Category Archives: History

Brotherhood of the Bomb

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brotherhood of the bombThe subtitle of this book by Gregg Herken is “The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller.” Another book by the author, “The Winning Weapon” (a review was posted October 1) concluded that too much was made of Soviet espionage of the Manhattan Project. “Brotherhood of the Bomb” reaches an entirely different conclusion. A footnote on page 126 states “Near the end of the war, because of Fuchs and other spies at Los Alamos, the Russians had a precise description of the component parts of Fat Man, including such engineering details as the makeup and design of the explosive lenses use to compress the plutonium core and the exact dimensions of the bomb’s polonium initiator. The device that the Soviets exploded in their first nuclear test, in August 1949, was essentially a copy of Fat Man.” “The Winning Weapon” was published in 1980 and “Brotherhood of the Bomb” in 2002. Much was learned about the extent of Soviet spying after the first book was published in 1980. For example, the Venona Project that revealed the massive extent of Soviet spying was declassified in 1995. Both books have value to someone interested in the atomic bomb and its impact on the Cold War, and the first gives a good idea of how much of the media looked at the issue of Soviet spying in 1980.

“Brotherhood of the Bomb” gives detailed insight into the scientists who became famous as the result of discovering what could be accomplished, mostly in the form of weapons, with atomic energy. Lawrence had announced in 1932 that “…heavy particles not only disintegrated readily but in the process seemed to release more energy than it took to break them apart.” He proposed a vista of cheap, reliable, and virtually limitless energy…” His “disintegration hypothesis” was greeted with skepticism verging on ridicule. Rutherford made his now famous statement that “anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of atoms was talking moonshine.” Continue reading →

Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics

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This book by Ruth Lewin Sime is a wonderful introduction to a fascinating person and a powerful example of the inequalities created by rigorous suppression of women in (hopefully) years past. The author says at six years old she must have seen a picture of Lise (pronounced Lee-seh) “in Life or The New York Times, or perhaps Aufbau, The German refugee’s newspaper…Lise Meitner was a celebrity:  the tiny woman who barely escaped the Nazis, the physicist responsible for nuclear fission, ‘the Jewish mother of the atomic bomb’—although she was a Jew by birth, not affiliation, and she had refused to work on the bomb…To me she was a hero…” Einstein referred to her as “our Marie Curie” for her physics research in Berlin.

The author was a chemistry teacher at a community college and was known as “…the woman the all-male chemistry department did not want to hire.” The author describes herself as a feminist; although it is doubtful she faced anything similar to the discrimination Lise experienced as a youngster wanting to gain an education and as a scientist. One of my favorite descriptions is about a research director (male, of course) who didn’t allow women in the laboratories because he was afraid they would set their hair on fire. Continue reading →

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

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present-at-creationThis autobiography by Dean Acheson, who was President Harry S. Truman’s trusted Secretary of State, is filled with information that would be interesting to anyone wanting to know more about the people and policies of the Truman administration. It is a very long book (over 700 pages excluding notes, references, and the index), and it is in small font. The title is derived from a quote from King of Spain Alphonso X, the Learned, 1252-1284, “Had I been present at the creation I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.” I certainly had the impression that Mr. Acheson had no lack of confidence in his ability to make wise decisions about solutions to problems or making accurate judgments about people. There were a few cases where he writes that decisions proved to be a mistake, but those were the exception. He either writes with admiration and often affection for people or with open contempt. I don’t recall anyone being described other than in the two extremes. I also don’t recall a single circumstance where he describes Harry S. Truman with anything other than admiration. I have read in other sources that the respect was mutual; Harry considered Acheson his “second in command.” The office of the Vice President was vacant until Truman and his running mate, Alben Barkley took office in 1949 after winning the election in 1948. I don’t recall Barkley being prominently mentioned.

The book follows Acheson’s State Department career chronologically from being an Assistant Secretary of State 1941-1945, Under Secretary of State 1945-1947, to his tumultuous years of Secretary of State 1947-1953.  My primary interest in reading the book was the decisions of the Truman administration in containment of the Soviet Union during the Cold War and whether Acheson and others in the State Department were, as described by critics, “in the pocket of the Soviets.” To the contrary, Acheson describes relations with the Soviets in a non-flattering manner beginning early in the book. He says the Soviet diplomats “…cultivated boorishness as a method of showing their contempt for the capitalist world, with which they wanted minimum contact…” He mentions one Soviet diplomat named Oumansky who was killed in “…a plane crash of suspicious cause…” and that “…we felt no sense of loss.” Acheson would eventually come under constant attack and suspicion during the “red scare era,” but I never found an instance in the book where he displayed anything but distrust of Stalin and the Soviets. Continue reading →

Rocky Flats Benefit Changes – Another in a String of Reductions

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This blog was started to document the truth about the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Rocky Flats Plant, which purified and fabricated plutonium and other parts for nuclear weapons at a relatively small site sixteen miles northwest of Denver. Last week, RF_Alum posted on changes to retirement benefits for these “Cold War Warriors”. This week I will explain how I lost my retirement benefits, despite twenty-two years of service at the plant.

