Nuclear Issues
Serious Questions
The next few issues of this newsletter will be devoted to nuclear issues, including nuclear weapons and nuclear power for electricity production.
One event stands out: On August 5, 1945, Aircraft 44-86292 was named Enola Gay after Col. Paul Tibbets’ mother. On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay, with Paul Tibbets in command, departed Tinian Island at 2:45 am bound for Hiroshima. The atomic bomb, named Little Boy, was released over Hiroshima at 8:15 local time. On August 9, 1945, the Enola Gay flew as the weather plane as another atomic bomb, this one named Fat Man, was dropped on Nagasaki. The world was never the same.
Merely a few months later, on November 16 and 17, 1945, an historic Joint Meeting of the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Sciences, a Symposium of Atomic Energy and Its Implications was held in Philadelphia. The papers presented were published in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society as Volume 90 in 1946; they were reprinted, with a foreword by John Holdren, as Volume 113, Part 2, in June of 2024. The twelve papers read in 1946 were by leading scientists who had worked on or commented on the work done at Los Alamos and other sites that produced the bomb. They all raised compelling questions.
I will first talk about the one by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant scientist who headed the scientific effort to build the atomic bomb at Los Alamos as part of the Manhattan Project. Recounting the science that took place there, he says: “It would be a pleasure to tell you a little about it….That would not be a dull story – Atomic weapons are based on things that are in the very frontier of physics – but it is not one that I can tell today. It would be too dangerous to tell that story….What has become upon us, that the insight, the knowledge, the power of physical science, to the cultivation of which, to the learning and teaching of which we are dedicated, has become too dangerous to be talked of even in these halls?”
“It is that question that faces us now, that goes to the root of what science is and what its value is…we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man…Because we are scientists, we must say an unalterable yes to these questions: it is our faith and our commitment, seldom made explicit, even more seldom challenged, that knowledge is a good in itself, knowledge and such power as must come with it.”
There is much here to ponder, and we will return to these issues – what good is science, anyway – in future issues. Please, if you have things to say – and I’m sure you do – please let us know.
All the best, Alan