The hydrogen bomb was to be vastly more powerful
than the atomic bomb. The idea was to add about 12 kilograms of liquid heavy
hydrogen to the ordinary fission bomb. The fission bomb would explode creating
extremely high temperatures enabling the hydrogen to undergo a fusion reaction
resulting in a heavier element and a burst of energy -- a force 500 times
greater than was released by the first fission bomb. It was Teller who
master-minded this nuclear fusion bomb. There was a fear among some
scientists that these powerful bombs could ignite the nitrogen in the
atmosphere or the hydrogen in the oceans causing a chain reaction to spread
wildly out of control destroying the entire planet.97 This
evidently did not happen, but the long term environmental consequences of this
nuclear weapons madness is by no means clear. When witnessing the disruption
of ocean temperatures, weather patterns and nature's seasonal cycles, one
cannot help but wonder if there are causes beyond the official explanations
for these calamitous changes.
Heaven-Words has ten chapters, seven of which are divided into sub-chapters by repeating the chapter number either once or twice. There is an out-standing chapter numbered 1984. As the themes of this book develop, they become more complex and inter-woven with each other. The links on this page should help you follow those ideas most central to your own research. You will find 22 links and excerpts for all these chapters by clicking on the Heaven-Words homepage link below.
If you wish to understand this book, you should see it whole � and the place to start is the homepage: Heaven-Words � copyright 2002 WEBb1910473801 (All rights reserved by the author)
11 Cold War origins of totalitarianism in North America and Western Europe
3 Quantum theory made easy Part I: an introduction to the new physics
33 Quantum relativistic stereogram vision: Quantum theory made easy Part II
333 M-theory of Witten and Greene - quantum theory made easy part III
4 Creators of the atomic bomb: debasing nuclear power into a totalitarian order in the new world
55 Breakdown of madness dawns on genius of collective consciousness
88 The double edge rap of black and white words
888 Totalitarian science of quantum wholeness -- David Bohm: Krishnamurti or Cusa
99 In Terror of a Savage Nation - Orwellian nightmare dawns on the West
1984 Waking up to a Savage nightmare in an Orwellian Nation: Michael Savage and Alex Jones compared
999 Collective genius in the common man: Revelation of a savage spirit
10 Spiritual beauty of the fighting Irish - A quest for courage
100 Collective ends of a quantum relativistic beginning: Quantum theory made easy
Quantum theory made easy - Origin of nuclear weapons - 22
Morality, truth, justice and integrity are all merely frills that embroider the rock solid foundation of any society: power. In a book titled Condition of Post modernity, Lyotard takes a harsh look at the real world we live in, where the validity of a scientific theory is determined by its funding agency. Because of the high cost of scientific equipment, only that research is carried out which is supported by a funding agency. " 'In the discourse of today's financial backers of research, he wrote, 'the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power'."56 Since 1945, nuclear weapons have been the ultimate appeal to authority. For this reason, it is essential that we learn something of how these weapons of tyranny came to be.
The best known scientist of the twentieth century was Albert Einstein. He played a political as well as a scientific role in the development of the first atom bomb. But he was more an associate professor of this horrendous technology gone mad, and not the primary intelligence behind the bomb. In his prize winning classic The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes traces its origin to a close friend and prot�g� of Einstein's: Leo Szilard. He was inventive, aggressive and far less charming than Einstein. Szilard's dream was to materialize in a surreal world of secrecy code named: "Manhattan". The bomb was to be built at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and tested in the desert of the American southwest in a valley between the Rio Grande and the Sierra Oscura mountains. The valley was called Jornada del Muerto. This event took place July 16, 1945 under its own code-name: Trinity. It was necessary to conceal funding for this top secret project from virtually all Americans, so it was buried inconspicuously in the largest budget allocated by congress for domestic purposes, that of the district of Manhattan.
