate. </p>
<p>On top of box office success and critical success, <em>Oppenheimer</em> does an impressive job of translating <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/shopping/oppenheimer-movie-book-read-american-prometheus-online-1235539040/">biographical source material</a> into an engaging and thought-provoking feature film. As such, this functions as a clarion call in the present, <a href="https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/annie-lennox-stars-sign-open-letter-warning-nuclear-threat-1235623118">sparking real questions about the meaning of the nuclear age today</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/225304/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kim Nelson receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Canadian Heritage under their Initiative for Digital Citizen Research.</span></em></p>
The success of ‘Oppenheimer’ at the Academy Awards presents an opportunity to think about critical criteria for viewing historical film — and what we are owed by historical filmmakers.
Kim Nelson, Associate Professor. Cinema Arts, School of Creative Arts, University of Windsor
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/210262
2023-08-01T12:26:50Z
2023-08-01T12:26:50Z
The nuclear arms race’s legacy at home: Toxic contamination, staggering cleanup costs and a culture of government secrecy
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/540032/original/file-20230729-63311-ud8ybo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=28%2C7%2C4716%2C3151&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Packaging excavated radioactive materials at the Hanford site in Washington state.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://flic.kr/p/cpEWtw">USDOE</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Christopher Nolan’s film “<a href="https://www.oppenheimermovie.com/">Oppenheimer</a>” has focused new attention on the legacies of the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Manhattan-Project">Manhattan Project</a> – the World War II program to develop nuclear weapons. As the anniversaries of the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/atomic-bombings-of-Hiroshima-and-Nagasaki">bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki</a> on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, approach, it’s a timely moment to look further at dilemmas wrought by the creation of the atomic bomb.</p>
<p>The Manhattan Project spawned a trinity of interconnected legacies. It initiated a <a href="https://theconversation.com/hiroshima-attack-marks-its-78th-anniversary-its-lessons-of-unnecessary-mass-destruction-could-help-guide-future-nuclear-arms-talks-210115">global arms race</a> that threatens the survival of humanity and the planet as we know it. It also led to widespread public health and environmental damage from nuclear weapons production and testing. And it generated a culture of governmental secrecy with troubling political consequences.</p>
<p><a href="https://chass.ncsu.edu/people/wjkinsel/">As a researcher</a> examining communication in science, technology, energy and environmental contexts, I’ve studied these <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780739119044/Nuclear-Legacies-Communication-Controversy-and-the-U.S.-Nuclear-Weapons-Complex">legacies of nuclear weapons production</a>. From 2000 to 2005, I also served on a <a href="http://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/hab">citizen advisory board</a> that provides input to federal and state officials on a massive environmental cleanup program at the <a href="https://www.hanford.gov/">Hanford nuclear site</a> in Washington state that continues today.</p>
<p>Hanford is less well known than Los Alamos, New Mexico, where scientists designed the first atomic weapons, but it was also crucial to the Manhattan Project. There, an enormous, secret industrial facility produced the plutonium fuel for the <a href="https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/trinity-test-1945/">Trinity test</a> on July 16, 1945, and the bomb that incinerated Nagasaki a few weeks later. (The Hiroshima bomb was fueled by uranium produced in <a href="https://www.energy.gov/em/oak-ridge">Oak Ridge, Tennessee,</a> at another of the principal Manhattan Project sites.) </p>
<p>Later, workers at Hanford <a href="https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/pu50yc.html">made most of the plutonium</a> used in the U.S. nuclear arsenal throughout the Cold War. In the process, Hanford became one of the most contaminated places on Earth. Total cleanup costs are projected to reach <a href="https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-22-105809.pdf">up to US$640 billion</a>, and the job won’t be completed for decades, if ever.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/66dALYGDySo?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The Hanford nuclear site in eastern Washington state is the most toxic site in the U.S.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Victims of nuclear tests</h2>
<p>Nuclear weapons production and testing have harmed public health and the environment in multiple ways. For example, a new study released in preprint form in July 2023 while awaiting scientific peer review finds that fallout from the Trinity nuclear test <a href="https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2307/2307.11040.pdf">reached 46 U.S. states and parts of Canada and Mexico</a>. </p>
<p>Dozens of families who lived near the site – many of them Hispanic or Indigenous – were unknowingly exposed to radioactive contamination. So far, they <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2023/07/oppenheimer-christopher-nolan-manhattan-project-nuclear-testing-los-alamos-trinity-victims.html">have not been included</a> in the federal program to <a href="https://www.justice.gov/civil/common/reca">compensate uranium miners and “downwinders</a>” who developed radiation-linked illnesses after exposure to later atmospheric nuclear tests. </p>
<p>On July 27, 2023, however, the U.S. Senate voted to extend the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act and <a href="https://www.currentargus.com/story/news/2023/08/01/radiation-nuclear-exposed-new-mexicans-trinity-site-compensated-us-senate-vote-oppenheimer/70484797007/">expand it to communities near the Trinity test site</a> in New Mexico. A companion bill is under consideration in the House of Representatives. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/location/marshall-islands/">largest above-ground U.S. tests</a>, along with tests conducted underwater, took place in the Pacific islands. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and other nations conducted their own testing programs. <a href="https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nucleartesttally">Globally through 2017</a>, nuclear-armed nations exploded 528 weapons above ground or underwater, and an additional 1,528 underground. </p>
<p>Estimating <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-014-0491-1">how many people have suffered health effects</a> from these tests is notoriously difficult. So is accounting for <a href="https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/location/marshall-islands/">disruptions to communities</a> that were displaced by these experiments.</p>
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<h2>Polluted soil and water</h2>
<p>Nuclear weapons production has also exposed many people, communities and ecosystems to radiological and toxic chemical pollution. Here, Hanford offers troubling lessons.</p>
<p>Starting in 1944, workers at the remote site in eastern Washington state irradiated uranium fuel in reactors and then dissolved it in acid to extract its plutonium content. Hanford’s nine reactors, located along the Columbia River to provide a source of cooling water, discharged water <a href="https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=second.cleanup&id=1001114">contaminated with radioactive and hazardous chemicals</a> into the river through <a href="https://ecology.wa.gov/waste-toxics/nuclear-waste/hanford-cleanup/hanford-overview">1987, when the last operating reactor was shut down</a>.</p>
<p>Extracting plutonium from the irradiated fuel, an activity called reprocessing, generated 56 million gallons of liquid waste laced with radioactive and chemical poisons. The wastes were stored in <a href="https://ecology.wa.gov/Waste-Toxics/Nuclear-waste/Hanford-cleanup/Tank-waste-management/Tank-monitoring-closure">underground tanks</a> designed to last 25 years, based on an assumption that a disposal solution would be developed later. </p>
<p>Seventy-eight years after the first tank was built, that solution remains elusive. A project to vitrify, or <a href="https://ecology.wa.gov/Waste-Toxics/Nuclear-waste/Hanford-cleanup/Tank-waste-management/Tank-waste-treatment">embed tank wastes in glass</a> for permanent disposal, has been <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/31/us/nuclear-waste-cleanup.html">mired in technical, managerial and political difficulties</a>, and repeatedly threatened with cancellation. </p>
<p>Now, officials are considering mixing some radioactive sludges <a href="https://crosscut.com/environment/2022/12/hanford-considers-quicker-way-clean-radioactive-waste">with concrete grout</a> and shipping them elsewhere for disposal – or perhaps leaving them in the tanks. Critics regard those proposals as <a href="https://www.hanfordchallenge.org/inheriting-hanford/2023/3/17/should-we-grout-tank-waste-at-hanford">risky compromises</a>. Meanwhile, an <a href="https://www.oregon.gov/energy/safety-resiliency/Pages/Hanford-Tank-Waste.aspx">estimated 1 million gallons</a> of liquid waste have leaked from some tanks into the ground, threatening the Columbia River, a backbone of the Pacific Northwest’s economy and ecology.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/540033/original/file-20230729-24848-e523wv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Graphic showing cutaways of Hanford radioactive waste tanks." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/540033/original/file-20230729-24848-e523wv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/540033/original/file-20230729-24848-e523wv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=347&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/540033/original/file-20230729-24848-e523wv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=347&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/540033/original/file-20230729-24848-e523wv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=347&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/540033/original/file-20230729-24848-e523wv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/540033/original/file-20230729-24848-e523wv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/540033/original/file-20230729-24848-e523wv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Underground waste tanks at the Hanford site, many of which are operating decades past their original design life. In total, they hold about 56 million gallons of radioactive and hazardous wastes. The Department of Energy has removed liquid wastes from all single-shell tanks.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-73.pdf">USGAO</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Radioactive trash still litters parts of Hanford. Irradiated bodies of laboratory animals were <a href="https://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Workers-uncover-carcasses-of-Hanford-test-animals-1225341.php">buried there</a>. The site houses radioactive debris ranging from medical waste to <a href="https://www.oregon.gov/energy/safety-resiliency/Pages/Naval-Nuclear-Transport.aspx">propulsion reactors from decommissioned submarines</a> and <a href="https://pdw.hanford.gov/document/E0025397?">parts of the reactor</a> that partially melted down at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979. Advocates for a full Hanford cleanup warn that without such a commitment, the site will become a “<a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Tainted-Desert-Environmental-and-Social-Ruin-in-the-American-West/Kuletz/p/book/9780415917711">national sacrifice zone</a>,” a place abandoned in the name of national security.</p>
<h2>A culture of secrecy</h2>
<p>As the movie “Oppenheimer” shows, government secrecy has shrouded nuclear weapons activities from their inception. Clearly, the science and technology of those weapons have dangerous potential and require careful safeguarding. But <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/09505430120052284">as I’ve argued previously</a>, the principle of secrecy quickly expanded more broadly. Here again, Hanford provides an example.</p>
<p>Hanford’s reactor fuel was sometimes reprocessed before its most-highly radioactive isotopes had time to decay. In the 1940s and 1950s, managers <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1986/10/24/us/northwest-plutonium-plant-had-big-radioactive-emissions-in-40-s-and-50-s.html">knowingly released toxic gases into the air</a>, contaminating farmlands and pastures downwind. Some releases supported an <a href="https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/199602/backpage.cfm">effort to monitor Soviet nuclear progress</a>. By tracking deliberate emissions from Hanford, scientists learned better how to spot and evaluate Soviet nuclear tests.</p>
<p>In the mid-1980s, local residents grew suspicious about an apparent excess of illnesses and deaths in their community. Initially, strict secrecy – reinforced by the region’s economic dependence on the Hanford site – made it hard for concerned citizens to get information.</p>
<p>Once the curtain of secrecy was <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/09505430120052284">partially lifted</a> under pressure from area residents and journalists, public outrage prompted <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/hanford/background.pdf">two major health effects studies</a> that engendered fierce controversy. By the close of the decade, more than 3,500 “downwinders” had filed lawsuits related to illnesses they attributed to Hanford. A judge finally <a href="http://www.tricityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article57866938.html">dismissed the case</a> in 2016 after awarding limited compensation to a handful of plaintiffs, leaving a bitter legacy of legal disputes and personal anguish.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Plaintiff Trisha Pritikin and attorney Tom Foulds reflect on 25 years of litigation over illnesses that ‘downwinders’ developed as a result of exposure to Hanford’s radiation releases.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Cautionary legacies</h2>
<p>Currently active atomic weapons facilities also have seen their share of nuclear and toxic chemical contamination. Among them, <a href="https://www.lanl.gov/">Los Alamos National Laboratory</a> – home to Oppenheimer’s original compound, and now a site for both military and civilian research – has contended with <a href="https://www.newmexicopbs.org/productions/groundwater-war/2021/02/24/forever-chemicals-found-in-los-alamos-waters/">groundwater pollution</a>, <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/federal-watchdog-identifies-new-workplace-safety-problems-at-los-alamos-lab">workplace hazards</a> related to the toxic metal beryllium, and gaps in emergency planning and <a href="https://nmpoliticalreport.com/2023/07/17/safety-lapses-at-los-alamos-national-laboratory/">worker safety procedures</a>. </p>
<p>As Nolan’s film recounts, J. Robert Oppenheimer and many other Manhattan Project scientists had <a href="https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2021-05/features/once-more-into-breach-physicists-mobilize-again-counter-nuclear-threat">deep concerns</a> about how their work might create unprecedented dangers. Looking at the legacies of the Trinity test, I wonder whether any of them imagined the scale and scope of those outcomes.</p>
<p><em>This is an update of an <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-cold-wars-toxic-legacy-costly-dangerous-cleanups-at-atomic-bomb-production-sites-90378">article</a> originally published March 5, 2018.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/210262/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>William Kinsella served with the citizen advisory board for the Hanford site cleanup from 2000-2005, representing the public interest group Hanford Watch. </span></em></p>
Nuclear weapons production and testing contaminated many sites across the US and exposed people unknowingly to radiation and toxic materials. Some have gone uncompensated for decades.
