Bombs and Scientists
Leó Szilárd, an important member of the Manhattan Project, was quite an interesting character. While he was politically active and had a tendency to be extremely blunt with such dealings, those aspects of him are not what I’d like to share. First, from the Wikipedia article (emphasis mine):
In 1960, Szilárd was diagnosed with bladder cancer. He underwent radiation therapy at New York’s Memorial Hospital using a treatment regimen that he designed himself. A second round of treatment followed in 1962; Szilárd’s cancer remained in remission thereafter.
Those were certainly the days of the super scientists, when physicists could cure their own cancer. But seriously, by “super scientists,” I refer to the likes of Szilárd and Feynman, who possessed an extraordinarily broad range of knowledge and experience. To me, they are the modern equivalents to the Renaissance man.
In response to the topic of “How bombing boomeranged” in a famous interview “President Truman Did Not Understand,” Szilárd had this:
Let me say only this much to the moral issue involved: Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?
But, again, don’t misunderstand me. The only conclusion we can draw is that governments acting in a crisis are guided by questions of expediency, and moral considerations are given very little weight, and that America is no different from any other nation in this respect.
Remember, this is coming from one of the key physicists who worked to develop the first nuclear bomb; I would think the bomb development work kept those scientists up nights and the results kept them up again years after.
Comments
Nils +1
I read a fascinating auto-biography on Feynman titled “Surely, You Must Be Joking Mr. Feynman!” It was a great book and I would also put him into the category of Renaissance Man. But the book is a good read for anyone with some spare time.