Hacker News Reader

Comment by gh0zt | Hacker News Reader

“I’m sure there will be applications that nobody will expect. I think the hallmark of good science is when you do something just because it’s cool and then somebody turns around and uses it for something you never imagined. It’s really nice to have this type of creative stuff.”

Thinking atomic bombs :(

View on HN

>Thinking atomic bombs :(

The same ones which have prevented large scale open military conflicts involving superpowers for the last 60+ years? Atom bombs have likely saved more lives than they have taken, if we had conventional wars with modern technology without MAD.

That’s one read on history. Another is that the world has been tremendously lucky to not have suffered a nuclear holocaust since WWII. Many powerful people have done everything they could to advocate for nuclear bombings in the past 60 years, and we’ve had some extremely close calls with near accidental launches.

You are right. It might be too soon to definitively say which take is correct. It might be the case that a disaster (natural, economic, alien invasion, etc) might spark yet another world war.

I think the thing that saved the world was Stalin's stroke, if he had held onto power for longer he had the right kind of volatile personality to go 'fuck it' and start something..

We have no way of knowing, in retrospect, what the real risk of global nuclear war was. We live in the universe where the die roll came up "no", and we don't know if the odds of our survival were 99% or much less than that.

How do you weigh the certain death of millions vs. peace with a small chance of utter annihilation? I don't know, but I don't think it's as easy as you say.

The US atomic bomb project didn't fit that description, I don't think. It was started expressly because people believed they were in a race with the Axis to develop one first. I am surprised that Einstein's letter to FDR isn't all that universally known these days.[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein–Szilárd_letter

That's not really how the history of atomic bombs went down. Szilàrd imagined the destructive power of chain reactions around 1932, nuclear fission was discovered in 1938, and soon after the Manhattan project was started with the clear intention of understanding the science enough to make a bomb.

I frequently encounter people who believe that nuclear energy was harnessed initially for power generation and then co-opted for destructive purposes. The first nuclear reactor was created to enrich uranium to make a bomb.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com