William J. Kinsella, Professor Emeritus of Communication, North Carolina State University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/204885
2023-07-24T12:16:37Z
2023-07-24T12:16:37Z
How the Soviets stole nuclear secrets and targeted Oppenheimer, the ‘father of the atomic bomb’
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538815/original/file-20230722-19-gtfzxd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=27%2C0%2C3074%2C2024&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Cillian Murphy as physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in 'Oppenheimer.'</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://dam.gettyimages.com/universal/oppenheimer">Universal Pictures</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>“<a href="https://www.oppenheimermovie.com/">Oppenheimer</a>,” the epic new movie directed by Christopher Nolan, takes audiences into the mind and moral decisions of J. Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the team of brilliant scientists in Los Alamos, New Mexico, who built the world’s first atomic bomb. It’s not a documentary, but it gets the big historical moments and subjects right.</p>
<p>The issues that Nolan depicts are not relics of a distant past. The new world that Oppenheimer helped to create, and the nuclear nightmare he feared, still exists today. </p>
<p>Russian President Vladimir Putin is <a href="https://theconversation.com/would-putin-use-nuclear-weapons-an-arms-control-expert-explains-what-has-and-hasnt-changed-since-the-invasion-of-ukraine-178509">threatening to use nuclear weapons</a> in his war in Ukraine. Iran is doing everything it can to <a href="https://theconversation.com/enriching-uranium-is-the-key-factor-in-how-quickly-iran-could-produce-a-nuclear-weapon-heres-where-it-stands-today-186985">develop nuclear weapons</a>. China is <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/29/pentagon-china-nuclear-stockpile-00071101">expanding its nuclear arsenal</a>. Hostile governments like China are <a href="https://www.striderintel.com/resources/the-los-alamos-club/">stealing U.S. defense technologies</a>, including from Los Alamos. </p>
<p>Charges that Oppenheimer was a Soviet spy and a security risk – a major focus of the movie – have been disproved. In December 2022, the Biden administration posthumously voided the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s 1954 decision to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance, calling that process <a href="https://www.energy.gov/articles/secretary-granholm-statement-doe-order-vacating-1954-atomic-energy-commission-decision">biased and unfair</a>. Declassified records reveal that Soviet spying on the U.S. atomic bomb effort advanced Moscow’s bomb program, but Oppenheimer was no spy.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538816/original/file-20230722-39889-hklbnt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A large orange cloud rises over desert land." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538816/original/file-20230722-39889-hklbnt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538816/original/file-20230722-39889-hklbnt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=353&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538816/original/file-20230722-39889-hklbnt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=353&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538816/original/file-20230722-39889-hklbnt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=353&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538816/original/file-20230722-39889-hklbnt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538816/original/file-20230722-39889-hklbnt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538816/original/file-20230722-39889-hklbnt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A mushroom cloud forms seconds after detonation of the first atomic bomb at the Trinity test site in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/Trinity_Detonation_T%26B.jpg">U.S. Department of Energy/Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Oppenheimer’s perspective</h2>
<p>Oppenheimer joined the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Manhattan-Project">Manhattan Project</a>, a nationwide effort to build an atomic bomb before the Nazis developed one, in 1942. The scientists he led at the Los Alamos site were probably the most talented group of minds ever assembled in a single laboratory, including <a href="https://www.tamupress.com/book/9781648431630/nobel-laureates-of-los-alamos/">12 eventual Nobel laureates</a>. </p>
<p>In 1954, at the height of the McCarthy era, Oppenheimer was accused of being a communist and even a Soviet spy. What’s the truth? </p>
<p>We know that in the 1930s, and until 1943, Oppenheimer was a Communist sympathizer. His <a href="https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/profile/frank-oppenheimer/">brother Frank</a> and <a href="https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/profile/jean-tatlock/">his girlfriend Jean Tatlock</a> belonged to the Communist Party of the United States, and Oppenheimer’s <a href="https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/profile/katherine-kitty-oppenheimer/">wife Katherine</a> was a former member. </p>
<p>For Oppy, as his students called him, Marxism was intellectually interesting, but it was also practical. Oppenheimer saw communism as the best defense against the rise of fascism in Europe, which, being of <a href="https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-750317">Jewish heritage</a>, was personal for him. </p>
<p>By 1943, however, Oppenheimer’s support for Communist Party causes shifted – evidently, as he <a href="https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C14540301">realized the enormity of his mission</a> to produce an atomic bomb. That year, Oppenheimer helped U.S. Army security officers <a href="https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C14540301">identify scientists he believed were communists</a>. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/K7uvrd94mrg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Los Alamos, N.M., was developed as a secret town where scientists built and tested the first atomic bomb.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Russian overtures</h2>
<p>Oppenehimer was a top target for Soviet intelligence, which assigned him the code names CHESTER and CHEMIST. He was also being cultivated by Soviet intelligence officers. But being targeted and cultivated for recruitment is not the same as being a recruited spy. </p>
<p>As the movie shows, in 1943, Oppenheimer’s academic colleague at the University of California, Berkeley, Haakon Chevalier, told Oppenheimer that a British scientist working in San Francisco could relay information to the Soviets. Oppenheimer <a href="https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/profile/haakon-chevalier/">rejected the approach</a>, but for reasons that remain unclear, he did not inform authorities for several months.</p>
<p>Over the ensuing years, Oppenheimer provided at least three versions of the story, sometimes involving his brother Frank. It seems likely that Robert was trying to protect his brother from Army security.</p>
<p>Archives made available after the Soviet Union’s collapse now establish beyond doubt that Oppenheimer <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300164381/spies/">was not a Soviet agent</a>. In fact, Soviet intelligence reports about the Manhattan Project reveal that at key points, Stalin’s spy chiefs were frustrated that their operatives had not recruited Oppenheimer. But the Russians did penetrate the Manhattan Project – the greatest security breach in U.S. history.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538817/original/file-20230722-23-sagv3c.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A page from a declassified security agency report describes events depicted in 'Oppenheimer'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538817/original/file-20230722-23-sagv3c.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538817/original/file-20230722-23-sagv3c.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538817/original/file-20230722-23-sagv3c.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538817/original/file-20230722-23-sagv3c.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538817/original/file-20230722-23-sagv3c.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=617&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538817/original/file-20230722-23-sagv3c.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=617&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538817/original/file-20230722-23-sagv3c.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=617&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An excerpt from British security agency MI5’s dossier on J. Robert Oppenheimer describes efforts to persuade Oppenheimer and other scientists to share information about their atomic bomb research with the Soviet Union.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Calder Walton</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>All the Kremlin’s men</h2>
<p>Multiple scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project provided critical information about U.S. atomic bomb research to the Soviet Union. </p>
<p>“Oppenheimer” focuses on <a href="https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/profile/klaus-fuchs/">Klaus Fuchs</a>, a brilliant theoretical physicist who fled from Nazi Germany to Britain and became a British naturalized subject. From the time he started to work on Britain’s wartime atom bomb project, Fuchs was in what he later described as “<a href="https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C11134981">continuous contact” with Soviet intelligence</a>, providing theoretical calculations that were necessary to build the atom bomb. </p>
<p>General Leslie Groves, the military commander of the Manhattan Project, later <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1950/02/05/archives/gives-views-on-alleged-atom-spy-groves-blames-the-british-in-atom.html">blamed the British</a> for failing to identify Fuchs as a Soviet spy. That’s correct. But the declassified dossier on Fuchs from Britain’s security service, MI5, shows that at the time, the agency <a href="https://www.mi5.gov.uk/klaus-fuchs">did not have any positive, reliable evidence</a> of Fuchs’s communism. MI5 knew that Fuchs was anti-Nazi, but not that he was pro-Soviet. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538818/original/file-20230722-19-l9u616.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Head and shoulder portrait of a man, labeled 'K.E.J. Fuchs'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538818/original/file-20230722-19-l9u616.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538818/original/file-20230722-19-l9u616.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=805&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538818/original/file-20230722-19-l9u616.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=805&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538818/original/file-20230722-19-l9u616.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=805&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538818/original/file-20230722-19-l9u616.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1012&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538818/original/file-20230722-19-l9u616.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1012&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538818/original/file-20230722-19-l9u616.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1012&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Los Alamos worker identification photo of theoretical physicist Klaus Fuchs, who passed information to the Soviet Union about the construction of nuclear weapons.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/ca-1944-los-alamos-national-laboratory-worker-news-photo/615305088">Corbis via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As I discuss in my new book, “<a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Spies/Calder-Walton/9781668000694">Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West</a>,” other spies at Los Alamos included a prodigious scientist, Theodore “Ted” Hall (code name MLAD, or “Young”); Julius Rosenberg (code name ANTENNA, later LIBERAL); David Greenglass (BUMBLEBEE, CALIBER). Other Soviet spies, like the British scientist Alan Nunn May, worked in other parts of the Manhattan Project. </p>
<p>These men had multiple motives for betraying U.S. atomic secrets. They were communist true believers and thought atomic weapons were too powerful to be held by one country alone. Moreover, they had a (misguided) defense – that the Soviet Union was America’s wartime ally, so they were “only” delivering secrets to an allied government. But as Nolan correctly shows in the movie, when Chevalier approached Oppenheimer with the same argument, Oppenheimer retorted that <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/27757496">it was still treason</a>. </p>
<p>Soviet espionage inside the Manhattan Project would change history. By the end of World War II, Stalin’s spies had delivered the secrets of the atomic bomb to the Kremlin. This accelerated Moscow’s bomb project. When the Soviets <a href="https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/soviet-atomic-program-1946/">detonated their first atomic weapon</a> in August 1949, it was a replica of the weapon built at Los Alamos and dropped by the Americans on Nagasaki.</p>
<p>Even now, nearly 80 years later, secrets about Soviet nuclear espionage are still emerging. One Soviet agent whose espionage has only recently been revealed is <a href="https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/profile/george-koval/">George Koval</a> (code name DEVAL), an American engineer who was drafted into the Manhattan Project, where he worked on polonium bomb “initiators” at a facility in Dayton, Ohio. </p>
<p>After Koval died in 2006, at the age of 93, Russia’s ministry of defense disclosed that the initiator for the first Soviet atomic bomb was prepared to specifications provided by Koval. Putin posthumously honored Koval as a “Hero of Russia,” <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300248296/the-secret-world/">offering a champagne toast in his honor</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538819/original/file-20230722-92729-1pcvlm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Photo looking across dozens of buildings and facilities." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538819/original/file-20230722-92729-1pcvlm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538819/original/file-20230722-92729-1pcvlm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538819/original/file-20230722-92729-1pcvlm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538819/original/file-20230722-92729-1pcvlm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538819/original/file-20230722-92729-1pcvlm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538819/original/file-20230722-92729-1pcvlm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538819/original/file-20230722-92729-1pcvlm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Today, Los Alamos National Laboratory is one of three federal labs that maintain the U.S. nuclear arsenal.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/LosAlamosLabAnniversary/42da501214c742d4b9932601aa37c8a7/photo">AP Photo/Jae C. Hong</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>New targets</h2>
<p>If Nolan’s film inspires audiences to read the deeply researched <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/13787/american-prometheus-by-kai-bird-and-martin-sherwin/">biography of Oppenheimer</a> by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, which inspired Nolan to make this movie, or <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Making-of-the-Atomic-Bomb/Richard-Rhodes/9781451677614">other accounts</a> of the Manhattan Project or the <a href="https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/odd-arne-westad/the-cold-war/9780465093137/?lens=basic-books">Cold War</a>, they will find that the underlying tissues of science and espionage remain alive. </p>
<p>Today, the world stands at the edge of technological revolutions that will transform societies in the 21st century, much as nuclear weapons did in the 20th century: artificial intelligence, quantum computing and biological engineering. Watching “Oppenheimer” makes me wonder whether hostile foreign governments may already have stolen keys to unlocking these new technologies, in the same way the Soviets did with the atom bomb.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/204885/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Calder Walton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Spying was a concern from the dawn of the nuclear age, but charges that J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the development of the first nuclear weapons, was a Soviet spy have been proved wrong.
Calder Walton, Assistant Director, Applied History Project and Intelligence Project, Harvard Kennedy School
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/207697
2023-07-12T12:39:07Z
2023-07-12T12:39:07Z
Female physicists aren’t represented in the media – and this lack of representation hurts the physics field
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536097/original/file-20230706-21-hnz1eu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C4199%2C2690&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Lise Meitner, in the front row, sits alongside many male colleagues at the Seventh Solvay Physics Conference in 1933. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://media.gettyimages.com/id/615305140/photo/participants-at-the-seventh-solvay-physics-conference-at-brussels-belgium-line-up-for-a-photo.jpg?s=612x612&w=0&k=20&c=7Dff1kI7GzHBNfEpiP6BXnoiWle7W-IgooUlgAH39z4=">Corbin Historical via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Christopher Nolan’s highly-anticipated movie “<a href="https://www.oppenheimermovie.com/">Oppenheimer</a>,” set for release July 21, 2023, depicts <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/J-Robert-Oppenheimer">J. Robert Oppenheimer</a> and his role in the development of the atomic bomb. But while the Manhattan Project wouldn’t have been possible without the work of many accomplished female scientists, the only women seen in the movie’s trailer are either hanging laundry, crying or cheering the men on.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uYPbbksJxIg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The only women featured in the official trailer for Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ are crying, hanging laundry or supporting the men.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As a <a href="https://www.physicsandastronomy.pitt.edu/people/chandralekha-singh">physics professor</a> who <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=y820d7MAAAAJ&hl=en">studies ways to support women in STEM – science, technology, engineering and math – fields</a> and a <a href="https://www.filmandmedia.pitt.edu/people/carl-kurlander">film studies professor</a> who worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood, we believe the trailer’s depiction of women reinforces stereotypes about who can succeed in science. It also represents a larger trend of women’s contributions in science going unrecognized in modern media.</p>
<h2>Lise Meitner: A pioneering role model in physics</h2>
<p>The Manhattan Project would not have been possible without the work of <a href="https://theconversation.com/lise-meitner-the-forgotten-woman-of-nuclear-physics-who-deserved-a-nobel-prize-106220">physicist Lise Meitner</a>, who <a href="https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200712/physicshistory.cfm">discovered nuclear fission</a>. Meitner used <a href="https://www.britannica.com/science/E-mc2-equation">Einstein’s E=MC²</a> to calculate how much energy would be released by splitting uranium atoms, and it was that development that would prompt Einstein to sign a letter urging President Franklin Roosevelt to begin the United States’ atomic research program. </p>
<p>Einstein called Meitner the “<a href="https://www.dpma.de/english/our_office/publications/ingeniouswomen/lisemeitner/index.html#:%7E:text=nominated%2048%20times%20for%20the,Max%20Born%20and%20many%20others.">Madame Curie of Germany</a>” and was one of a pantheon of physicists, from Max Planck to Niels Bohr, who nominated Meitner for a Nobel Prize 48 times during her lifetime.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536071/original/file-20230706-20-eet6hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A young woman with her hands clasped together standing in front of a large plant and wearing a skirt, blouse and hat." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536071/original/file-20230706-20-eet6hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536071/original/file-20230706-20-eet6hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=936&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536071/original/file-20230706-20-eet6hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=936&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536071/original/file-20230706-20-eet6hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=936&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536071/original/file-20230706-20-eet6hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1177&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536071/original/file-20230706-20-eet6hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1177&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536071/original/file-20230706-20-eet6hq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1177&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lise Meitner, the accomplished physicist who discovered nuclear fission.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lise_Meitner12.jpg">MaterialScientist/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Meitner never won. Instead, the prize for fission <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1944/summary/">went to Otto Hahn</a>, her male lab partner of 30 years in Berlin. Hahn received the news of his nomination under house arrest in England, where he and other German scientists were being held to determine how far the Third Reich had advanced with its atomic program. </p>
<p>Of Jewish descent, Meitner had been forced to flee the Nazis in 1938 and refused to use this scientific discovery to develop a bomb. Rather, she <a href="http://cwp.library.ucla.edu/articles/gold_meitn.html">spent the rest of her life</a> working to promote nuclear disarmament and advocating for the responsible use of nuclear energy.</p>
<p>Meitner was not the only woman who made a significant contribution during this time. But the lack of physics role models like Meitner in popular media leads to real-life consequences. Meitner <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15398776/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_3_nm_5_q_oppen">doesn’t appear as a character in the film</a>, as she was not part of the Manhattan Project, but we hope the script alludes to her groundbreaking work. </p>
<h2>A lack of representation</h2>
<p>Only around <a href="https://www.aip.org/statistics/women">20% of the undergraduate majors and Ph.D. students</a> in physics are women. The <a href="https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.14.020119">societal stereotypes and biases</a>, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1261375">expectation of brilliance</a>, <a href="https://www.aps.org/programs/education/su4w/index.cfm">lack of role models</a> and <a href="https://www.per-central.org/items/detail.cfm?ID=15784">chilly culture of physics</a> discourage many talented students from historically marginalized backgrounds, like women, from pursuing physics and related disciplines. </p>
<p>Societal stereotypes and biases influence students even before they enter the classroom. One common stereotype is the idea that <a href="https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1261375">genius and brilliance</a> are important factors to succeed in physics. However, genius is <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/where-are-all-the-female-geniuses/">often associated with boys</a>, and <a href="https://theconversation.com/an-emphasis-on-brilliance-creates-a-toxic-dog-eat-dog-workplace-atmosphere-that-discourages-women-178525">girls from a young age tend to shy away from</a> <a href="https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aah6524">fields associated with innate brilliance</a>. </p>
<p>Studies have found that by the age of 6, girls are <a href="https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aah6524">less likely than boys</a> to believe they are “really, really smart.” As these students get older, often the norms in science classes and curricula tend <a href="https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831216678379">not to represent the interests and values of girls</a>. All of these stereotypes and factors can influence women’s perception of their ability to do physics.</p>
<p>Research shows that at the end of a yearlong college physics course sequence, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.14.020123">women with an “A” have the same physics self-efficacy as men with a “C”</a>. A person’s physics self-efficacy is their belief about how good they are at solving physics problems – and one’s self-efficacy can shape their career trajectory. </p>
<p>Women drop out of college science and engineering majors with <a href="https://www.nsta.org/journal-college-science-teaching/journal-college-science-teaching-januaryfebruary-2022/gender">significantly higher grade-point averages</a> than men who drop out. In some cases, women who drop out have the same GPA as men who complete those majors. Compared to men, women in physics courses feel <a href="https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.15.020148">significantly less recognized</a> for their accomplishments. Recognition from others as a person who can excel in physics is the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.15.020148">strongest predictor of a student’s physics identity</a>, or whether they see themselves as someone who can excel in physics. </p>
<p>More frequent media recognition of female scientists, such as Meitner, could vicariously influence young women, who may see them as role models. This recognition alone can boost young women’s physics self-efficacy and identity.</p>
<p>When Meitner started her career at the beginning of the 20th century, male physicists made excuses about why women had no place in a lab – their <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/oct/23/sue-arnold-science-audiobooks-review">long hair might catch fire</a> on Bunsen burners, for instance. We like to believe we have made progress in the past century, but the underrepresentation of women in physics is still concerning. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536138/original/file-20230706-21-7m0oyq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Three students (two women and one man) watch a woman professor write equations on a whiteboard." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536138/original/file-20230706-21-7m0oyq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536138/original/file-20230706-21-7m0oyq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536138/original/file-20230706-21-7m0oyq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536138/original/file-20230706-21-7m0oyq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536138/original/file-20230706-21-7m0oyq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536138/original/file-20230706-21-7m0oyq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536138/original/file-20230706-21-7m0oyq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A number of barriers keep young women out of the physics field, but having role models to look up to can lead them toward success.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://media.gettyimages.com/id/643999287/photo/professor-talking-to-students-in-college-classroom.jpg?s=612x612&w=0&k=20&c=hD3t9QFlVw5otISs1svH3wCCFJ9cXDR84xoqIJcja-4=">Hill Street Studios/DigitalVision via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Diversity as an asset to science</h2>
<p>If diverse groups of scientists are involved in brainstorming challenging problems, not only can they <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691138541/the-difference">devise better, future-oriented solutions</a>, but those solutions will also benefit a wider range of people. </p>
<p>Individuals’ lived experiences affect their perspectives – for example, over two centuries ago, mathematician <a href="https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2003.1253887">Ada Lovelace imagined applications</a> far beyond what the original inventors of the computer intended. Similarly, women today are more likely to focus on applications of quantum computers <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-quantum-computer-revolution-must-include-women/">that will benefit their communities</a>. Additionally, <a href="https://williamkamkwamba.typepad.com/williamkamkwamba/book.html">physicists from Global South countries</a> are more likely to develop improved stoves, solar cells, water purification systems or solar-powered lamps. The perspectives that diverse groups bring to science problems can lead to new innovations. </p>
<p>Our intention is not to disparage the “Oppenheimer” movie, but to point out that by not centering media attention on diverse voices – including those of women in physics like Meitner – filmmakers perpetuate the status quo and stereotypes about who belongs in physics. Additionally, young women <a href="https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.6.3.20190513a">continue to be deprived</a> of exposure to role models who could inspire their academic and professional journeys</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207697/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The trailer for ‘Oppenheimer’ fails to include female physicists, which is indicative of a broader media trend that, if reversed, could lead to greater gender diversity in science.