At the time, the retirement calculation used at DOE sites considered both years of service and age of the employee, so when I left in 2003 I would have qualified for a full retirement package except for one problem: Twenty months short of earning my retirement, I was laid off from the prime-contractor and shifted to a job with a subcontractor (or “third tier” company).  Time with such a subcontractor didn’t “count”.  The day I was laid off, the Human Resources representative handed me my twenty-year service award, thanked me for my loyalty, and held her breath hoping I wouldn’t explode.

I thanked the nice HR lady (it wasn’t her fault) and left her office shaking my head.  The next day I reported to my subcontractor job.  The DOE still wanted my labor, but they didn’t want to follow through on the promise of retirement benefits that had been part of my compensation package for twenty years.

The DOE had wanted to keep turn-over rates low. The promised retirement encouraged employees like me to stay at the Flats, and this benefited the nation since hiring, paying for security clearance investigations, and developing employee expertise cost a lot of money.

America’s needs changed when the Cold War fizzled out.  Continue reading →

The Manhattan Project: Bioscience and the Atom Bomb

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manhattan-projectThis small book by Jeff Hughes explores how science in the twentieth century changed everything as it spread from universities to the government and to the military. It has good information about the Manhattan Project in “condensed form,” but it spends time and words on the wisdom of “Big Science.”  The Manhattan Project was symbolic of the greatest change of all; “…science’s growth in scale, scope, and cost as it transformed from …small groups or individuals into…”Big Science”—a large-scale enterprise that is carried out by multidisciplinary and multinational groups of researches, cost enormous sums, demanded massive institutions of its own, and often represents a significant fraction of national budgets.” The Project brought together American, British, Canadian, and refugee European scientists to design and build the world’s first atomic bombs. It employed 130,000 people, cost $2 billion, and changed the world forever.

The book gives a brief history of the scientists who began to unlock the mysteries of the atom. Henri Becquerel accidently discovered that uranium had “spontaneous emission” recorded on a photographic plate. Marie Curie suggested the name “radioactivity.” Earnest Rutherford collaborated with Frederick Soddy and many others to work out the theory of radioactive decay by emission of alpha, beta, and gamma. Hans Geiger developed methods for measuring the emissions. Enrico Fermi and co-workers discovered that elements bombarded with neutrons could be turned into isotopes of other elements. Otto Hahn and Fritz Stassman reported they had apparently produced barium by bombarding uranium with neutrons. Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch deducted that “a splitting” had been achieved. Frisch conferred with a biologist who explained that biological cells dividing was called “fission,” and the term stuck. Researchers around the world began replicating the results. Continue reading →

The Samson Option

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samson-optionThis is a fascinating book by Seymour M. Hersh. As suggested by the subtitle, “Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy,” the book is split between describing how Israel developed nuclear weapons and a succession of American Presidents mostly turning a blind eye toward what Israel was doing. Some of the information is astonishing, and I often wondered whether the information was fact or fiction. There seems to have been a significant amount of research in the form of interviews with Israelis and Americans who could have known the secrets that are discussed. My inclination is to present the book as factual, and that is mostly because that would make the book more interesting!

The story begins with a description of how the U.S. shared high resolution images from a spy satellite called the “KH-11.” It seems a bit odd that the Israelis supposedly promised not to use the images for military purposes but used them to develop targets in the Soviet Union. They also used them to target and destroy the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak twelve miles north of Baghdad in early June 1981. The bombing raid was accomplished with F-16s that had been purchased from the U.S. “for defensive purposes only.” The bombing brought about worldwide protest and was the first Middle East crises for the Reagan administration. President Reagan asked his national security advisor, Richard Allen why the Israelis had bombed the facility and was told “Well. Boys will be boys.” The real answer was that Menachem Begin had said that it was necessary to prevent Iraq from developing a nuclear weapon. He said Iraq having nuclear weapons would result in “another Holocaust.” He then added, “Never again! Never again!” Nine hundred Jewish defenders had committed suicide at Masada in 73 A.D. while Samson had killed himself and his captors by pushing apart the temple pillars where he was chained. “For Israel’s nuclear advocates, the Samson Option became another way of saying ‘Never again!’” Continue reading →