But who was this mysterious beneficiary of humanity who could imagine this ultimate weapon of mass destruction? We will gradually get to know him, but for now let us just say he was an ambitious student who knew how to make the right connections. His friend from Hungary, Eugene Wigner, noted Szilard's rapid acceptance by Einstein while studying at the University of Berlin. He quickly made himself known to both Einstein and Max Plank, and convinced both of them to take him under their tutelage.57 It was Einstein who was influential in seeing that Szilard's Ph.D. thesis was accepted. Einstein and Szilard were both inventors; they were also partners and shared credits for many patents.58
In 1934, Szilard was getting involved in efforts to release energy from the nucleus of the atom.59 This was the same year Joliot-Curies stated in a Nobel prize speech that the transmutation of elements could lead to explosive consequences, and the release of enormous quantities of energy.60 He understood that by bombarding a nuclei with neutrons, it was possible to produce radio-active substances.61 Fermi knew that by exposing uranium to a stream of neutron bullets that first isotope uranium239 would be created, and then a new element, with atomic number 93, would form which never existed in nature.62 Bombardment by neutrons caused the uranium atom to split into two lighter elements which themselves spontaneously emitted neutrons. The implications of this phenomenon, called chain reaction, were not missed by Szilard.63 Bombarding a small quantity of pure U235 isotope with neutrons would initiate a chain reaction resulting in an atomic explosion.64 Enrico Fermi, at the University of Chicago, succeeded in establishing the first nuclear chain reaction on December 2, 1942.65 To give a sense of how important Szilard actually was, consider that he held a joint patent with Fermi for the invention of the nuclear reactor. You don't get too much more important than that in the world of nuclear physics.66
When Szilard told Einstein about his own research into uranium chain reactions, he was surprised to learn that Einstein was not aware of chain reactions. He quickly understood the implications when Szilard explained the nuclear bomb to him. Einstein was willing to allow his colleagues to utilize his prestige to simplify the process of informing and persuading government authorities in America and England to engage in constructing a nuclear weapon. Above all, scientists do not like to appear foolish, but Einstein held a special status so he could lend his name to a risky bomb project without fear of endangering his reputation.67 Alexander Sachs was an economist who was known to Einstein and Szilard; he also had the ear of President Roosevelt. It was Sachs who delivered the letter from Einstein and Szilard to Roosevelt. He explained the meaning of the atom bomb in non-scientific terms, and sold the president on this project of constructing the first nuclear weapon.68 My point is that the man most associated with originating the idea of the atom bomb was Einstein's student, colleague and close friend, and together these two new-comers to America petitioned the president of the United States to authorize the Manhattan project. The concept of nuclear fission was critical to the creation of the bomb, and this idea was best understood by Einstein's famous formula: E=mc2.
Nuclear fission occurs when an unstable uranium nucleus, which is like a liquid drop, is hit by a neutron; the nucleus stretches into the shape of a dumb bell and then splits into two separate nuclei -- but not of uranium, but barium and krypton in some cases. Now uranium is heavier than barium and krypton.69 It is Einstein's relativity formula E=mc2 that describes this process of splitting the atom. The central phenomenon of nuclear fission is that matter is converted into energy -- the explosive energy of the atom bomb! "If the large uranium nucleus split into two smaller nuclei, the smaller nuclei would weigh less in total than their common parent. How much less? That was a calculation she could easily work: about one-fifth the mass of a proton less. Process one-fifth of the mass of a proton through E=mc2. 'One fifth of a proton mass, ' Frisch exclaims, 'was just equivalent to 200 MeV. So here was the source for that energy; it all fitted! ' "70 Think of how heavy lead is. Recall the history of alchemy and efforts to transform lead into gold. Something not so unlike this occurs in nuclear fission. However, it is not the resulting matter that is most important in this transformation process, but the release of atomic energy!
Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch were refugees living in Scandinavia, and had learned of the transformation of uranium into lighter substances, particularly barium, from the recent experimental results of her former German colleagues Hahn and Strassmann. Otto Hahn, who shared his discovery of nuclear fission with Lise Meitner,71 believed that it would be dangerous for the world as a whole if Hitler should have sole access to nuclear weapons.72 The person Meitner and Frisch turned to with this vital information from Germany was the most prominent physicist in Europe: Neils Bohr.73 In 1932, the Danish Academy awarded Bohr and his family the right, for life, to live in the Danish House of Honor, and this elevated Bohr to a stature in society almost rivaling that of the king himself.74 Frisch visited Bohr to inform him of these extraordinary developments, and disclosed how he and Lise Meitner interpreted the revolutionary discovery made by the Germans Hahn and Strassman. It took Bohr but an instant to recognize the importance of what he was being told. He was so struck by the implications of this revelation that he graciously dismissed his visitor after a meeting of only a few minutes. Bohr clearly had urgent matters on his mind.75 The missing piece to the atomic puzzle had been found by the Germans, but perhaps they did not yet realize what they had witnessed with their own eyes: nuclear fission. His mission was to pass this vital insight to those who would not fail to appreciate its immense value. Bohr now understood the long sought secret of the atom bomb, and this, combined with his social stature and political influence made him the most powerful man on Earth. He would waste no time in taking full advantage of a discovery less prudent men had squandered.
According to official history, "Bohr's contributions to twentieth-century physics would rank second only to Einstein's. He would become a scientist-statesman of unmatched foresight."76 But that was not necessarily the way the heavy hitters in the game of geopolitical nuclear power saw things. Einstein had established himself at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. His reputation guaranteed him a fine, spacious office. However, when his long time rival Neils Bohr came on the scene with his victorious solution to the problem of nuclear fission, Einstein relocated to a secretary's office nearby.77 What I mean to suggest here is that Bohr was second to no one in the academic or political world, and both he and Einstein knew it. The little "Swiss watchmaker's" influence was fading, and the man calling the shots in the most important research ever engaged in the history of physics was Neils Bohr. This is not to say that Bohr single handedly masterminded the bomb, or that he had not made his share of miscalculations, but only that he was the one person to whom both scientists like Oppenheimer and political leaders around the world would turn for guidance in both making the bomb and deciding to deploy it. Most incredibly, not only did the bomb makers at Los Alamos seek his counsel, but so also did those from Berlin!
In 1941 Heisenberg understood the procedure for converting uranium into a form suitable to sustain a nuclear chain reaction. German scientists, including Werner Heisenberg, von Weizsacker and Houtermans, saw few obstacles preventing them from developing an atomic bomb. Heisenberg was very troubled about creating such a weapon, and wished to exchange thoughts on this matter that so tormented him with his old friend Neils Bohr. Such a meeting with a prominent ally of Germany's enemy was dangerous for Heisenberg and suspicious from Bohr's perspective. Heisenberg evidently wished to inform Bohr that Germany would not develop an atom bomb in the hope that Bohr might some day act as a restraining force in the face of those who would use such a weapon against Germany. Heisenberg and Bohr could not speak openly about bomb research and this led to a misunderstanding between the two men. Heisenberg gave Bohr a sketch of a reactor he planed to build. Bohr was unable to determine if Heisenberg was sincere or operating on a mission of dis-information with nazi approval. Whatever Heisenberg's purpose may have been, Bohr could not trust him. He could hear only one message from Heisenberg: the Germans knew a great deal about the atomic bomb.78 Even with Bohr's public campaign for international openness in the exchange of scientific information, it is hard to imagine that Heisenberg could expect an outspoken adversary of Nazi Germany to share highly sensitive information concerning the atom bomb with a nuclear scientist of the Third Reich, however close their friendship might once have been. Heisenberg's drawing of a nuclear reactor indicated to those on the Manhattan Project that Heisenberg did not yet have an accurate understanding of how such a reactor must be designed. Some dismissed his drawing as mere dis-information.79 Rhodes gives the impression that Heisenberg sought to discourage the German leadership from focusing full energy on the bomb. Hitler was known to oppose research that could lead to a nuclear accident in the heart of Germany.80
While the Germans and Japanese understood the possibilities of nuclear power, they did not realize that the Manhattan team was working with a resolve and efficiency that would surprise even Neils Bohr. When visiting Los Alamos to monitor the development of the atom bomb, Bohr was extremely pleased that the vast industrial capacity of America had been marshaled to solve the most difficult step in constructing the bomb: separating U235 from U238. 81 Both Bohr and the Japanese over-estimated the difficulty of this uranium separation process.82 With the removal of this obstacle, the bomb had ceased to be a possibility and became an inevitability. As so often happens, success finds many possessive parents. The inventors of the bomb were not exactly from the heartland of America, and they found themselves at odds with their sponsor: the United States Government. As U.S. government officials saw it, the bomb was theirs and they were not willing to share this windfall of power with some international alliance simply because the men who created it wanted it that way.83 We will return to a very detailed discussion of these political scientists and their ambitions after learning something of the new physics. For now, I would simply like to introduce them as nuclear physicists, and continue this brief account of how nuclear weapons came to be.