Carl Kurlander, Senior Lecturer, Film and Media Studies, University of Pittsburgh
Chandralekha Singh, Distinguished Professor of Physics, University of Pittsburgh
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/154687
2021-02-10T20:45:08Z
2021-02-10T20:45:08Z
New postage stamp honors Chien-Shiung Wu, trailblazing nuclear physicist
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/383602/original/file-20210210-17-1ra43r9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=62%2C178%2C2915%2C2120&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Chien-Shiung Wu's experiments were instrumental in supporting some of the biggest 20th-century theories in physics.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/physics-professor-dr-chien-shiung-wu-in-a-laboratory-at-news-photo/515185238">Bettmann via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/383299/original/file-20210209-23-13scq0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Forever stamp with portrait of Chien-Shiung Wu." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/383299/original/file-20210209-23-13scq0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/383299/original/file-20210209-23-13scq0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=944&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383299/original/file-20210209-23-13scq0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=944&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383299/original/file-20210209-23-13scq0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=944&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383299/original/file-20210209-23-13scq0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1187&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383299/original/file-20210209-23-13scq0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1187&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383299/original/file-20210209-23-13scq0b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1187&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The new U.S. postage stamp featuring Wu.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2021/0201ma-nuclear-physicist-chien-shiung-wu-to-be-honored-on-forever-stamp.htm">U.S. Postal Service</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On Feb. 11, 2021, the sixth <a href="https://www.un.org/en/observances/women-and-girls-in-science-day">International Day of Women and Girls in Science</a>, the U.S. Postal Service issued <a href="https://store.usps.com/store/product/buy-stamps/chien-shiung-wu-S_480204">a new Forever stamp to honor</a> Chien-Shiung Wu, one of the most influential nuclear physicists of the 20th century.</p>
<p>A Chinese American woman, Wu performed experiments that tested the fundamental laws of physics. In a male-dominated field, she won many honors and awards, including the <a href="https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/medalofscience50/wu.jsp">National Medal of Science</a> (1975), the inaugural <a href="https://wolffund.org.il/2018/12/09/chien-shiung-wu/">Wolf Prize in Physics</a> (1978) and honorary degrees from universities around the world. </p>
<p>In China, where I grew up, Wu is an icon who is sometimes called the “Chinese Marie Curie.” I first read about Wu’s extraordinary story in my physics textbook, when I was a teenager in high school. Chien-Shiung Wu became a scientific role model for me, inspiring me to <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=-x2wJigAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">pursue an academic career in physics</a> and follow her path to the U.S.</p>
<h2>From China to the US, to pursue physics</h2>
<p>In 1912, <a href="https://www.biography.com/scientist/chien-shiung-wu">Wu was born in Liuhe</a> in Jiangsu province, a town about 40 miles north of Shanghai. Although it was uncommon in China for girls to attend school at that time, her father founded a school for girls where she received her elementary education.</p>
<p>In 1930, Wu attended National Central University in Nanjing to study mathematics. But the revolutionary triumphs of late 19th-century modern physics – such as the <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dp13at.html">discoveries of atomic structure</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/on-the-120th-anniversary-of-the-x-ray-a-look-at-how-it-changed-our-view-of-the-world-50154">of X-rays</a> – attracted Wu’s attention. She changed her major to physics and graduated at the top of her class in 1934.</p>
<p>Encouraged by her college advisor and financially supported by her uncle, Wu booked the month-long steamship trip to the United States in 1936 to pursue her doctoral education. She arrived in San Francisco, where she met her future husband, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/23/world/luke-yuan-90-senior-physicist-at-brookhaven.html">Luke Chia-Liu Yuan</a>, another physicist, when he showed her around the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Scientists at the lab had only <a href="https://www2.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/early-years.html">recently invented the cyclotron</a>, the most advanced instrument for accelerating charged particles in a spiral trajectory.</p>
<p>Enticed by the atomic nuclei research being done in the lab, Wu abandoned her original plan to attend the University of Michigan and successfully enrolled in the physics doctoral program at Berkeley.</p>
<p>In her graduate research, Wu worked closely with nuclear scientist <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1939/lawrence/biographical/">Ernest Lawrence</a>, who had won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939, and <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1959/segre/biographical/">Emillo Segrè</a>, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1959. She studied the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRev.59.481">electromagnetic radiation produced when charged particles decelerate</a>, as well as <a href="https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRev.67.142">radioactive isotopes of xenon generated by splitting uranium atoms</a> via nuclear fission. In June 1940, Wu completed her Ph.D. with honors.</p>
<p>After a short period of postdoctoral research still at the Radiation Laboratory, Wu moved to the East Coast, where she taught at Smith College and then Princeton University.</p>
<h2>Experimental work in radioactive decay</h2>
<p>In 1944, Wu became a research scientist at Columbia University, where she joined <a href="https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/The%20Manhattan%20Project.pdf">the Manhattan Project</a>, the top-secret U.S. effort to turn basic research in physics into a new kind of weapon, the atomic bomb. As a team member, Wu helped develop the process for separating uranium atoms into the charged uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes using gaseous diffusion. This work eventually led to enriched uranium, a critical component for nuclear reactions.</p>
<p>After World War II, Wu remained at Columbia and focused her research on the radioactive process of <a href="https://www2.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/chapters/03/2.html">beta decay</a>. She investigated beta particles: fast-moving electrons or positrons emitted from an atomic nucleus in the radioactive decay process.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/383606/original/file-20210210-13-1geajf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Beta particles leave one atom and transform it into another" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/383606/original/file-20210210-13-1geajf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/383606/original/file-20210210-13-1geajf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=655&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383606/original/file-20210210-13-1geajf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=655&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383606/original/file-20210210-13-1geajf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=655&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383606/original/file-20210210-13-1geajf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=823&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383606/original/file-20210210-13-1geajf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=823&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383606/original/file-20210210-13-1geajf5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=823&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Beta decay describes the process when a fast-moving electron or positron leaves an atom’s nucleus, leaving behind a different kind of atom.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/illustration/beta-plus-and-beta-minus-decay-royalty-free-illustration/1195604225?adppopup=true">ttsz/iStock via Getty Images Plus</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the mid-1950s, Wu performed a famous experiment to test the <a href="https://physics.aps.org/story/v22/st19">law of parity conservation</a>. This was a widely accepted but unproven principle implying that a physical process and its mirror reflection are identical. As proposed by theoretical physicists <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1957/yang/biographical/">Chen Ning Yang</a> and <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1957/lee/biographical/">Tsung-Dao Lee</a>, Wu designed an experiment to see if reality matched the theory.</p>
<p>Observing the beta decay of cobalt-60 atoms, Wu measured the radiation intensity as a function of the radiation direction. To increase the accuracy of her experimental measurements, Wu figured out techniques to get her cobalt-60 atoms all spinning in the same direction. She observed that more particles flew off in the direction opposite to the direction the nuclei were spinning. The law of parity conservation predicted that the atoms would emit beta particles in symmetrical ways. But Wu’s observations meant the “law” did not hold and she had discovered parity nonconservation.</p>
<p>This breakthrough achievement helped Wu’s theoretical colleagues win the <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1957/summary/">1957 Nobel Prize in Physics</a>, but unfortunately, the Nobel Committee <a href="https://physicsworld.com/a/overlooked-for-the-nobel-chien-shiung-wu/">overlooked Wu’s experimental contribution</a>. </p>
<p>In addition to her famous parity law research, Wu carried out <a href="https://doi.org/10.1142/S0217751X15300501">a series of important experiments</a> in nuclear physics and quantum physics. In 1949, she experimentally verified <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1938/fermi/biographical/">Enrico Fermi</a>’s theory of beta decay, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRev.75.1107.2">correcting the discrepancies</a> between the theory and previous inaccurate experimental results and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.10.253">developing a universal version of his theory</a>. She also <a href="https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRev.77.136">proved the quantum phenomenon</a> relevant to a pair of <a href="https://www.nist.gov/itl/entangled-photon-pair-sources">entangled photons</a>.</p>
<p>In 1958, Wu was the first Chinese-American <a href="http://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/deceased-members/48916.html">elected to the National Academy of Sciences</a>. In 1967, she served as the first female <a href="https://aps.org/about/governance/presidents.cfm">president of the American Physical Society</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/383605/original/file-20210210-13-1tao3qm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Wu stands with other honorary degree recipients in academic gowns." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/383605/original/file-20210210-13-1tao3qm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/383605/original/file-20210210-13-1tao3qm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383605/original/file-20210210-13-1tao3qm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383605/original/file-20210210-13-1tao3qm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383605/original/file-20210210-13-1tao3qm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383605/original/file-20210210-13-1tao3qm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/383605/original/file-20210210-13-1tao3qm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Wu received many accolades, including an honorary doctorate at Harvard in 1974.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/six-of-the-seven-honorary-degree-recipients-at-harvard-news-photo/515112302">Bettmann via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After her retirement in 1981, Wu dedicated herself to public educational programs in both the United States and China, giving numerous lectures and working to inspire younger generations to pursue science, technology, engineering and math education. She died in 1997. </p>
<p>Wu’s legacy continues with the issuing of her postage stamp. She joined a short list of physicists featured on U.S. stamps, including Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman and Maria Goeppert-Mayer.</p>
<p>[<em>Understand new developments in science, health and technology, each week.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/science-editors-picks-71/?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=science-understand">Subscribe to The Conversation’s science newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/154687/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Xuejian Wu does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Chinese American physicist Wu worked on the Manhattan Project and performed groundbreaking experiments throughout her long career.
Xuejian Wu, Assistant Professor of Physics, Rutgers University - Newark
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/142184
2020-07-15T13:25:32Z
2020-07-15T13:25:32Z
This is what happened the morning the first atomic bomb created a new world
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/347300/original/file-20200714-18-ixz4me.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The gadget in the Trinity Test Site tower. Unless otherwise indicated, this information has been authored by an employee or employees of the Los Alamos National Security, LLC (LANS), operator of the Los Alamos National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC52-06NA25396 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The U.S. Government has rights to use, reproduce, and distribute this information. The public may copy and use this information without charge, provided that this Notice and any statement of authorship are reproduced on all copies. Neither the Government nor LANS makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any liability or responsibility for the use of this information.</span> </figcaption></figure><p>Fifteen seconds before 5.30am on July 16 1945, above an <a href="https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Resources/maps/trinity_site_map.htm">area</a> of New Mexico desert so unforgivingly dry that earlier travellers christened it the <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/files/jornada-del-muerto"><em>Jornada del Muerto</em></a> (Journey of the Dead Man), a new sun flashed into existence and rose rapidly into the sky. It was a little before dawn.</p>
<p>This strange, early daybreak was the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJRP4TCA4Q8">Trinity Test</a>: humanity’s first encounter with the atomic bomb. Within a month two bombs were dropped on Japan: the first, “Little Boy”, a uranium weapon, at Hiroshima; the second, “Fat Man”, a plutonium weapon of the <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/little-boy-and-fat-man">implosion design</a> tested at Trinity, on Nagasaki. Casualty estimates <a href="http://www.aasc.ucla.edu/cab/200708230009.html">vary</a> <a href="http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/MED/med_chp10.shtml">widely</a>, but perhaps as many as <a href="https://k1project.columbia.edu/news/hiroshima-and-nagasaki">150-250,000 people</a> died as a direct result of these two events. The following half century was one of intense nuclear <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjAqR1zICA0">testing</a>, the residue of which might be the <a href="https://theconversation.com/anthropocene-began-in-1965-according-to-signs-left-in-the-worlds-loneliest-tree-91993">signature</a> for the proposed new epoch of the Anthropocene.</p>
<p>The extraordinary story of the Manhattan Project, which led to this point, has been told many times. It begins with the realisation that atomic weapons, releasing vast amounts of energy via a nuclear chain reaction, were possible. It includes <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/key-documents/einstein-szilard-letter">a 1939 letter</a>, signed by Albert Einstein, alerting President Roosevelt to the dangers of a German atomic bomb programme, and tells how, following the United States’ entry into the second world war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the programme accelerated rapidly under the control of <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/leslie-r-groves">General Leslie Groves</a>. </p>
<p>The Manhattan Project absorbed the British and Canadian “Tube Alloys” atomic programme, and drew on a dazzling array of scientific talent. More than a purely scientific endeavour, it was an engineering and <a href="http://alexwellerstein.com/teaching/documents/?pdf=manhattan_project_map.pdf">industrial enterprise</a> on a massive scale, employing about 130,000 people at its peak, and perhaps <a href="http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/11/01/many-people-worked-manhattan-project/">half a million</a> cumulatively.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288776/original/file-20190820-170910-8bv1s7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><strong><em>This article is part of Conversation Insights</em></strong>
<br><em>The Insights team generates <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/insights-series-71218">long-form journalism</a> derived from interdisciplinary research. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.</em> </p>
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<p>Site Y was a town built from scratch to build the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Here, under the scientific directorship of J Robert Oppenheimer – a complex, charismatic figure (so famous after the war that he was instantly recognisable by his <a href="https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/photos/oppenheimer-j-robert-h6">porkpie hat</a>) – scientists, including many who’d fled Nazi persecution in Europe and were acutely aware of what a Nazi bomb might mean, built the “gadget” tested at Trinity.</p>
<p>By then, though, circumstances had changed. In late 1944, as Allied forces advanced across Europe, it became apparent that the <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/german-atomic-bomb-project">German bomb programme</a> had stalled years before. After Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April 1945 and Germany’s defeat in May, the Trinity Test was prioritised so Harry Truman, the new president, would have news of it when he met Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill at the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Potsdam-Conference">Potsdam conference</a>.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346871/original/file-20200710-189224-1six7hu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346871/original/file-20200710-189224-1six7hu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346871/original/file-20200710-189224-1six7hu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346871/original/file-20200710-189224-1six7hu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346871/original/file-20200710-189224-1six7hu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346871/original/file-20200710-189224-1six7hu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346871/original/file-20200710-189224-1six7hu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Winston Churchill, Harry S Truman and Josef Stalin at the Potsdam conference, Germany 1945.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:L_to_R,_British_Prime_Minister_Winston_Churchill,_President_Harry_S._Truman,_and_Soviet_leader_Josef_Stalin_in_the..._-_NARA_-_198958.jpg">© National Archives and Records Administration</a></span>
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<p>Trinity is a striking moment. Scientists, military personnel and observers gathered in observation bunkers 10,000 yards from <a href="https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Resources/maps/trinity_site_map.htm">ground zero</a>, at a base camp ten miles away, and at Compañia Hill, 20 miles away. Overnight, thunder, lightning and rain swept across the area, imperilling the test. </p>
<p>Don Hornig, the last man to <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=z3PBDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT365&lpg=PT365&dq=cynthia+kelly+the+manhattan+project+%22desert+island+decameron%22&source=bl&ots=ryjmM6i117&sig=ACfU3U3z3tDq5AdbCuSZCyIvLEqTuCXVJA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjbwZ3J28LqAhX8RxUIHTplAL8Q6AEwAHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=cynthia%20kelly%20the%20manhattan%20project%20%22desert%20island%20decameron%22&f=false">“babysit” the bomb</a> in its metal shack at the top of a 100ft tower, recalls passing the time by reading an anthology of humorous writing, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Desert_Island_Decameron.html?id=YpxUAAAAYAAJ&redir_esc=y">Desert Island Decameron</a>, by the light of a 60-watt bulb. He hoped the wet tower would act as a lightning rod if there were any lightning strikes. The alternative was sobering, but he appears to have been philosophical: “It would set the bomb off. And in that case, I’d never know about it! So I read my book.”</p>
<p>At a 2am conference, Groves threatened hard-pressed project meteorologist, Jack Hubbard, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Rf2O9eqrMgMC&pg=PA77&lpg=PA77&dq=szasz+day+the+sun+rose+twice+insisting+that+Hubbard+sign+his+forecast&source=bl&ots=mP5lvttS0k&sig=ACfU3U0M8-xt__5_-N1Dlpe5WpkXD1DuEQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjW_PWpprPqAhXDnFwKHbLFAyAQ6AEwAHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=szasz%20day%20the%20sun%20rose%20twice%20insisting%20that%20Hubbard%20sign%20his%20forecast&f=false">insisting he sign</a> his forecast predicting conditions would clear by dawn and promising to “hang” him if they didn’t. Groves then roused New Mexico’s governor by phone, warning him he might have to declare martial law if things went wrong. By 4am the skies were clearing.</p>
<p>As 5.30 approached, people readied themselves with welder’s glass to view the test. At Compañia Hill, the physicist, Edward Teller, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=aSgFMMNQ6G4C&pg=PA668&lpg=PA668&dq=rhodes+making+of+the+atomic+bomb+%22passed+the+lotion%22&source=bl&ots=JyanySZG32&sig=ACfU3U2IT6BHgSBChii0QMzTzsDZ0am8uA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi2qM-V5MLqAhWpRhUIHdXUCmEQ6AEwAHoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=rhodes%20making%20of%20the%20atomic%20bomb%20%22passed%20the%20lotion%22&f=false">passed around sun cream</a>. At S-10000, the main control bunker, an exhausted Oppenheimer leaned against a post to steady himself as the final seconds ticked away, and was heard to mutter: “Lord, these affairs are <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2G2TlJOhGI8C&pg=PA669&lpg=PA669&dq=rhodes+making+of+the+atomic+bomb+%22Lord,+these+affairs%22&source=bl&ots=IA9xzd4B0X&sig=ACfU3U2iVC5T7kAWLTUuE4P2RNJ4pCtX1g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjRlKei48LqAhULUxUIHXNNC9QQ6AEwAHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=rhodes%20making%20of%20the%20atomic%20bomb%20%22Lord%2C%20these%20affairs%22&f=false">hard on the heart</a>.”</p>
<p>The story of the Manhattan Project often ends with the controversial use of the bomb on Japan, or goes on to tell about the leaking of atomic secrets by <a href="https://www.mi5.gov.uk/klaus-fuchs">Klaus Fuchs</a> and the first Soviet atomic test in 1949. It might add that Oppenheimer, frequently portrayed as a tragic figure, had his <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/oppenheimer-security-hearing">security clearance</a> revoked amid the anti-communist hysteria of the early 1950s.</p>
<h2>A new world</h2>
<p>Now, 75 years on, it’s worth isolating Trinity from this complex history to ask what that early morning moment in the remote desert meant. It was here, after all, that humans first encountered phenomena that were to haunt the cold war imagination, and still shape how many imagine potential nuclear futures: the atomic flash, the mushroom cloud and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1946/05/23/archives/film-spots-trace-vast-abomb-range-radioactive-particles-spread-over.html?searchResultPosition=364">radioactive fallout</a>.</p>
<p>Although this was a new human experience (Norris Bradbury, who succeeded Oppenheimer as director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/The-Making-Of-The-Atomic-Bomb/Richard-Rhodes/9781471111235">noted</a> that “the atom bomb did not fit into any preconceptions possessed by anybody”), it was processed through cultural traditions with long histories. It’s become an origin story in nuclear mythologies.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346864/original/file-20200710-42-1pdsjv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346864/original/file-20200710-42-1pdsjv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346864/original/file-20200710-42-1pdsjv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346864/original/file-20200710-42-1pdsjv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346864/original/file-20200710-42-1pdsjv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346864/original/file-20200710-42-1pdsjv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346864/original/file-20200710-42-1pdsjv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=594&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Norris Bradbury, group leader for bomb assembly, stands next to the partially assembled Gadget atop the test tower.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/departmentofenergy/10540204545/">© U.S. Department of Energy</a></span>
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<p>Writers return repeatedly to Trinity as a moment pregnant with meaning. In the 21st century alone, it’s featured in novels by, among others, <a href="http://www.lydiamillet.net/oh-pure-and-radiant-heart/">Lydia Millet</a>, <a href="http://ellenklages.com/writing/the-green-glass-sea-2/">Ellen Klages</a>, <a href="https://www.noragallagher.org/changing-light.php">Nora Gallagher</a>, <a href="http://tarasheanesbit.com/writing/the-wives-of-los-alamos/">TaraShea Nesbit</a>, <a href="https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/9780008209322/the-atomic-weight-of-love/">Elizabeth J Church</a> and <a href="https://louisahall.net/portfolio/trinity/">Louisa Hall</a>, and there are notable earlier examples, including those by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1959/05/03/archives/science-and-the-bomb-command-the-morning-by-pearl-s-buck-317-pp-new.html">Pearl Buck</a>, <a href="http://www.jaas.gr.jp/jjas/PDF/2014/04_Matsunaga.pdf">Leslie Marmon Silko</a> and <a href="http://josephkanon.com/books/los-alamos/">Joseph Kanon</a>. It’s been depicted by poets from <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42777/at-the-bomb-testing-site">William E Stafford</a> to <a href="https://unmpress.com/books/critical-assembly/9780826358837">John Canaday</a> and <a href="https://plumwoodmountain.com/alamogordo-glass/">Hannah Cooper-Smithson</a>, and on stage by <a href="http://www.tommortonsmith.com/theatre/2014/10/21/oppenheimer">Tom Morton-Smith</a>. It features in music in genres ranging from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlqZM4covn1EBdzdKnChfMmaaRFiAqt3O">rock</a> to <a href="https://www.metopera.org/user-information/synopses-archive/doctor-atomic">opera</a>.</p>
<p>This fascination with Trinity shows how it’s not only an important historical moment, but a critical cultural one too. As the old sun crept above the horizon a few minutes after the test, many present were in little doubt it was rising on a new world.</p>
<h2>The brightest light</h2>
<p>In both eyewitness accounts and in fiction, Trinity is described as a moment of rupture and rapture: rupture because it marks the transition from a pre-nuclear to a nuclear age; rapture because the encounter with dazzling light and a power overwhelming the senses has the quality of religious experience. </p>
<p>Of course, there can be distortion in such accounts. The popular tendency to see the atomic bomb as the definitive nuclear technology marginalises fields like nuclear medicine and ignores the intellectual richness of the nuclear sciences. </p>
<p>And there are other candidates for the beginning of the nuclear age: <a href="https://theconversation.com/hiroshimas-literary-legacy-the-blinding-flash-that-changed-the-world-forever-45471">Hiroshima</a>, for sure, but also perhaps the creation of the first self-sustaining <a href="https://www.uchicago.edu/features/how_the_first_chain_reaction_changed_science/">chain reaction</a> by Enrico Fermi’s team in Chicago in 1942, Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch’s description of <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/key-documents/meitner-frisch-nuclear-fission">fission</a> in 1939, James Chadwick’s discovery of the <a href="https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200705/physicshistory.cfm#:%7E:text=By%201920%2C%20physicists%20knew%20that,which%20he%20called%20the%20neutron.">neutron</a> in 1932, and Ernest Rutherford’s “<a href="https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/rutherfords-legacy--the-birth-of-nuclear-physics-in-manchester/">splitting</a>” (depending how one defines this) of the atom in 1917. The very notion of a singular beginning to the nuclear age is a fiction: each moment exists only in the context of others.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/hiroshimas-literary-legacy-the-blinding-flash-that-changed-the-world-forever-45471">Hiroshima's literary legacy: the 'blinding flash' that changed the world forever</a>
</strong>
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<p>Yet, Trinity was experienced as a new dawn. This is particularly apparent in the recurring metaphor of the explosion as a sun. For William Laurence of the New York Times, observing the test from <a href="https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.84862/page/n25/mode/2up?q=super-sun">20 miles away</a> at Compañia Hill, it was: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sunrise such as the world has never seen, a great green super-sun climbing in a fraction of a second to a height of more than 8,000 feet, rising ever higher until it touched the clouds, lighting up earth and sky all around with a dazzling intensity.</p>
</blockquote>
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<p>Ernest Lawrence, inventor of the <a href="https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/lawrences-cyclotron/3010873.article">cyclotron</a>, a type of particle accelerator, noted the transition “from darkness to brilliant sunshine, in an instant”.</p>
<p>Perhaps the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Qgv9Xjv8_LYC&pg=PA156&lpg=PA156&dq=rabi+brightest+light+i+have+ever+seen+or+that+i+think+anyone+has+ever+seen&source=bl&ots=j4293-Ww3R&sig=ACfU3U1L027oNf6LqzMHA1TfcUiTajJ7BA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwip8MmltLnqAhVSVsAKHbvFDCMQ6AEwBnoECAYQAQ#v=onepage&q=rabi%20brightest%20light%20i%20have%20ever%20seen%20or%20that%20i%20think%20anyone%20has%20ever%20seen&f=false">description</a> by Isidor Rabi, discoverer of nuclear magnetic resonance (used in MRI scans), is the most compelling:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The brightest light I have ever seen or that I think anyone has ever seen. It blasted; it pounced; it bored its way right through you. It was a vision that was seen with more than the eye.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The experience is corporeal here: the light has heft and is felt by the body. Its revelatory characteristics are picked up in literature of the Trinity Test. In Lydia Millet’s novel, <a href="http://www.lydiamillet.net/oh-pure-and-radiant-heart/">Oh Pure and Radiant Heart</a>, the flash is a “sear of lightness”. In Joseph Kanon’s thriller, Los Alamos, the protagonist “closed his eyes for a second, but it was there anyway, this amazing light, as if it didn’t need sight to exist”. In John Canaday’s poem, <a href="https://unmpress.com/books/critical-assembly/9780826358837">Victor Weisskopf</a>, “a sun erupted”.</p>
<p>Laurence, whose reporting on the bomb <a href="https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/william-leonard-laurence">won a Pulitzer</a>, saw Trinity as crystallising a new relation with the universe. There, he wrote, “an <a href="https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.84862/page/n25/mode/2up?q=elemental+force">elemental force</a> [was] freed from its bonds after being chained for billions of years” as, for the first time, humans used an energy source that “does not have its origin in the sun”. “All seemed to feel”, wrote Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, General Groves’s deputy, “that they had been present at the birth of a new age – the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6hAaCgAAQBAJ&dq=cynthia+kelly+the+manhattan+project&q=Age+of+Atomic+Energy#v=snippet&q=%22Age%20of%20Atomic%20Energy%22&f=false">Age of Atomic Energy</a>”.</p>
<h2>Fire from the gods</h2>
<p>Stories of human acquisition of knowledge and power have deep roots in western culture. In Greek myth, Prometheus steals fire from the gods and is punished by being chained to a rock, his liver torn out daily by an eagle, only to grow back that he might be tormented again. One of the most substantial biographies of Oppenheimer names him, in its title, <a href="https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/kai-bird-and-martin-j-sherwin">The American Prometheus</a>. </p>
<p>In 1946, reflecting on the moment of the Trinity Test, Oppenheimer himself saw the analogy: “We thought of the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BWek8zJ-U7IC&pg=PA161&lpg=PA161&dq=oppenheimer+we+thought+of+the+legend+of+prometheus&source=bl&ots=N1knDB0fVc&sig=ACfU3U38MmS82yo_F6yYyH5clKbueMiY9A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiO7JePt7nqAhXNiFwKHX9_AyIQ6AEwCnoECAsQAQ#v=onepage&q=oppenheimer%20we%20thought%20of%20the%20legend%20of%20prometheus&f=false">legend of Prometheus</a>, of that deep sense of guilt in man’s new powers, that reflects his recognition of evil, and his long knowledge of it.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346867/original/file-20200710-22-6j5iwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346867/original/file-20200710-22-6j5iwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346867/original/file-20200710-22-6j5iwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346867/original/file-20200710-22-6j5iwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346867/original/file-20200710-22-6j5iwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346867/original/file-20200710-22-6j5iwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=977&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346867/original/file-20200710-22-6j5iwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=977&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346867/original/file-20200710-22-6j5iwp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=977&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Oppenheimer and Groves at Ground Zero, Trinity Test.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trinity_Test_-_Oppenheimer_and_Groves_at_Ground_Zero_002.jpg">© U.S. Army Corps of Engineers</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The most famous of Oppenheimer’s words to describe Trinity, the lines from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb13ynu3Iac">Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds</a>” – first appearing in print in <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BWek8zJ-U7IC&pg=PA161&lpg=PA161&dq=charles+thorpe+oppenheimer+%22first+publication+of+Oppenheimer%27s%22&source=bl&ots=N1knGx0l-6&sig=ACfU3U0EluzRfOjN-7KePahyVmdMhI0EOg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiL2vWQgsHqAhUBShUIHT3cDbIQ6AEwAHoECAIQAQ#v=onepage&q=charles%20thorpe%20oppenheimer%20%22first%20publication%20of%20Oppenheimer's%22&f=false">1948</a> but frequently repeated subsequently – reinforce this sense of an encounter with divine forces. They are, for instance, the final words in Tom Morton-Smith’s play, <a href="http://www.tommortonsmith.com/theatre/2014/10/21/oppenheimer">Oppenheimer</a>. They are invoked, too, though not actually spoken or sung, when the chorus sings <a href="https://www.opera-arias.com/adams/doctor-atomic/libretto/">lines from the Gita</a> in John Adams’ opera, Doctor Atomic.</p>
<p>So much part of the mythology are these words, that it’s sometimes <a href="https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/satyam-bruyat/bhagavad-gita-and-the-first-atomic-explosion/">erroneously</a> assumed Oppenheimer actually said them at Trinity. His brother Frank’s recollection was that he simply said: “<a href="https://youtu.be/xosmgrYF9K8?t=3106">It worked</a>”. It’s important, too, to be wary of where the mythmaking might take us. As the nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein <a href="http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/05/23/oppenheimer-gita/">points out</a>, the words from the Gita are unlikely to be the hubristic statement of Oppenheimer’s triumph they might seem. They are often contrasted with the rather blunter assessment of Kenneth Bainbridge, in charge of the test, who commented to Oppenheimer, “<a href="http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2015/07/17/now-we-are-all-sons-of-bitches/">Now we are all sons of bitches</a>”.</p>
<p>The phrase’s attraction is, I think, its ambiguity. It’s portentous, but open to interpretation, gesturing toward something important in humanity’s encounter with greater powers (perhaps a Faustian bargain struck between the purity of physics and the real-world horror of military technology) without quite stating it. A similar suggestiveness surely accounts, too, for the proliferation of the famous (but possibly <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Rf2O9eqrMgMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=szasz+the+day+the+sun+rose+twice&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi74YbwkbnqAhWNT8AKHfDwACQQ6AEwAXoECAAQAg#v=onepage&q=theories%20are%20still%20unlikely&f=false">erroneous</a>) story that Trinity was named by Oppenheimer for a metaphysical <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44106/holy-sonnets-batter-my-heart-three-persond-god">poem</a> by John Donne: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you<br>
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;<br>
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend<br>
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>It opens up interesting creative possibilities. In her novel Trinity, Louisa Hall imagines Donne’s poem to be one admired by <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/jean-tatlock">Jean Tatlock</a>, with whom Oppenheimer had an intense relationship, but who died in 1944. In Doctor Atomic, the poem’s words comprise the lyrics of the moving <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlUHKHLk_VU">aria</a> closing the first act.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, Christian traditions of the acquisition of knowledge, and of the relation with God, are also invoked at Trinity. Oppenheimer famously stated in a lecture in 1947 that “the physicists <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=xg0AAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA65&lpg=PA65&dq=oppenheimer+physics+in+the+contemporary+world&source=bl&ots=cGBTysgzrO&sig=ACfU3U2WOwz8BztdN1Oa8bA1a6XrntAuVQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjC8_-Csq7qAhWRiVwKHR_cATcQ6AEwB3oECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=oppenheimer%20physics%20in%20the%20contemporary%20world&f=false">have known sin</a>”, a statement controversial among his colleagues.</p>
<p>There is, then, a furious mythmaking around both Trinity and Oppenheimer. It transforms Oppenheimer from an actual person into a compelling tragic figure. It transforms the atomic bomb into a technology that symbolises broader anxieties about the relations between ourselves, our technologies and the Earth.</p>
<h2>Beauty and terror</h2>
<p>Stories about the atomic explosion also conjure up the aesthetic tradition of the <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/sublime">sublime</a>, perhaps the dominant means through which encounters with nature have been processed in western societies since the Romantic period. In the art of the sublime, extremity of experience – the wildness and grandeur of nature one might encounter in a <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/the-romantic-sublime-r1109221">storm at sea</a>, for instance – is emphasised.</p>
<p>The sublime evokes both beauty and terror. For Farrell, Groves’s deputy, the explosion was “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6hAaCgAAQBAJ&dq=cynthia+kelly+the+manhattan+project&q=Age+of+Atomic+Energy#v=snippet&q=%22magnificent%2C%20beautiful%22&f=false">magnificent, beautiful</a>” and “terrifying”. In Ellen Klages’ young adult novel, The Green Glass Sea, a witness describes Trinity, saying “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=-Y4YipKx898C&printsec=frontcover&dq=klages+green+glass+sea&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjakKTiuLnqAhU6TRUIHUmOA64Q6AEwAHoECAIQAg#v=onepage&q=%22It%20was%20beautiful%22&f=false">It was beautiful. It was terrifying</a>”. These are experiences of awe in the sense defined by the Oxford English Dictionary: “a feeling of fear or dread, mixed with profound reverence, typically as inspired by God or the divine”. </p>
<p>Indeed, Edwin McMillan, one of the physicists, described “the immediate reaction of the watchers as <a href="https://www.blackdogandleventhal.com/titles/cynthia-c-kelly/manhattan-project/9781603762069/">one of awe</a>” and <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=D9KpDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=frisch+what+little+i+remember&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiB6Mb7vLnqAhU5QUEAHdFtCCUQ6AEwAHoECAYQAg#v=onepage&q=awesome&f=false">Frisch</a>, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6hAaCgAAQBAJ&dq=cynthia+kelly+the+manhattan+project&q=Age+of+Atomic+Energy#v=snippet&q=awesome&f=false">Farrell</a>, <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/The-Making-Of-The-Atomic-Bomb/Richard-Rhodes/9781471111235">Bainbridge</a> and <a href="https://youtu.be/xosmgrYF9K8?t=2973">Robert Wilson</a> all use the word “awesome” to describe their own responses.</p>
<p>Farrell said of the test that it appeared as “that beauty that <a href="https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.84862/page/n179/mode/2up?q=great+poets">great poets</a> dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately”. He is, in fact, remarkably eloquent, as this description of the desert landscape, lit by Trinity, shows:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, violet, grey and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Pearl Buck’s novel about the Manhattan Project, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1959/05/03/archives/science-and-the-bomb-command-the-morning-by-pearl-s-buck-317-pp-new.html">Command the Morning</a> (1959), seems to draw on this description. Stephen Coast, a (fictional) project scientist, sees:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The sky burst into blinding light. Miles away the mountains were black and then glittered into brilliant relief in the searing light. Colour splashed over the landscape, yellow, purple, crimson, grey. Every fold in the mountain sprang into bold lines, every valley was revealed, every peak stood stark.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The proliferation of adjectives chase after the experience as if they can’t keep up with the boiling profusion of colours. Characteristically, here, the sublime exceeds language’s capacity to capture it.</p>
<h2>Trinitite and transmutation</h2>
<p>Of course, what’s important about eyewitness and literary descriptions is not merely that they fit Trinity into established aesthetic traditions, but that the fit is uncomfortable. There are religious connotations to the dazzling light and overwhelming power of the explosion, but the forces encountered aren’t divine. Feelings aroused by the sublime are displaced uncannily when the source is technology, not nature.</p>
<p>In an <a href="https://journals.ku.edu/amsj/article/view/2890">essay on the atomic sublime</a>, the scholar, Peter Hales, shows how the threat of the mushroom cloud was eventually somewhat tamed by being mediated through the aesthetics of the sublime. Trinity, though, provides a compelling origin story in nuclear mythologies precisely because in 1945 it was too new to be contained by that tradition. Even the familiar term, “mushroom cloud”, wasn’t yet readily available to name what rose into the sky (Frisch thought it both “a bit like a strawberry … slowly rising into the sky from the ground, with which it remained connected by a lengthening stem of whirling dust”, and “a <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=D9KpDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=frisch+what+little+i+remember&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi8-4KDxLnqAhXYWhUIHVjTC0oQ6wEwAHoECAYQAQ#v=snippet&q=elephant&f=false">red-hot elephant</a> standing balanced on its trunk”).</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346869/original/file-20200710-58-1e52x3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346869/original/file-20200710-58-1e52x3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346869/original/file-20200710-58-1e52x3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346869/original/file-20200710-58-1e52x3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346869/original/file-20200710-58-1e52x3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346869/original/file-20200710-58-1e52x3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=996&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346869/original/file-20200710-58-1e52x3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=996&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346869/original/file-20200710-58-1e52x3z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=996&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Trinity test site.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trinity_Test_Site.jpg">© United States Army</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Trinity is unsettling. The experience evoked intimations of the world’s end that were later frequently associated with nuclear weapons. George Kistiakowsky, who led the group building <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/electronics-and-detonators">explosive lenses</a> for the gadget, said Trinity was “the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=R10-DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT365&lpg=PT365&dq=kistiakowsky+the+nearest+thing+to+doomsday&source=bl&ots=QuJ0PDcHH2&sig=ACfU3U3anoVEEtmttS_ECAaWceqejOMZcA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj9osP5xrrqAhVUqHEKHYNuAuUQ6AEwBHoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=kistiakowsky%20the%20nearest%20thing%20to%20doomsday&f=false">nearest thing to doomsday</a> that one could possibly imagine”. </p>
<p>As the mushroom cloud boiled upwards, one military official, perhaps spooked by Enrico Fermi’s mischievous <a href="https://youtu.be/xosmgrYF9K8?t=2844">taking of bets</a> on whether the explosion would ignite the atmosphere and, if so, whether it would destroy the whole world or just New Mexico (a possibility actually discussed, but ruled out well in advance of the test), apparently lost faith in the “long-hairs”, as the scientists were sometimes referred to by the soldiers at Los Alamos. “My God,” <a href="https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.84862/page/n175/mode/2up?q=long-hairs+have+lost+control">he’s said to have exclaimed</a>, “the long-hairs have lost control!”.</p>
<p>Trinity presaged an era when the <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-end-of-the-world-a-history-of-how-a-silent-cosmos-led-humans-to-fear-the-worst-120193">absurdity of extinction</a> replaced a divinely ordained judgement day as the dominant vision of the end of the world: <a href="https://youtu.be/s4VlruVG81w">Dr Strangelove</a> instead of the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Revelation-to-John">Book of Revelation</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-end-of-the-world-a-history-of-how-a-silent-cosmos-led-humans-to-fear-the-worst-120193">The end of the world: a history of how a silent cosmos led humans to fear the worst</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Frequently, then, Trinity is a story about entering an unsettling new era. <a href="http://ellenklages.com/writing/the-green-glass-sea-2/">The Green Glass Sea</a> captures this beautifully. The desert sand was melted by the test into a glassy substance, dubbed <a href="https://www.lanl.gov/museum/news/newsletter/2018/04/trinitite.php">trinitite</a> or Alamogordo glass. The novel’s young protagonist traverses this beautiful, alien world, that came into being 75 years ago:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The ground sloped gently downward into a huge green sea. Dewey took a few more steps and saw that it wasn’t water. It was glass. Translucent jade-green glass, everywhere, colouring the bare, empty desert as far ahead as she could see.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=112&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=112&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=112&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/313478/original/file-20200204-41481-1n8vco4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em>For you: more from our <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/insights-series-71218?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=InsightsUK">Insights series</a>:</em></p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daniel Cordle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Seventy-five years ago, the first atomic bomb exploded and a new world dawned.