General Groves was the military supervisor of the Manhattan Project. The method of compartmentalization was seen as critical to maintaining security in the bomb making process. Only the leading scientists, such as Oppenheimer and Teller, would hold a complete understanding of how the bomb was to be constructed. The others would be informed about the top-secret Manhattan Project only on a need to know basis. Oppenheimer was director of the Manhattan Project and in an exceedingly sensitive position with respect to the national security of the United States. This security conscious general had fought bullishly to get Oppenheimer in the director's position. General Groves did not have a free hand to operate the Manhattan Project; he was accountable to Army counter-intelligence, "and that organization adamantly refused to clear someone whose former fianc�e, wife, brother and sister-in-law had all been members of the Communist Party once and perhaps, gone underground, still were. The general wanted Oppenheimer anyway."84
This battle of loyalty was to explode after the war in what came to be known as the McCarthy hearings, and was to be fought not only over Oppenheimer, but many other pro-communist activists associated with the bomb. There had been strict government censorship surrounding the Manhattan Project, but Bohr, Szilard and others were making serious efforts to share the secret of the bomb with the Soviet Union. The U.S.S.R. started work on the atom bomb in 1939. The Soviets knew the Americans were working on a nuclear bomb because the names of leading physicists, chemists, mathematicians and metallurgists vanished from the major scientific journals.85 In 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the United States for having passed secrets concerning the bomb to the Soviet Union during the war. Wigner, Szilard, Wheeler, and Teller had tried to persuade Bohr to keep their nuclear fission research secret so that they would not assist the nazis in developing the bomb, and of course Bohr had no intentions of assisting Germany in that deadly matter. But allies such as the Soviet Union were a different case all together. This was not State Department policy, this was the political vision of Neils Bohr, a man very close to the bomb. He saw physics as an international activity that could not flourish in secrecy. The free exchange of ideas in the world wide scientific community was as essential to physics as free speech is to an open society.86 He and his fellow bomb makers had certainly benefited from the flow of information coming from Germany. But he had something more in mind. He was a leading advocate of internationalism. He had the bright idea that the terror of a maddening nuclear standoff between nations offered the hope that internationalism might emerge as the only sane alternative to the ancient passions of national rivalries.87 It is precisely this kind of reasoning which was suggested regarding Wallerstein's interpretation of the cold war. This was the meaning of complementarity, and Bohr was its primary advocate. After the discussion of the new physics that we are about to begin, we will return to other issues involving the bomb, including the internationalist connections of major bomb makers, such as Oppenheimer, Bohr and Szilard.
Germany surrendered just months before the bomb was ready for testing, not merely in the New Mexico desert, but in the theatre of world power -- and there would indeed need to be a cast of hundreds of thousands of unwilling players. A real concern of the U.S. Air Force was that if the bomb makers did not complete their tests on schedule, there would be no Japanese cities remaining on which they could demonstrate their spanking new bomb.88 Eisenhower did not volunteer an opinion when he was told that the military planned to drop the atom bomb on Japan. His fight had been in Europe and not in Asia so he felt it was not his place to offer advice. However, when pressed to respond, Eisenhower said he opposed using it for two reasons. In the first place, he thought it obvious that the Japanese were already trying to surrender and could be defeated by continued use of conventional bombs. Eisenhower's second objection was simply that he did not wish to see his country be the first to use such a horrendous weapon, particularly when it was not necessary.89 This suggests to me that perhaps, in the European arena where Eisenhower had a voice in decision making, he would have rejected using the atom bomb, although the firebombing of women and children in Dresden and elsewhere in Germany seemed morally acceptable to him. As we shall later see, Fermi, Oppenheimer, and Teller had worked out their own nuclear plans for attacking Germany.