Daniel Cordle, Associate Professor in English and American Literature, Nottingham Trent University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/125258
2019-10-21T11:45:28Z
2019-10-21T11:45:28Z
To fight climate change, science must be mobilised like it was in World War II
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297104/original/file-20191015-98632-ndire4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/zBG29d6Z98I">Harrison Moore/Unsplash</a>, <a class="license" href="http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en">FAL</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>We’ve all but won the argument on climate change. The facts are now unequivocal and climate denialists are facing a losing battle. Concern has risen up the political agenda, and major economic institutions such as the <a href="https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/envir_e/climate_challenge_e.htm">World Trade Organisation</a> and the <a href="https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/climate-change">Bank of England</a> highlight the increasingly extreme climate as a central risk to human prosperity and well-being.</p>
<p>Now, the second, even more challenging phase of the struggle begins – what exactly to do about it. More specifically, how do we deal with climate change without plunging those on the threshold of poverty into <a href="https://theconversation.com/climate-change-is-triggering-a-migrant-crisis-in-vietnam-88791">further hardship</a>? Without damaging our already <a href="https://theconversation.com/climate-change-is-putting-even-resilient-and-adaptable-animals-like-baboons-at-risk-115588">fragile biodiversity</a>? Without threatening our <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-climate-change-is-making-it-harder-to-monitor-marine-pollution-102672">already polluted</a> water and air?</p>
<p>Proposed solutions to deal with climate change vary enormously in terms of their benefits and pitfalls. Take my own research field of landscape ecology. Some proposals are overwhelmingly positive. For example, if we plant forests to absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, we can <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1600-0587.2012.07665.x">help wildlife persist</a> in the face of drought. This does, however, depend on forest composition – the fastest growing trees that store most carbon are actually less beneficial for wildlife than mixed forest.</p>
<p>But other solutions have worrying trade offs. If we plant biofuels extensively, for example, we might end up reducing <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513008264">water availability, air quality and biodiversity</a>, as has been shown on before on a <a href="https://www.cbd.int/agriculture/2011-121/UNEP-WCMC3-sep11-en.pdf">global scale</a>. </p>
<p>And other nature-based solutions are a bit of a mixed bag. Re-wetting peatlands will help them to store carbon (<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837709000945">peat bogs</a> are our most important carbon store, more important that forests). But re-wetting peat means less land for agriculture, unless we develop new ways to grow food in wet peatland (“<a href="https://www.cabdirect.org/cabdirect/abstract/20163196384">paludiculture</a>”). As you can see, it gets complicated very quickly.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297107/original/file-20191015-98632-1dgd2qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297107/original/file-20191015-98632-1dgd2qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297107/original/file-20191015-98632-1dgd2qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297107/original/file-20191015-98632-1dgd2qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297107/original/file-20191015-98632-1dgd2qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297107/original/file-20191015-98632-1dgd2qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297107/original/file-20191015-98632-1dgd2qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Which path should we take?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/M_w21PVzSI8">Johannes Ludwig/Unsplash</a>, <a class="license" href="http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en">FAL</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Beyond blue sky science</h2>
<p>There is clearly a key role for science in informing the best solutions, but not just any old science. We need “applied”, solutions-oriented science. </p>
<p>You may detect a certain urgency in my tone here. I don’t disagree with so-called “blue sky” science – science for its own sake – where we explore the world with a sense of awe and curiosity, without any intention of immediate application (even though ultimately there often is one – as many advances in genetics will attest). It’s just that time is getting awfully short. In 2018, the IPCC warned we only have 12 years to halve greenhouse gas emissions to keep global <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/">average warming below 1.5°C</a>, and avoid significant risks of severe negative impacts. We now have just over ten years left, and in the last year we have actually <a href="https://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbonbudget/">increased global emissions</a>.</p>
<p>And unfortunately, science, as it’s mostly practised today, is just not up to the task of delivering timely knowledge on solutions to climate change.</p>
<p>Consider the way science is traditionally funded: a team of scientists bid for research funding, with the application review process and administration taking around 6-12 months. If funded, the research project is typically for about three to five years, with results provided to “stakeholders” towards the end of the project. This generally involves a nominal workshop involving a few participants from business, charities and maybe a policy official (although by that point they may well have lost interest in the project because the policy questions have moved on). This is not fit for purpose for a <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-48126677">climate emergency</a>.</p>
<p>Although in recent years there has been a move towards “co-development” of research – working with stakeholders to develop key research questions – the same problematic time lag persists, as well as the limited connectivity between scientists and those who need the answers.</p>
<p>This isn’t the only way of doing things. In the past, governments have worked much more closely with scientists to respond to emergencies. Consider World War II, when there was huge state funding to mobilise knowledge to provide solutions to communications issues (both transmitting messages and decrypting), food provision and defence. For example, the US and UK cooperated on the <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9780312061678">Manhattan project</a> to develop the nuclear bomb, which led eventually to <a href="https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780198822080.001.0001/oso-9780198822080-chapter-7">civilian nuclear reactors</a>. State-funded research during the Cold War, meanwhile, led to the development of <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23738871.2016.1157619?src=recsys&">the internet</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297108/original/file-20191015-98653-shfp2e.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297108/original/file-20191015-98653-shfp2e.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297108/original/file-20191015-98653-shfp2e.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297108/original/file-20191015-98653-shfp2e.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297108/original/file-20191015-98653-shfp2e.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297108/original/file-20191015-98653-shfp2e.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297108/original/file-20191015-98653-shfp2e.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 1940 meeting of Manhattan Project scientists.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project#/media/File:Lawrence_Compton_Bush_Conant_Compton_Loomis_83d40m_March_1940_meeting_UCB.JPG">US Government</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A direct approach</h2>
<p>But today, in the face of the climate crisis, the capacity of government to commission its own research is reduced, because most research is commissioned through the UK research councils. These councils may do better job at delivering competitive research, but the less centralised and ministerial control of science funding makes it harder to respond to challenge of providing timely solutions to climate change.</p>
<p>So what is the answer? We might take a lesson from the Ministry of Defence here, who have developed something they call a <a href="http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/national-security-strategy-committee/work-of-the-national-security-adviser/oral/95669.html">Fusion Doctrine</a> to deal with complex problems by taking a more holistic approach. This involves a strategic policy design, drawing on foresight methods, and integrating across departments. In a similar vein, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs recently established a “<a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/science-research-programme-launched-to-inform-defra-policy-making">Systems Research Programme</a>” that aims to draw on the expertise of the academic community to understand the implications of various policies to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions. I am currently advising them on the design of this programme.</p>
<p>Yet there is a still a missing player here: civil society. Because any attempt to design a carbon-free future must involve citizens from its inception, so that policy solutions are realistic, have democratic legitimacy, and give people a sense of power and agency to respond to climate change. As such, scientists and government will need to work with citizen science groups to produce a new evidence-based participatory democracy. And this must occur on a vast scale, across every aspect of British society and economy, to successfully achieve net zero emissions and adaption to climate change.</p>
<p>Recently, civil society groups such as <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/extinction-rebellion-69561">Extinction Rebellion</a> have called for “<a href="https://theconversation.com/citizens-assemblies-how-to-bring-the-wisdom-of-the-public-to-bear-on-the-climate-emergency-119117">citizen assemblies</a>” to deal with climate change. They recommend that scientific “experts” should be on these panels. Yet no single expert can provide all the answers. Instead, each citizen assembly and local council should be linked with a network of scientists (economists, ecologists, social scientists, engineers and more) in an ongoing dialogue to provide timely evidence on climate change solutions.</p>
<p>This requires nothing less than a vast mobilisation of scientific knowledge on a scale greater than ever yet achieved. But, just as in wartime, our prosperity, well-being and the future of our children are under severe threat. So, to paraphrase the wartime slogan: scientists, citizens, government, “Your Country Needs You” – to work together.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263883/original/file-20190314-28475-1mzxjur.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263883/original/file-20190314-28475-1mzxjur.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263883/original/file-20190314-28475-1mzxjur.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263883/original/file-20190314-28475-1mzxjur.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263883/original/file-20190314-28475-1mzxjur.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=176&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263883/original/file-20190314-28475-1mzxjur.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=176&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263883/original/file-20190314-28475-1mzxjur.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=176&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/imagine-newsletter-researchers-think-of-a-world-with-climate-action-113443?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=Imagineheader1125258">Click here to subscribe to our climate action newsletter. Climate change is inevitable. Our response to it isn’t.</a></em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/125258/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tom Oliver is on secondment with the UK government's Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra). The views expressed in this article are his own and do not necessarily represent those of government. Tom has received past research funding from UK research councils (NERC, BBSRC) and Natural England. </span></em></p>
In the past, governments have worked much more closely with scientists to respond to emergencies.
Tom Oliver, Professor of Applied Ecology, University of Reading
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/108809
2019-02-12T11:46:21Z
2019-02-12T11:46:21Z
Time for a Manhattan Project on Alzheimer’s
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/253300/original/file-20190110-43517-1thkww2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Figuring out the pieces to the Alzheimer's puzzle.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/brain-degenerative-diseases-parkinson-alzheimer-puzzle-247872682">Naeblys/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Imagine if Alzheimer’s was treated like other common diseases. Instead of worrying about the prospect of slowly losing your memory, you might get a series of shots during middle age to prevent the onset of this neurological nightmare, just as we do to reduce the risk of flu. Or you could take a daily pill as many do to control their cholesterol or blood pressure.</p>
<p>That may sound improbable, given the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1186/alzrt269">long string of Alzheimer’s drugs</a> that have <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-alzheimer-s-drugs-keep-failing/">failed to work in clinical trials</a>, but I remain optimistic. As a <a href="https://www.utsouthwestern.edu/labs/diamond/about/meet-the-pi.html">physician-scientist</a> leading research into the causes of neurodegenerative diseases, I believe that we are making significant progress on uncovering the roots of Alzheimer’s. </p>
<p>Alzheimer’s is a neurodegenerative disease that has stymied researchers for years. The disease develops when two proteins – A-beta and tau – accumulate in the brain. A-beta builds up outside of nerve cells, and tau inside them. Decades of study suggests that A-beta somehow leads to the accumulation of tau, which is <a href="http://doi.org/10.1126/scitranslmed.3002369">what causes nerve cells to die</a>. This may explain why early treatments focusing exclusively on A-beta failed. These ideas have led to <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jalz.2018.02.018">new diagnostic criteria</a> that take into account these two proteins to make the definitive diagnosis. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/253293/original/file-20190110-43541-1b4l3eu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/253293/original/file-20190110-43541-1b4l3eu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/253293/original/file-20190110-43541-1b4l3eu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=281&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/253293/original/file-20190110-43541-1b4l3eu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=281&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/253293/original/file-20190110-43541-1b4l3eu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=281&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/253293/original/file-20190110-43541-1b4l3eu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=353&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/253293/original/file-20190110-43541-1b4l3eu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=353&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/253293/original/file-20190110-43541-1b4l3eu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=353&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Clumps of tau protein cause neurofibillatory tangles inside neurons. The A-beta protein forms clumps in between them. Together they destroy brain tissue.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/alzheimers-disease-309207956">joshya/Shutterstock.com</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Mechanistic studies take time but pay off</h2>
<p>As a scientist, I have always been fascinated by the molecular basis of disease, and as a physician I am committed to helping patients. <a href="https://www.utsouthwestern.edu/labs/diamond/">In my lab</a> at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, our group is focused on identifying structural changes in the tau protein that enable it to aggregate and cause disease. <a href="https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.36584.001">Our work suggests that neurodegeneration begins</a> with a shape shift in the tau protein, which then forms toxic assemblies, or clumps, in the brain. These assemblies are mobile, and appear to transmit pathology between different groups of neurons causing disease progression. As tau appears to play the central role in destroying brain cells, and because lost neurons cannot be replaced, our researchers are working to develop tools to pick up the earliest signs of toxic tau. This may occur many years before cognitive symptoms become apparent.</p>
<p>If physicians can detect the disease-causing forms of tau, they will be able to diagnose the underlying disease before permanent loss of brain cells occurs, perhaps even before individuals know they have a problem. This requires that we develop better, more sensitive biomarkers that may facilitate this process, much like we now use hemoglobin A1C to diagnose incipient diabetes. </p>
<p>To do this we’ve pulled together an unconventional team with expertise in structural biology, biochemistry, cell biology, neurology and neuropathology to work side by side in our <a href="https://www.utsouthwestern.edu/education/medical-school/departments/alzheimers/">Center for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases</a> (CAND). <a href="https://www.utsouthwestern.edu/labs/diamond/">Studies from my lab</a> have already contributed to the development of an <a href="https://www.alzforum.org/therapeutics/c2n-8e12">anti-tau antibody that is in clinical trials</a>. This antibody binds tau, and may <a href="https://news.abbvie.com/news/abbvie-initiates-phase-2-clinical-trial-programs-for-abbv-8e12-an-investigational-anti-tau-antibody-in-early-alzheimers-disease-and-progressive-supranuclear-palsy.htm">facilitate its clearance from the brain</a>. Full disclosure: I receive royalties through my former employer, Washington University in St. Louis, for my role in discovering this drug.</p>
<p>The approach at the CAND is much like the diverse group of engineers and physicists who were brought together during World War II for the <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/the-manhattan-project">Manhattan Project</a> – the secret effort to create the first atomic bomb. Our multidisciplinary team marries discovery and engineering with the goal of developing diagnostic tools and personalized therapies that can stem the progression of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative disorders. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/253298/original/file-20190110-43517-vmusoy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/253298/original/file-20190110-43517-vmusoy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/253298/original/file-20190110-43517-vmusoy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/253298/original/file-20190110-43517-vmusoy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/253298/original/file-20190110-43517-vmusoy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/253298/original/file-20190110-43517-vmusoy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=621&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/253298/original/file-20190110-43517-vmusoy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=621&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/253298/original/file-20190110-43517-vmusoy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=621&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Manhattan Project was the secret government effort that created atomic weapons. Here seven atom bomb scientists look over a roentgenometer at the site of the test atom bomb explosion on Sept. 13, 1945. Pictured (l-r): Dr. Kenneth T. Bainbridge, Harvard; Dr. Joseph G. Hoffman, University of Buffalo; Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, California; Dr. Louis H. Hempelmann, Washington; Dr. Victor Weisskopf; Dr. Robert F. Bacher, Cornell University; and Dr. Richard W. Dodson of California.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Watchf-AP-A-NM-USA-APHSL40329-New-Mexico-Atom-/7e78c72cffe84e7bbd21db90ca988f06/3/1">AP Photo/KEYSTONE/Martial Trezzini</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The role of philanthropy</h2>
<p>Major philanthropists have realized the value of integrated research efforts to solve specific problems in science. They are pouring tens of millions of dollars into Alzheimer’s research. Our team at UT Southwestern was recently the recipient of a US$1 million award from the <a href="https://go.chanzuckerberg.com/NCN">Chan Zuckerberg Initiative</a>, set up by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. In all, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative awarded more than $50 million to 17 investigators and nine scientific teams to launch a Neurodegenerative Challenge Network. This brings together scientists from diverse fields – biochemistry, genetics, neuropathology and computational science – who are taking a broad view of the disease by exploring multiple underlying causes of neurodegenerative diseases, even while researchers at CAND focus primarily on tau. </p>
<p>The challenge is growing more urgent. Alzheimer’s is a defining medical problem of our generation. <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/features/alzheimers-disease-deaths/index.html">More than 5 million Americans</a> are now afflicted, and that number is expected to reach nearly <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/features/alzheimers-disease-deaths/index.html">14 million by 2050</a> – threatening to overwhelm an already stressed health care system. </p>
<p>With support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, we have integrated research across multiple different labs to try to develop a logical system to classify the various <a href="http://doi.org/10.1007/s00401-017-1717-7">subtypes of neurodegnerative diseases linked to tau</a>. This system is rooted in linking the three-dimensional structure of a single tau protein to its cellular effects, and correlating specific structures with particular <a href="https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.37813.001">patterns of pathology</a>. One day we hope to extract tiny amounts of critical proteins from blood, or spinal fluid that bathes the brain, to predict the onset of specific diseases, and then intervene with a personalized treatment before damage is done.</p>
<p>We seek a “personalized” approach to diagnosis based on protein structure. This is analogous to how genetic information is now used to classify cancer. We hope to use this framework to identify patients at risk, so that we can monitor their responses to treatment, and ultimately, to decide who will benefit most from specific interventions. This ambitious plan will require sophisticated new tools to study protein structure, to analyze brain tissues, and to facilitate translation of these ideas to the clinic, all in close collaboration across very disparate scientific disciplines.</p>
<h2>We must continue to fund basic research</h2>
<p>While we think targeting tau aggregation and its spread through the brain is the best way to treat disease, it is unlikely to be the only effective one. New therapies are now making their way through clinical trials. These include drugs that <a href="https://www.alzforum.org/therapeutics/biib080">turn off the tau gene and block the protein’s production</a>. Multiple trials are using the body’s immune system to attack A-beta and tau proteins, and new biological information about how tau and A-beta cause pathology within cells may lead to complementary strategies. </p>
<p>Vigorous efforts such as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative are providing a critical boost at a time when some <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/nrd.2018.16">pharmaceutical companies have scaled back research</a> into brain disorders. This means that support from the federal government remains indispensable. The National Institutes of Health has <a href="http://doi.org/10.1126/science.aav2455">tripled its annual budget for research</a> into Alzheimer’s and related dementias since 2014, reaching $1.9 billion in the last fiscal year. </p>
<p>I can’t predict when we will have a treatment for Alzheimer’s. But I am confident that when it happens it will be based on discoveries made in academic research laboratories, just as scientists in previous generations produced vaccines for polio and effective drugs for HIV and hepatitis C. </p>
<p>A vaccine for Alzheimer’s? Gene editing seemed like science fiction 25 years ago, but now it’s <a href="https://www.fda.gov/newsevents/newsroom/pressannouncements/ucm534611.htm">being used to save lives</a>. By shifting the paradigm on Alzheimer’s research, treatments for neurodegenerative diseases can also become reality.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/108809/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marc Diamond receives funding from the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, the State of Texas, the Rainwater Charitable Foundation, the Cure Alzheimer's Fund and the Aging Minds Foundation.</span></em></p>
Many pieces leading to Alzheimer’s disease have been identified. To put the pieces together, one scholar argues that the government should launch a Manhattan Project-scale effort to find a cure.
Marc Diamond, Professor of Neurology and Neurotherapeutics, UT Southwestern Medical Center
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/96539
2018-05-15T06:54:40Z
2018-05-15T06:54:40Z
How an Australian scientist tried to stop the US plan to monopolise the nuclear arms race
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218942/original/file-20180515-122916-jnoyez.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=18%2C386%2C2506%2C1964&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Mark Oliphant in 1939.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">From a collection at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. Gift of Ms Vivian Wilson 2004</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Australian scientist Mark Oliphant, who helped push the United States to develop the atomic bombs in World War II, also played a major role during the war in attempting to stop the US dominating the UK in any further development of nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>Details of the Adelaide-born physicist’s efforts are included in new research <a href="https://doi.org/10.1071/HR18008">published today in the CSIRO’s Historical Records of Australian Science</a>, based on documents sourced from the UK Cabinet archives.</p>
<p>These archival documents reveal how Oliphant attempted a British rebellion against scientific collaboration with the US that escalated all the way to the top of Britain’s wartime leadership.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-melbourne-activists-launched-a-campaign-for-nuclear-disarmament-and-won-a-nobel-prize-85386">How Melbourne activists launched a campaign for nuclear disarmament and won a Nobel prize</a>
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<h2>The rise of the physicist</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.science.org.au/fellowship/fellows/biographical-memoirs/marcus-laurence-elwin-oliphant-1901-2000#1">Oliphant</a> (1901-2000) described himself as a “belligerent pacifist” and his humanitarianism and compassion forms an indelible image of the gentle giant of Australian science.</p>
<p>After studying at the University of Adelaide he moved to the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge in the UK. Oliphant joined a freewheeling cabal of atomic physicists led by fellow antipodean <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ernest-Rutherford">Ernest Rutherford</a>. He later took up a position at Birmingham University.</p>
<p>But soon the war was to change everything for him.</p>
<p>In late 1938, <a href="https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200712/physicshistory.cfm">nuclear fission of uranium was discovered in Berlin</a> and within months the thunderclap of war clattered over Europe. After convincing the Americans of the potential of an atomic bomb in 1941, Oliphant joined the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Manhattan-Project">Manhattan Project</a> in 1943 as a leading member of the collaborative British Mission.</p>
<h2>At war with secrecy</h2>
<p>Oliphant found that wartime secrecy was totally opposite to the usual culture of open science. The US military police opened his mail, and the FBI interrogated him on his casual attitude to rules.</p>
<p>In September 1944 Oliphant complained of his restrictions to the US Army’s no-nonsense military head of the project, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leslie-Richard-Groves">General Leslie Groves</a>. Groves was frustrated with progress and gave Oliphant a lecture on war and security.</p>
<p>In doing so, the cabinet documents on Oliphant’s notes show that the normally circumspect Groves also let slip that the US had no intention of honouring an agreement with the British to share atomic technology after the war. Groves stated that even after the war America needed to prepare for an “inevitable war with Russia”.</p>
<p>Oliphant’s notes added:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In this conversation Groves insisted that he spoke for the armed forces and for every thinking man and woman in U.S.A. He said that any effort U.K. might make must be confined to central Canada. He excluded specifically Australia or any other part of the Empire. Every possible source of supply of raw materials would be monopolised and controlled by U.S.A.-U.K.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>How to warn the UK?</h2>
<p>Oliphant saw weapons development as merely a vehicle on which to carry the potential of almost limitless energy and he was intent on resuming his open research after the war.</p>
<p>He could not risk his mail being opened again. So he headed from Berkeley, California to the British Embassy in Washington to write a secret report to London detailing his conversation with Groves.</p>
<p>Oliphant had a plan. He proposed that, without delay, the entire British Mission leave the Manhattan Project, return to Britain and restart their own programs. In late 1944 he seemingly had traction and the British project, code-named Tube Alloys, was reinvigorated with new plans tabled to construct uranium isotope plants.</p>
<p>Oliphant’s plan escalated up the chain to Lord Cherwell, then Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s scientific advisor, and to Sir John Anderson, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the authority on atomic matters inside the British War Cabinet.</p>
<p>James Chadwick, the scientific head of the British Mission, was furious at Oliphant’s cavalier approach and wrote to the British polity arguing that the British Mission must stay in America to complete the task at hand.</p>
<p>Oliphant’s bombast, confidence and directness is famous. As he approached the door of 11 Downing Street (the official residence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer) on January 9, 1945, he was likely optimistic that his meeting with Sir John would result in a decision to follow his new plan.</p>
<p>But Sir John was in a pessimistic mood. There was still a war on, and the allies were being pushed back by the Nazis at the Battle of the Bulge. Sir John put a stop to talk of this scientific rebellion, and ordered Oliphant back to America to complete the job.</p>
<p>The atomic bombs fell on Japan in August 1945. World War II soon ended.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218943/original/file-20180515-122935-1e3igum.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218943/original/file-20180515-122935-1e3igum.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/218943/original/file-20180515-122935-1e3igum.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218943/original/file-20180515-122935-1e3igum.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218943/original/file-20180515-122935-1e3igum.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218943/original/file-20180515-122935-1e3igum.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218943/original/file-20180515-122935-1e3igum.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/218943/original/file-20180515-122935-1e3igum.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The wrecked framework of the Museum of Science and Industry in Hiroshima, Japan, shortly after the dropping of the first atomic bomb, on August 6, 1945.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock/Everett Historical</span></span>
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</figure>
<h2>After the war</h2>
<p>In mid-1946 the newly formed United Nations debated control of atomic technology and Oliphant was in New York as an Australian advisor. He and other scientists pushed a plan to abolish weapons and throw the science open.</p>
<p>The alternative, the scientists argued, would be an escalation of an arms race. Only openness in science could reduce suspicion between nations. </p>
<p>The US and the Soviet Union almost agreed to the plan. But the Americans refused a Soviet request to first destroy their atomic arsenal and the Soviets refused to allow UN inspections.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/we-may-survive-the-anthropocene-but-need-to-avoid-a-radioactive-plutocene-84763">We may survive the Anthropocene, but need to avoid a radioactive 'Plutocene'</a>
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<p>The US passed their Atomic Energy Act in August 1946 which prevented any collaboration on atomic technology. Oliphant’s prophecy came true. But the scientists had made another prophecy: atomic secrets cannot be contained.</p>
<p>As the critical mass of international scientists that had gathered together for war radiated back out around the world, they carried with them the secrets of the atom.</p>
<p>The British restarted their bomb project in 1947 and tested their first weapon in 1952, and the Soviets tested their first bomb in 1949. The US monopoly on atomic weaponry was a fleeting moment.</p>
<p>So the opportunity was lost in 1946 to abolish weapons, and today <a href="https://fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-nuclear-forces/">more than 14,000 nuclear weapons exist</a>, held by nine countries. Even in a post-Cold War world this sword of annihilation hangs by a thread over the head of all us.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/96539/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Darren Holden does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Australian scientist Mark Oliphant helped push the development of nuclear weapons during World War II but later riled at US attempts to keep the UK and others out of the nuclear arms race.
Darren Holden, PhD Candidate, University of Notre Dame Australia
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/90378
2018-03-05T11:45:23Z
2018-03-05T11:45:23Z
The Cold War’s toxic legacy: Costly, dangerous cleanups at atomic bomb production sites
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208704/original/file-20180302-65529-blvpr6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=24%2C291%2C2020%2C1152&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Nuclear reactors line the bank of the Columbia River at the Hanford site in 1960.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Hanford_N_Reactor_adjusted.jpg">USDOE</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Seventy-five years ago, in March 1943, a mysterious construction project began at a remote location in eastern Washington state. Over the next two years some 50,000 workers built an industrial site occupying half the area of Rhode Island, costing over US$230 million – equivalent to $3.1 billion today. Few of those workers, and virtually no one in the surrounding community, knew the facility’s purpose. </p>
<p>The site was called Hanford, named for a small town whose residents were displaced to make way for the project. Its mission became clear at the end of World War II. Hanford had produced plutonium for the first nuclear test in the New Mexico desert in July 1945, and for the bomb that incinerated Nagasaki on Aug. 9. </p>
<p><a href="https://chass.ncsu.edu/people/wjkinsel/">As a researcher</a> in environmental and energy communication, I’ve studied the <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780739119044/Nuclear-Legacies-Communication-Controversy-and-the-U.S.-Nuclear-Weapons-Complex">legacies of nuclear weapons production</a>. From 2000 to 2005, I served with a <a href="http://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/hab">citizen advisory board</a> that provides input to state and federal officials on a massive environmental cleanup program at Hanford, now one of the most contaminated sites in the world. </p>
<p>As U.S. leaders <a href="https://media.defense.gov/2018/Feb/02/2001872877/-1/-1/1/EXECUTIVE-SUMMARY.PDF">consider producing new nuclear weapons</a>, I believe they should study lessons from Hanford carefully. Hanford provides one of the more dramatic examples of problems that unfolded – and persist today – at nuclear sites where production and secrecy took priority over safety and environmental protection. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208697/original/file-20180302-65519-rkmkeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208697/original/file-20180302-65519-rkmkeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208697/original/file-20180302-65519-rkmkeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208697/original/file-20180302-65519-rkmkeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208697/original/file-20180302-65519-rkmkeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208697/original/file-20180302-65519-rkmkeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=638&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208697/original/file-20180302-65519-rkmkeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=638&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208697/original/file-20180302-65519-rkmkeg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=638&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/ProjectsFacilities#HM">www.hanford.gov</a></span>
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<h2>A nationwide nuclear network</h2>
<p>Hanford was one of three large facilities anchoring the <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/history">Manhattan Project</a> – the crash program to build an atomic bomb. It was part of a larger complex linking facilities across the nation. A plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, enriched uranium and operated a prototype nuclear reactor. Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico assembled a cadre of world-class scientists to design and build the weapons, using materials produced at the other sites. Smaller facilities across the nation made other contributions. </p>
<p>As World War II phased into the Cold War and the U.S.-Soviet arms race escalated, new sites were added in Ohio, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, Colorado and elsewhere. Secrecy masked much of the work at these sites until well into the 1980s, with serious consequences for public health, worker safety and the environment. Nuclear and chemical wastes caused severe contamination at Hanford and the other sites, and dealing with them has proved to be difficult and costly. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208700/original/file-20180302-65544-lfz718.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208700/original/file-20180302-65544-lfz718.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208700/original/file-20180302-65544-lfz718.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208700/original/file-20180302-65544-lfz718.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208700/original/file-20180302-65544-lfz718.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208700/original/file-20180302-65544-lfz718.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208700/original/file-20180302-65544-lfz718.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208700/original/file-20180302-65544-lfz718.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Major sites in the Cold War nuclear weapons production complex.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.acq.osd.mil/ncbdp/nm/nmhb/chapters/chapter_4.htm">USDOD</a></span>
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<h2>Contamination at Hanford</h2>
<p>When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, the United States had mass-produced some 70,000 nuclear bombs and warheads. <a href="https://fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/pu50yc.html">Hanford made most of the plutonium used in those weapons</a>. Workers irradiated uranium fuel in reactors, and then dissolved it in acid to extract the plutonium produced. This method, called reprocessing, generated 56 million gallons of liquid wastes laced with radioactive and chemical poisons. </p>
<p>Hanford’s nine reactors were <a href="http://www.toxipedia.org/display/wanmec/Radioactive+Contamination+of+the+Columbia+River">located along the Columbia River</a> to provide a source of cooling water, and discharged radiation into the river throughout their lifetimes. </p>
<p>Fuel was sometimes reprocessed before its most highly radioactive isotopes had time to decay. Managers knowingly released toxic gases into the air, contaminating farmlands and grazing areas downwind. Some releases supported an <a href="https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/199602/backpage.cfm">effort to monitor Soviet nuclear progress</a>. By tracking intentional emissions from Hanford, scientists learned better how to spot Soviet nuclear tests. </p>
<p>Liquid wastes from reprocessing were stored in <a href="https://ecology.wa.gov/Waste-Toxics/Nuclear-waste/Hanford-cleanup/Tank-waste-management/Tank-monitoring-closure">underground tanks</a> designed to last 25 years, assuming that a permanent disposal solution would be developed later. The U.S. Department of Energy, which now operates the weapons complex and its cleanup program, is still working on that solution.</p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Workers prepare to remove the core from a waste tank at Hanford in 2010.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.hanford.gov/c.cfm/photogallery/img.cfm/c107holecutting/full/A%20cold%20winter%20afternoon%20as%20workers%20prepare%20to%20remove%20the%20core%20from%20tank%20C-107.jpg">Hanford Site</a></span>
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<p>Meanwhile, at least a million gallons of tank wastes have <a href="http://hanfordlearning.org/hanford-101/cleanup/tri-party-agreement/department-of-energy/">leaked into the ground</a>. This material, and the prospect of more to follow, threatens the Columbia River, a backbone of the Pacific Northwest’s economy and ecology. <a href="https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/nation-and-world/clock-ticks-as-nuclear-waste-storage-tanks-leak-at-hanford/">Some groundwater is already contaminated</a>. Estimates of when that plume will reach the river are uncertain. </p>
<p>Radioactive trash still litters parts of Hanford. Irradiated bodies of laboratory animals were <a href="https://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Workers-uncover-carcasses-of-Hanford-test-animals-1225341.php">buried there</a>. The site houses radioactive debris ranging from medical wastes to <a href="http://www.oregon.gov/energy/facilities-safety/safety/Pages/Naval-Nuclear-Transport.aspx">propulsion reactors from decommissioned submarines</a> and <a href="http://pdw.hanford.gov/arpir/pdf.cfm?accession=E0025397">parts of the reactor</a> that melted down at Three Mile Island. Some nuclear decision makers have called Hanford a “national sacrifice zone.” </p>
<h2>A struggle for accountability</h2>
<p>In the mid-1980s, local residents grew suspicious about an apparent excess of illnesses and deaths in their community. Initially, strict secrecy – reinforced by the region’s economic dependence on the Hanford site – made it hard for concerned citizens to get information. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208707/original/file-20180302-65529-33fcaj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208707/original/file-20180302-65529-33fcaj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/208707/original/file-20180302-65529-33fcaj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208707/original/file-20180302-65529-33fcaj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208707/original/file-20180302-65529-33fcaj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208707/original/file-20180302-65529-33fcaj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208707/original/file-20180302-65529-33fcaj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/208707/original/file-20180302-65529-33fcaj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cold War-era billboard at Hanford reinforcing strict secrecy rules.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hanford_billboard.jpg">USDOE</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>Once the curtain of secrecy was <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/09505430120052284">partially lifted</a> under pressure from area residents and journalists, public outrage prompted <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/hanford/background.pdf">two major health effects studies</a> that engendered fierce controversy. By the close of the decade, more than 3,500 “downwinders” had filed lawsuits related to illnesses they attributed to Hanford. A judge finally <a href="http://www.tricityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article57866938.html">dismissed the case</a> in 2016 after limited compensation to a handful of plaintiffs, leaving a bitter legacy of legal disputes and personal anguish. </p>
<p>Cleanup operations at Hanford began in 1989, but have been hamstrung by <a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/will-hanford-ever-be-cleaned-up/">daunting technical challenges and management errors</a>. The <a href="http://www.hanford.gov/files.cfm/2016_LCR_Fact_Sheet_Final.pdf">current estimate</a> assumes work will continue through 2060 and cost over $100 billion, beyond the approximately $50 billion already spent. </p>
<p>A key challenge is building a facility to extract the most toxic materials from the tank wastes and enclose them in glass logs to be sent elsewhere for permanent burial. <a href="http://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article159590304.html">Projected costs</a> have ballooned to over $17 billion, and the estimated completion date is now 2036. And with the proposed <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/341369-trump-triggers-fight-over-yucca-waste-site">Yucca Mountain</a> nuclear waste repository in Nevada mired in controversy, there is still no final resting place for these materials, which will be dangerous for tens of thousands of years. </p>
<p>Cleanup has progressed in other areas. The reactors have been shut down and enclosed in <a href="https://energy.gov/em/articles/hanford-workers-enter-reactor-prepare-cocooning">concrete and steel “cocoons”</a> until their radioactivity decays further. Hanford’s “<a href="http://b-reactor.org/">B Reactor</a>,” the world’s first large-scale nuclear reactor, is now part of the <a href="https://energy.gov/management/office-management/operational-management/history/manhattan-project/manhattan-project-0">Manhattan Project National Historic Park</a>. </p>
<p>Buffer lands around the outer parts of the site, presumably clean enough for the purpose, have been converted to <a href="https://www.fws.gov/refuge/Hanford_Reach/maps.html">wildlife refuge areas</a>. And in 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory (LIGO), with a station located at Hanford, <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-happens-when-ligo-texts-you-to-say-its-detected-one-of-einsteins-predicted-gravitational-waves-53259">detected the first gravitational waves</a> predicted by Albert Einstein. LIGO scientists chose Hanford for its remote location and minimal interference from human activity. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8rlVHEY7BF0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Inside Hanford’s B Reactor.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Lessons to remember</h2>
<p>The Department of Energy now considers <a href="https://energy.gov/em/cleanup-sites">many of its former nuclear weapons production sites</a> to be fully cleaned up. Some remaining sites are involved in maintaining the current nuclear arsenal and could play roles producing new weapons. Others, like Hanford, are “legacy” sites where cleanup is the sole mission. </p>
<p>There is more oversight of the nuclear weapons complex today, but serious concerns remain. Notably, inspectors have found problems at <a href="http://www.lanl.gov/">Los Alamos National Laboratory</a> dating back to 2011 related to handling of <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/federal-watchdog-identifies-new-workplace-safety-problems-at-los-alamos-lab">beryllium</a>, a toxic material that can cause cancer and lung disease.</p>
<p>These issues at Hanford and other nuclear sites are reminders that nuclear weapons production is a risky process – and that in Washington state and elsewhere, legacies of the Cold War are still very much with us.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/90378/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>William J. Kinsella served from 2000 to 2005 on the Hanford Advisory Board, an organization of stakeholders that provides recommendations and advice to the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S Environmental Protection Agency, and the Washington Department of Ecology on selected major policy issues related to the cleanup of the Hanford site.</span></em></p>
During the Cold War, the US built nuclear weapons at a network of secretive sites across the nation. Some are still heavily polluted and threaten public health today.