The United States and Great Britain both deliberately bombed civilians, although neither would publicly admit it. They used the same kind of dehumanizing terms as the Germans did to conceal their actions from public opinion back home. In this case, Churchill spoke of "de-housing" the Germans; the fact that German women and children were being killed in the process seemed inconsequential.90 Amazingly, those who win wars are never found to have committed war crimes. The efforts of these bomb makers were not going to be in vain because of the Japanese bowing out of a losing fight. There could be no surrender when a demonstration of power was so pains-takingly prepared for the whole world to witness. They weren't about to engage in foreplay for a few years and then just walk away. The American intelligence community had intercepted and translated messages from Tokyo to their Moscow embassy indicating that they were trying to engage the Soviets in arranging a Japanese surrender. The problem was that the U.S. and England were making it very difficult for the Japanese to surrender.91 Americans should reflect for a moment on the necessity of having demanded the Japanese accept unconditional surrender. Upon hearing of the devastation caused in Japan by the atom bomb, uncle Joe Stalin could not let the Japanese pleas for peace go unanswered. He immediately declared war on Japan.92 One bombing of Japan was not sufficient. It was necessary to drop a second bomb in the event the Japanese had failed to notice the horror of Hiroshima, and to suggest to them that there were many more to follow if they did not agree to an immediate unconditional surrender. Actually the Americans could be slightly more flexible on terms of surrender now that the Japanese had so graciously assisted them in accomplishing their primary goal of demonstrating both Little Boy and Fat Man.93 Those racist Japs sure were taught a lesson by our boys in Air Force blue, weren't they?
The atom bomb was not an accidental discovery, or the idea of stupid men. The sharpest scientific minds of the age are to be credited with this ungodly creation. The man who projected the body count from the bomb blasts was a genius named John Von Neumann, the prominent mathematician. He was the compressions specialist in the atom bomb project. Teller recalls that everyone's friend "Johnny" was an explosives expert.94 But we will learn later that "Johnny" was not your all American boy, at least not the kind that fought and died on the beaches of Normandy or in the jungles of Asia. There were not many Johnnys among the major league players from Manhattan; they had names like: Einstein, Szilard, Fermi, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Teller, von Neumann, Wigner, Meitner, Frisch, and Feynman.
In a section titled "Hitler: 'Psychic', Shaman, or Paranoiac?", Ehrenwald condemns Hitler for uncritical reliance on intuition, for lacking rational judgement. But he and others praise Einstein, Dirac and creative thinkers in general for their intuitive approach to the arts and sciences. Harmless mystical types, removed from the instruments of power, are to be appreciated for their psychic qualities, but these same features in the leaders of nations have invariably catastrophic results.95 This is the judgement of history, or so we are told. Long before this journey has run its course, we will discover that the intuitive genius of honored men and women of science has shaped our world in destructive ways that we today can see with something of the horror Hitler saw, as he tried to resist the assaults from this devastating tidal wave of one world socialism.
The creation and use of the atom bomb,
thus ending World War II, did not mark the end to nuclear weapons development,
only its beginning. Once tasted, power becomes addictive. Teller comments that
the atomic bomb was the primary objective at Los Alamos during the war, but
Oppenheimer and other prominent physicists believed their work at Los Alamos
would not be finished until they knew if it was possible to construct a
thermonuclear bomb.96 The
hydrogen bomb was to be vastly more powerful than the atomic bomb. The idea was
to add about 12 kilograms of liquid heavy hydrogen to the ordinary fission bomb.
The fission bomb would explode creating extremely high temperatures enabling the
hydrogen to undergo a fusion reaction resulting in a heavier element and a burst
of energy -- a force 500 times greater than was released by the first fission
bomb. It was Teller who master-minded this nuclear fusion bomb. There was
a fear among some scientists that these powerful bombs could ignite the nitrogen
in the atmosphere or the hydrogen in the oceans causing a chain reaction to
spread wildly out of control destroying the entire planet.97 This
evidently did not happen, but the long term environmental consequences of this
nuclear weapons madness is by no means clear. When witnessing the disruption of
ocean temperatures, weather patterns and nature's seasonal cycles, one cannot
help but wonder if there are causes beyond the official explanations for these
calamitous changes.
3 Quantum theory made easy Part I: an introduction to the new physics