William J. Kinsella, Professor Emeritus of Communication, North Carolina State University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/88973
2017-12-14T09:21:53Z
2017-12-14T09:21:53Z
Australia’s snub to Nobel Peace win is major break from ambiguous nukes policies of past
<p>The Australian government under Malcolm Turnbull has been less than ecstatic about the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the International Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). The <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/comment/malcolm-turnbull-wont-congratulate-australias-first-nobel-peace-laureate-because-he-supports-nukes-20171010-gyxwdg.html">failure</a> to congratulate Melbourne-based ICAN has come under <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-10/nobel-peace-prize-australian-government-accused-of-shame-job/9244194">much criticism</a> from anti-nuclear activists. </p>
<p>Following the country’s <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/nobel-peace-prize-ican-nuclear-weapons-donald-trump-labour-un-a8100986.html">NATO allies</a> and <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-10/nobel-peace-prize-australian-government-accused-of-shame-job/9244194">behaving as if</a> the whole episode never happened is in line with recent policy utterances, however. Canberra’s latest <a href="https://foreignminister.gov.au/releases/Pages/2017/jb_mr_171123.aspx">Foreign Policy White Paper</a>, released in November, says the country’s 60-year alliance with the US is “a choice we make how best to pursue our security interests” and “is central to our shared objective of shaping the regional order”. </p>
<p>There has not always been such a black-and-white split between activists and Australian politicians. Successive governments have waxed and waned considerably. At a time when nuclear tensions are running particularly high between the US and North Korea, the difference with the current administration is striking. </p>
<h2>Atomic Australia</h2>
<p>When the UK and US <a href="http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/ManhattanProject/Quebec.shtml">agreed to</a> collaborate on atomic weapons in 1943 through the Manhattan Project, Australia and other British dominions were explicitly cut out. The Americans wanted to control nuclear knowledge for exploitation after the war, and wanted the research to proceed with the utmost secrecy. </p>
<p>When Washington decided <a href="http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinetpapers/themes/co-operation-competition-testing.htm">to go it alone</a> in 1946, it gave Australia an opening. The British proceeded in the early 1950s to develop their own bomb, and decided to concentrate the effort in Australia because of its uranium and apparently wide empty spaces. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198819/original/file-20171212-9410-fdhrdn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198819/original/file-20171212-9410-fdhrdn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198819/original/file-20171212-9410-fdhrdn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198819/original/file-20171212-9410-fdhrdn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198819/original/file-20171212-9410-fdhrdn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198819/original/file-20171212-9410-fdhrdn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=893&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198819/original/file-20171212-9410-fdhrdn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=893&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198819/original/file-20171212-9410-fdhrdn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=893&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sir Mark Oliphant.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.epa.eu/human-interest-photos/people-photos/nobel-peace-prize-2017-concert-photos-53952960">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This had much to do with celebrated Australian physicist <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/7033">Mark Oliphant</a>. As a professor of physics at the University of Birmingham in the UK, it was he who had first told <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/j-robert-oppenheimer">J Robert Oppenheimer</a>, leader of America’s Manhattan Project, that it was possible to make an atomic bomb from only a few pounds, not tons, of uranium. </p>
<p>When Britain and America began collaborating in 1943, Oliphant moved to California as a leading contributor. He saw at first hand the US’s desire to monopolise nuclear know-how, <a href="http://dado.msk.ru/rlib/utf8/494471.html">writing privately</a> about how Britain had been “sold down the river”. </p>
<p>When British-Australian testing was getting underway in 1950, Oliphant returned to his homeland to take a senior physics post at the new Australian National University in Canberra. He was quoted in the press saying his department would focus on nuclear energy rather than weapons and would not do secret work “within the laboratory itself” unless it became necessary.</p>
<p>The 1950s saw Anglo-Australian tests for nuclear ballistic missiles at Woomera in South Australia, in parallel with atomic tests elsewhere in the country in preparation for a British hydrogen bomb. Yet the effort was short-lived: after the joint project <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ws7w90">successfully detonated</a> a hydrogen bomb in the central Pacific in 1957, Britain was soon <a href="http://www.nti.org/media/pdfs/56_4.pdf?_=1316627913">brought back</a> into the nuclear fold by the US. </p>
<p>Australia was relegated to supplying uranium and hosting listening posts to Asia for the Americans, in exchange for promises of nuclear protection. It has performed the same role ever since. </p>
<h2>View from Canberra</h2>
<p>In the intervening years, Canberra has never strayed from this overarching alliance. When you look at the details, however, the Australian view is far from straightforward. I’ll look at some former prime ministers in a moment. First a few words on Oliphant from research I expect to be published next year. He seems to almost personify these conflicting feelings. </p>
<p>During his time in Canberra, Oliphant came to <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1349058/Professor-Sir-Mark-Oliphant.html">describe himself</a> as a “belligerent pacifist”. He is quoted in several press reports from the early 1950s calling for a world government to avert the need for nuclear weapons. He <a href="http://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.1387592">joined</a> the Pugwash movement of leading scientists against nuclear weapons in 1957. This is quite a contrast to comments he made to the London Recorder in 1949:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The United States and United Kingdom are developing weapons designed for their own defence. They may not suit Australia’s needs if she has to defend herself. We must develop our own methods of defence and build for ourselves.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Oliphant maintained some involvement in the Commonwealth nuclear project despite his focus on energy. An archived letter shows him suggesting to a colleague that he visit Woomera to view the testing in 1953, for example, although he himself was <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781403921017">excluded</a> from the atom bomb tests at nearby Maralinga. He was quoted in the Australian press in 1951 expressing fears that Canberra might be considered “expendable” in its partnership with Britain if push came to shove. </p>
<p>In 1955, a government report refers to him telling government officers that atomic power plants built for energy could be converted to bombs manufacture within hours. “Australia could best be defended by nuclear weapons and that conventional forces and armaments could be cut”, he is quoted as saying. </p>
<p>Was he developing a pacifist public face while also trying to persuade Canberra to develop its own bomb? It certainly feels like it. Some Australian cabinet ministers also wanted an independent Australian nuclear deterrent in the late 1950s, though then Prime Minister Robert Menzies <a href="https://nautilus.org/apsnet/0623a-broinowski-html/">disagreed</a>. </p>
<p>Oliphant’s ambivalence is echoed in certain Australian administrations. In 1971, the Liberal prime minister, William McMahon <a href="https://nautilus.org/apsnet/0623a-broinwski-html/">scrapped plans</a> to build a nuclear reactor that could produce weapons-grade plutonium. His Labor successor Gough Whitlam then ratified the <a href="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1961-1968/npt">Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968</a>, overturning previous Liberal <a href="https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/bitstream/handle/10072/46413/78806_1.pdf?sequence=1">reluctance</a>. </p>
<p>Malcolm Fraser, another Liberal prime minister, introduced a <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BN/2011-2012/UraniumPolicy">safeguards regime</a> for exporting uranium in 1978 that included only selling it to countries that were parties to the 1968 treaty – including the Americans, of course. Fraser later became involved in founding ICAN, and <a href="http://www.news.com.au/national/breaking-news/hawke-fraser-join-anti-nuclear-campaign-group/news-story/dd832b27726b6a7633bd016d4b910cc7">campaigned</a> against nuclear weapons alongside his successor as prime minister, Bob Hawke.</p>
<p>The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to ICAN comes at a time when the pros and antis have rarely been more polarised or the choices more difficult. When the Nobel ICAN award first made news in October, Turnbull’s office made a <a href="http://www.theage.com/victoria/nobel-peace-prize-winners-thought-it-was-a-hoax">statement</a> acknowledging the campaign group’s commitment. </p>
<p>But it concluded: “So long as the threat of nuclear attack exists, US extended deterrence will serve Australia’s fundamental national security interests.” With a rogue nuclear power nearby, in other words, this is no time for contradictory policies from Australia. It raises difficult questions about where the country goes from here.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/88973/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sue Rabbitt Roff does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Canberra’s attitude to nuclear weapons has always been riddled with contradictions. Homegrown nuclear campaigners winning the Nobel prize have put the cat among the pigeons.
Sue Rabbitt Roff, Researcher, Social History/Tutor in Medical Education, University of Dundee
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/87154
2017-11-30T18:07:28Z
2017-11-30T18:07:28Z
Atomic age began 75 years ago with the first controlled nuclear chain reaction
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197029/original/file-20171129-12027-8o9l1v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=67%2C323%2C2806%2C1980&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">For the first time, human beings harnessed the power of atomic fission.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atomic_Man_-_panoramio.jpg">Keith Ruffles</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Over Christmas vacation in 1938, physicists <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/lise-meitner">Lise Meitner</a> and <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/otto-frisch">Otto Frisch</a> received puzzling scientific news in a private letter from nuclear chemist <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1944/">Otto Hahn</a>. When bombarding uranium with neutrons, Hahn had made some surprising observations that went against everything known at the time about the dense cores of atoms – their nuclei. </p>
<p>Meitner and Frisch were able to provide an explanation for what he saw that would revolutionize the field of nuclear physics: A uranium nucleus could split in half – or fission, as they called it – producing two new nuclei, called fission fragments. More importantly, this fission process releases huge amounts of energy. This finding at the dawn of World War II was the start of a scientific and military race to understand and use this new atomic source of power.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197022/original/file-20171129-12040-1t8vjvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197022/original/file-20171129-12040-1t8vjvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197022/original/file-20171129-12040-1t8vjvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197022/original/file-20171129-12040-1t8vjvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197022/original/file-20171129-12040-1t8vjvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=458&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197022/original/file-20171129-12040-1t8vjvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=576&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197022/original/file-20171129-12040-1t8vjvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=576&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197022/original/file-20171129-12040-1t8vjvu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=576&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Leo Szilard lectures on the fission process.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/argonne/9623642054">Argonne National Laboratory</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/143239a0">release of these findings</a> to the academic community immediately inspired many nuclear scientists to investigate the nuclear fission process further. Physicist <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/leo-szilard">Leo Szilard</a> made an important realization: if fission emits neutrons, and neutrons can induce fission, then neutrons from the fission of one nucleus could cause the fission of another nucleus. It could all cascade in a self-sustained “chain” process.</p>
<p>Thus began the quest to experimentally prove that a nuclear chain reaction was possible – and 75 years ago, researchers at the University of Chicago succeeded, opening the door to what would become the nuclear era.</p>
<h2>Harnessing fission</h2>
<p>As part of the <a href="https://www.energy.gov/management/office-management/operational-management/history/manhattan-project">Manhattan Project</a> effort to build an atomic bomb during World War II, Szilard worked together with <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1938/">physicist Enrico Fermi</a> and other colleagues at the University of Chicago to create the world’s first experimental nuclear reactor.</p>
<p>For a sustained, controlled chain reaction, each fission must induce just one additional fission. Any more, and there’d be an explosion. Any fewer and the reaction would peter out.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197023/original/file-20171129-12032-3odmpf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197023/original/file-20171129-12032-3odmpf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197023/original/file-20171129-12032-3odmpf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=776&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197023/original/file-20171129-12032-3odmpf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=776&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197023/original/file-20171129-12032-3odmpf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=776&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197023/original/file-20171129-12032-3odmpf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=976&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197023/original/file-20171129-12032-3odmpf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=976&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197023/original/file-20171129-12032-3odmpf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=976&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi led the project.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/argonne/5039457612">Argonne National Laboratory</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In earlier studies, Fermi had found that uranium nuclei would absorb neutrons more easily if the neutrons were moving relatively slowly. But neutrons emitted from the fission of uranium are fast. So for the Chicago experiment, the physicists used graphite to slow down the emitted neutrons, via multiple scattering processes. The idea was to increase the neutrons’ chances of being absorbed by another uranium nucleus.</p>
<p>To make sure they could safely control the chain reaction, the team rigged together what they called “control rods.” These were simply sheets of the element cadmium, an excellent neutron absorber. The physicists interspersed control rods through the uranium-graphite pile. At every step of the process Fermi calculated the expected neutron emission, and slowly removed a control rod to confirm his expectations. As a safety mechanism, the cadmium control rods could quickly be inserted if something started going wrong, to shut down the chain reaction.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chicago Pile 1, erected in 1942 in the stands of an athletic field at the University of Chicago.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/argonne/12371772445">Argonne National Laboratory</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>They called this <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1">20x6x25-foot setup</a> <a href="https://www.uchicago.edu/features/how_the_first_chain_reaction_changed_science/">Chicago Pile Number One</a>, or CP-1 for short – and it was here they obtained world’s the first controlled nuclear chain reaction on December 2, 1942. A single random neutron was enough to start the chain reaction process once the physicists assembled CP-1. The first neutron would induce fission on a uranium nucleus, emitting a set of new neutrons. These secondary neutrons hit carbon nuclei in the graphite and slowed down. Then they’d run into other uranium nuclei and induce a second round of fission reactions, emit even more neutrons, and on and on. The cadmium control rods made sure the process wouldn’t continue indefinitely, because Fermi and his team could choose exactly how and where to insert them to control the chain reaction.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197021/original/file-20171129-12035-4shqnh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197021/original/file-20171129-12035-4shqnh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197021/original/file-20171129-12035-4shqnh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=534&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197021/original/file-20171129-12035-4shqnh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=534&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197021/original/file-20171129-12035-4shqnh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=534&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197021/original/file-20171129-12035-4shqnh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=671&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197021/original/file-20171129-12035-4shqnh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=671&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197021/original/file-20171129-12035-4shqnh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=671&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A nuclear chain reaction. Green arrows show the split of a uranium nucleus in two fission fragments, emitting new neutrons. Some of these neutrons can induce new fission reactions (black arrows). Some of the neutrons may be lost in other processes (blue arrows). Red arrows show the delayed neutrons that come later from the radioactive fission fragments and that can induce new fission reactions.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nuclear_fission_chain_reaction.svg">MikeRun modified by Erin O’Donnell, MSU</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Controlling the chain reaction was extremely important: If the balance between produced and absorbed neutrons was not exactly right, then the chain reactions either would not proceed at all, or in the other much more dangerous extreme, the chain reactions would multiply rapidly with the release of enormous amounts of energy.</p>
<p>Sometimes, a few seconds after the fission occurs in a nuclear chain reaction, additional neutrons are released. Fission fragments are typically radioactive, and can emit different types of radiation, among them neutrons. Right away, Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1963/wigner-facts.html">Eugene Wigner</a> and others recognized the importance of these so-called “delayed neutrons” in controlling the chain reaction.</p>
<p>If they weren’t taken into account, these additional neutrons would induce more fission reactions than anticipated. As a result, the nuclear chain reaction in their Chicago experiment could have spiraled out of control, with potentially devastating results. More importantly, however, this time delay between the fission and the release of more neutrons allows some time for human beings to react and make adjustments, controlling the power of the chain reaction so it doesn’t proceed too fast.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197198/original/file-20171130-30931-1ebeuxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197198/original/file-20171130-30931-1ebeuxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197198/original/file-20171130-30931-1ebeuxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197198/original/file-20171130-30931-1ebeuxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197198/original/file-20171130-30931-1ebeuxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197198/original/file-20171130-30931-1ebeuxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197198/original/file-20171130-30931-1ebeuxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197198/original/file-20171130-30931-1ebeuxu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Nuclear power plants operate in 30 countries today.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Plant-Vogtle/05d857a8e2c640adacf01d8e0dcf77ca/1/0">AP Photo/John Bazemore</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The events of December 2, 1942 marked a huge milestone. Figuring out how to create and control the nuclear chain reaction was the foundation for the 448 nuclear reactors producing energy worldwide today. At present, 30 countries include nuclear reactors in their power portfolio. Within these countries, <a href="https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=US">nuclear energy contributes on average 24 percent</a> of their total electrical power, ranging as high as <a href="https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=FR">72 percent in France</a>.</p>
<p>CP-1’s success was also essential for the continuation of the Manhattan Project and the creation of the <a href="https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/bombings-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-1945">two atomic bombs used during World War II</a>.</p>
<h2>Physicists’ remaining questions</h2>
<p>The quest to understand delayed neutron emission and nuclear fission continues in modern nuclear physics laboratories. The race today is not for building atomic bombs or even nuclear reactors; it’s for understanding of basic properties of nuclei through close collaboration between experiment and theory. </p>
<p>Researchers have observed fission experimentally only for a small number of <a href="http://edtech2.boisestate.edu/lindabennett1/502/atoms_isotopes.html">isotopes</a> – the various versions of an element based on how many neutrons each has – and the details of this complex process are not yet well-understood. State-of-the-art theoretical models try to explain the observed fission properties, like how much energy is released, the number of neutrons emitted and the masses of the fission fragments.</p>
<p>Delayed neutron emission happens only for nuclei that are not naturally occurring, and these nuclei live for only a short amount of time. While experiments have revealed some of the nuclei that emit delayed neutrons, we are not yet able to reliably predict which isotopes should have this property. We also don’t know exact probabilities for delayed neutron emission or the amount of energy released – properties that are very important for understanding the details of energy production in nuclear reactors.</p>
<p>In addition, researchers are trying to <a href="https://science.energy.gov/ascr/highlights/2015/ascr-2015-08-a/">predict new nuclei where nuclear fission might be possible</a>. They’re building new experiments and powerful new facilities which will provide access to nuclei that have never before been studied, in an attempt to measure all these properties directly. Together, the new experimental and theoretical studies will give us a much better understanding of nuclear fission, which can help improve the performance and safety of nuclear reactors.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197077/original/file-20171130-12069-1jxmxhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197077/original/file-20171130-12069-1jxmxhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197077/original/file-20171130-12069-1jxmxhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197077/original/file-20171130-12069-1jxmxhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197077/original/file-20171130-12069-1jxmxhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197077/original/file-20171130-12069-1jxmxhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197077/original/file-20171130-12069-1jxmxhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/197077/original/file-20171130-12069-1jxmxhk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Artist’s rendition of two merging neutron stars, another situation where fission occurs.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/12740">NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Both fission and delayed neutron emission are processes that also happen within stars. The <a href="https://theconversation.com/cosmic-alchemy-colliding-neutron-stars-show-us-how-the-universe-creates-gold-86104">creation of heavy elements, like silver and gold</a>, in particular can depend on the fission and delayed neutron emission properties of exotic nuclei. Fission breaks the heaviest elements and replaces them with lighter ones (fission fragments), completely changing the element composition of a star. Delayed neutron emission adds more neutrons to the stellar environment, that can then induce new nuclear reactions. For example, nuclear properties played a vital role in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-astrophysicists-are-over-the-moon-about-observing-merging-neutron-stars-84957">neutron-star merger event</a> that was recently discovered by <a href="https://theconversation.com/ligo-announcement-vaults-astronomy-out-of-its-silent-movie-era-into-the-talkies-85727">gravitational-wave and electromagnetic observatories around the world</a>.</p>
<p>The science has come a long way since Szilard’s vision and Fermi’s proof of a controlled nuclear chain reaction. At the same time, new questions have emerged, and there’s still a lot to learn about the basic nuclear properties that drive the chain reaction and its impact on energy production here on Earth and elsewhere in our universe.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GDUncuEErzQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">How the Atomic Age began at UChicago.</span></figcaption>
</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87154/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Artemis Spyrou receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Wolfgang Mittig receives funding from NSF.</span></em></p>
By figuring out fission, physicists were able to split uranium atoms and release massive amounts of energy. This Manhattan Project work paved the way both for atomic bombs and nuclear power reactors.
Artemis Spyrou, Associate Professor of Nuclear Astrophysics, Michigan State University
Wolfgang Mittig, Professor of Physics, Michigan State University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/83387
2017-09-06T12:10:19Z
2017-09-06T12:10:19Z
Beware the cult of ‘tech fixing’ – it’s why America is eyeing the nuclear button
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184906/original/file-20170906-9862-iddu2f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'I will attack and I might like that.'</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/intercontinental-ballistic-missile-icbm-rocket-collect-688481440?src=boUUxc7YDSjMrLJgIEmDwg-1-2">Quality Stock Arts</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>With even Vladimir Putin <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/b4d37d7e-91d8-11e7-a9e6-11d2f0ebb7f0">now warning</a> of global catastrophe from the <a href="https://theconversation.com/if-trump-is-bluffing-on-north-korea-the-results-could-be-catastrophic-82340">recent tensions</a> in Korea, we are in arguably the worst period of nuclear brinkmanship since the end of the Cold War. It is partly thanks to a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/04/annihilating-north-korea-create-more-problems-than-solves-trump-us-right-nuclear-taboo">strand of thinking</a> among the American right that a nuclear attack on Pyongyang would succeed where decades of diplomacy has failed. </p>
<p>Welcome to the cult of the “technological fix”. It is the conviction that social and political problems can be side-stepped by clever engineering. The same logic finds its way into many recent initiatives. It helps explain why Donald Trump <a href="https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/us-commissions-first-prototypes-for-controversial-border-wall-a3624491.html">continues to</a> pursue a 1,000 mile wall with Mexico as the answer to America’s problem with illegal immigrants, for example. </p>
<p>Technological fixes are nothing new, of course. Controlling the flow of populations with physical obstructions lay behind the medieval <a href="http://www.history.com/topics/great-wall-of-china">Great Wall of China</a> and <a href="http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/hadrians-wall/history/">Hadrian’s Wall</a> in England in the second century. The layout of 19th century Paris was <a href="https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/avant-garde-france/second-empire/a/haussmann-the-demolisher-and-the-creation-of-modern-paris">transformed</a> with broad avenues to prevent mobs from barricading the streets. In the 1880s, streetcar manufacturers experimented with automatic doors to make joyriding impossible.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184907/original/file-20170906-9202-ncxfzg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184907/original/file-20170906-9202-ncxfzg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184907/original/file-20170906-9202-ncxfzg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184907/original/file-20170906-9202-ncxfzg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184907/original/file-20170906-9202-ncxfzg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184907/original/file-20170906-9202-ncxfzg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184907/original/file-20170906-9202-ncxfzg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184907/original/file-20170906-9202-ncxfzg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Great Wall of China.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ISSArt/iss_art2.php">NASA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the 20th century, technological fixes were packaged and given the name by one tireless promoter, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/21/obituaries/21weinberg.html?mcubz=0">Alvin M Weinberg</a>. Weinberg was a reactor designer during the wartime <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Manhattan-Project">Manhattan Project</a>, the Allies’ bid to be first to create an atomic bomb. He went on to become director of a <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=s-qyvnSvSpUC&pg=PA251&lpg=PA251&dq=sean+johnston+weinberg&source=bl&ots=bdw5tSlsCI&sig=pgOV_Ubr9qSmNJJSRoKECO9x5kU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi36cnYzI7WAhVFLVAKHafgArAQ6AEISDAJ#v=onepage&q&f=false">national laboratory</a> exploring applications of nuclear energy. </p>
<h2>Science supreme</h2>
<p>Imagining a world transformed by nuclear power, Weinberg became convinced that technological innovation was the best way of dealing with any social issue. Well placed to gain the ear of engineering peers and American policymakers, he <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/157/3792/1026">invented</a> a durable term for this confident new environment: Big Science.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184909/original/file-20170906-9823-11d36ks.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184909/original/file-20170906-9823-11d36ks.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184909/original/file-20170906-9823-11d36ks.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=711&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184909/original/file-20170906-9823-11d36ks.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=711&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184909/original/file-20170906-9823-11d36ks.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=711&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184909/original/file-20170906-9823-11d36ks.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184909/original/file-20170906-9823-11d36ks.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184909/original/file-20170906-9823-11d36ks.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=894&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Weinberg.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Alvin_Weinberg.jpg#/media/File:Alvin_Weinberg.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For Weinberg, conventional problem solving through education, law enforcement and moral guidance was slow and ineffective. Convert such issues into technological problems to be solved by engineers, he argued. The Hiroshima bomb had dodged the need for political negotiation, he claimed, stabilising international relations in the process.</p>
<p>In the wall-building stakes, Weinberg was Trump’s fellow traveller. He petitioned the <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/1600/presidents/lyndonbjohnson">Johnson administration</a> to build a wall between North and South Vietnam, though privately admitted shortly after that his scheme was “very amateurish”. He also <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=y5WjYgMc7eEC&pg=PA150&lpg=PA150&dq=weinberg+bresee&source=bl&ots=Ck9DuOLjW9&sig=vB9BcEYloFWnlsVwjrhRiy0715c&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi-o8uNzo7WAhUIJ1AKHRtICyYQ6AEIJjAA#v=onepage&q=weinberg%20bresee&f=false">promoted</a> the idea of funding air conditioners in slum districts, arguing they would literally cool down tensions during the hot summer months to avoid urban riots. </p>
<p>This too was left on the drawing board, but other <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=WAgAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA4&lpg=PA4&dq=weinberg+%22social+engineering%22&source=bl&ots=M1KDpNfg6f&sig=bmmDJYRrAhJ6g_wiwLC5AFpMdDU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwju9Oizyo7WAhUCJ1AKHbQ3AaE4ChDoAQgsMAE#v=onepage&q=weinberg%20%22social%20engineering%22&f=false">less provocative</a> ideas gained traction. He shared road safety campaigner Ralph Nader’s observation that car seatbelts were more effective than traffic laws or driver education for reducing fatalities. He <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=SbNAfWWdNQsC&pg=PA292&lpg=PA292&dq=air-conditioners+weinberg&source=bl&ots=HteFUeXN0H&sig=a0qD4CYwBfaPVv4_tHTwEiqLMNI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiplOWMz47WAhXRL1AKHTTWB70Q6AEIOzAE#v=onepage&q=air-conditioners%20weinberg&f=false">claimed</a> that intra-uterine contraceptive devices like the coil meant birth control was no longer “a desperately complicated social problem”. He pushed cigarette filters as an easier way to reduce the harms of smoking than persuading users to quit. </p>
<h2>The cult of the tech fix</h2>
<p>Weinberg’s faith in engineers is even more widespread today. His championing of the likes of cigarette filters anticipated the way we value technological fixes for improving individuals – particularly their health and well-being. </p>
<p>To address our cultural preoccupation with weight control, for example, why have diet plans or exercise regimes when there are low-calorie sugar substitutes, over-the-counter appetite suppressants, gastric bands and liposuction? And if you eat healthily and exercise anyway, don’t worry: there are wearable technologies to monitor, cajole and regiment us further. </p>
<p>When Apple <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szrsfeyLzyg">came up with</a> “there’s an app for that” to promote software-based tech fixes, it epitomised Silicon Valley’s reinvention of Weinberg dogma as <a href="http://www.techrepublic.com/article/silicon-valleys-solutionism-issues-appear-to-be-scaling/">solutionism</a>. Where Weinberg promoted societal benefits, now it had become about personal empowerment for the “me” generation. </p>
<p>The message is that if you’re deficient in willpower, attention and consistency, it’s okay – a consumer engineering fix is only a few clicks away. And the future promises to be still brighter. Say hello to <a href="https://theconversation.com/genome-editing-poses-ethical-problems-that-we-cannot-ignore-39466">genetic engineering</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-science-drugs-and-tech-pushing-our-brains-to-new-limits-65281">nootropics</a> and <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/elon-musk-neuralink-brain-computer-startup-a7916891.html">implantable microchips</a>. </p>
<p>Weinberg’s agenda also endures at the policy level. To address terrorism, we have locks on cockpit doors, metal detectors, surveillance monitoring, bomb-sniffing devices and body scanners at airports. We seem to prefer such responses to anything so socio-political as negotiation or education. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184913/original/file-20170906-9202-1fjvnhx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184913/original/file-20170906-9202-1fjvnhx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184913/original/file-20170906-9202-1fjvnhx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184913/original/file-20170906-9202-1fjvnhx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184913/original/file-20170906-9202-1fjvnhx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184913/original/file-20170906-9202-1fjvnhx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184913/original/file-20170906-9202-1fjvnhx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184913/original/file-20170906-9202-1fjvnhx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Step this way, sir.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/passenger-passing-through-security-check-airport-322320815?src=6xjXqpERpY3MVbQn21mNGQ-1-28">Monkey Business Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Environmental concerns are another favourite. <a href="https://theconversation.com/five-reasons-why-you-might-be-driving-electric-sooner-than-you-think-71896">Electric motors</a> promise more cars on the road with less air pollution. Oil-digesting microbes <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-microbes-helped-clean-bp-s-oil-spill/">promise to</a> clean up oil spills. Plastic packaging <a href="http://www.tikp.co.uk/knowledge/material-functionality/uv-resistance/the-effects-of-ultraviolet-light-on-polymeric-materials/">that degrades in sunlight</a> could make litter disappear without clean-up campaigns. </p>
<p>Geo-engineering could even deal with climate change overall – limiting <a href="http://uk.businessinsider.com/geoengineering-technology-could-cool-the-planet-2017-7">temperature rise</a>, <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/geo-engineering-technology-climate-change-environment-climeworks-carbon-dioxide-chemicals-dimming-a7860356.html">carbon dioxide levels</a> or both. Life can continue as usual, we are told again and again. </p>
<h2>Downsides</h2>
<p>For all this confidence and hubris, we need to pay more heed to the drawbacks. Critics have long argued that technological fixes overlook deeper problems. Weinberg himself conceded they can look like “band-aids”, but believed they were still worthwhile while a better solution was being sought. </p>
<p>Yet this risks settling for the band-aid. We might become so pleased with electric cars that we stop worrying about the continued proliferation of roads, sedentary lifestyles and social segregation. If Trump’s wall reduces illegal immigration, progressive Americans might lose interest in helping Mexico to become prosperous. </p>
<p>An even deeper concern is with placing problem solving in the hands of narrowly trained technical experts. Take the coil, for example: unlike condoms or the pill, where users make a daily choice, intra-uterine devices are a one-off insertion under a doctor’s authority. The flip-side of relying on engineering cures may be a passive and powerless public. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184915/original/file-20170906-9871-1d1d9gu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184915/original/file-20170906-9871-1d1d9gu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184915/original/file-20170906-9871-1d1d9gu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184915/original/file-20170906-9871-1d1d9gu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184915/original/file-20170906-9871-1d1d9gu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184915/original/file-20170906-9871-1d1d9gu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184915/original/file-20170906-9871-1d1d9gu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184915/original/file-20170906-9871-1d1d9gu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">That 2016 feeling.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Donald_Trump_supporters_in_Maryland_(29638831625).jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Weinberg never used the term “technocracy”, yet he <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-94-009-2207-5_10">did acknowledge</a> that some technological solutions were incompatible with liberal democracy. Ironically, of course, it is exactly such frustrations that helped usher the current American president into office. </p>
<p>None of this is to say technological fixes are always wrong; more that they can be overly seductive. We need to recognise when they seem too good to be true, and consider them cautiously. That way we can steal back some of that democratic thunder before it’s too late – starting, one would hope, by avoiding nuclear war in Korea.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83387/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sean Johnston has received funding for this research from the British Academy grant number SG132088</span></em></p>
What do intercontinental missiles and Apple’s app store have in common? Alvin M Weinberg.
Sean F. Johnston, Professor of Science, Technology and Society, University of Glasgow
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.