What John von Neumann Did at Los Alamos
3quarksdaily.com
3quarksdaily.com
> "How can any of us be called professor when Gödel is not?"
Clearly he had the highest of respect for him.
- Oppenheimer invited George Kistiakowsky from Harvard who was a world-class expert in explosives; in his spare time Kistiakowsky would use his explosives knowledge to raze trees and create ski slopes on the mesa for recreation for the scientists.
He made his way to Germany, where he earned his PhD in physical chemistry under the supervision of Max Bodenstein at the University of Berlin.
He emigrated to the United States in 1926, where he joined the faculty of Harvard University in 1930, and became a citizen in 1933.
During World War II, Kistiakowsky was the head of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) section responsible for the development of explosives, and the technical director of the Explosives Research Laboratory (ERL), where he oversaw the development of new explosives, including RDX and HMX.
He was involved in research into the hydrodynamic theory of explosions, and the development of shaped charges. In October 1943, he was brought into the Manhattan Project as a consultant.
He was soon placed in charge of X Division, which was responsible for the development of the explosive lenses necessary for an implosion-type nuclear weapon. In July 1945, he watched the first atomic explosion in the Trinity test. A few weeks later, another implosion-type weapon (Fat Man) was dropped on Nagasaki. From 1962 to 1965, Kistiakowsky chaired the National Academy of Sciences's Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP), and was its vice president from 1965 to 1973.
He severed his connections with the government in protest against the war in Vietnam, and became active in an antiwar organization, the Council for a Livable World, becoming its chairman in 1977."
There were a bunch of things that came together perfectly.
1) A bunch of intellectuals of the higher caliber that could be brought into a single location. A lot of this had to do with the rise of Nazism which led to a lot of these high powered intellectuals fleeing Germany and Eastern Europe for the US.
2) A bunch of money that could be poured into the project. At that time, the USA was completely committed to using every resource it had to win WWII.
3) Convince all those intellectuals that working on creating the most destructive weapon ever was a good thing. If there was ever a "good war" in the history of the world, it was the war against Hitler. I think almost everyone in the West understood at that time that stopping Hitler was of the highest moral imperative and that massive amounts of violence was the only way to stop him. Even with all this, people like Oppenheimer had their doubts. (Of course this would end up being used, not against Hitler and the Germans but against the Japanese).
4) The theoretic foundations for all this work were just laid a few decades before. This could not have happened before then.
I don't see such a convergence of factors happening afterward. I don't think you could get the top 100 leading scientists together to build a superweapon now.
If it were not for the Manhattan Project, I think it is likely that we would still be living in a nuclear weapon free world. Though, if that is a good thing or a bad thing with respect to great power wars, I am uncertain.
Edit: it was more. Nonetheless, accelerating the ring had advantages, according to WP! I didn’t know that.
TL;DR - even if bomb design is trivial for a gun type bomb, generating enough enriched U235 for a proper bomb requires a significant, prolonged, well funded effort. I agree we would probably have nukes at some point, but I'm not sure when.
Much smaller nation states have since been able to effectively generate enough uranium for nuclear weapons programs in short periods of time using centrifuges. The main challenge for them has not been production itself, but hiding the activity from international scrutiny. Tracking shipments of materials and parts necessary for centrifuge construction has been one of the leading methods of avoiding nuclear proliferation, but still centrifuges are so effective that even a small number is enough. North Korea, for example, is believed to have two buildings worth of centrifuges, but we only know where one of them is, and only because they have given international inspectors a tour of that location. For context, North Korea's current GDP is about 1/64th of the US's GDP in 1939.
Edward Pickles took on the challenge: “... (the Model L) has done more than any other single instrument to advance the study of viruses, yet Pickels received almost no attention for these remarkable achievements. Previously, ultracentrifuges had to be run behind three-foot-thick walls of reinforced concrete. The scientists who operated them were considered slightly insane. Centrifuges required constant attention … and explosions were to be expected at fairly regular intervals. The Spinco preparative centrifuge, for contrast, is about the size of a washing machine, and anyone can learn to run it in 10 minutes.” https://www.beckman.com/resources/technologies/analytical-ul...
It wouldn't have taken the top scientists a generation later, with advancements in all the related fields diffusing through the scientific community, even without those strictly depend on thr Manhattan Project and nuclear weapons, abd without the political context created by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the first use might well have been by a nation with dozens of devices available, and no reason for restraint in using them.
At the barest minimum, we would still develop nuclear reactors, and then plutonium would get discovered, and it’s easy to manufacture and purify (compared to U-235), and the bomb is just a matter of time.
The Nazis managed to drive out a large portion of Europe's best scientists & mathematicians (Von Neumann, Einstein, Gödel [eventually... it took him a while to realize how bad things were] just to name a few). Most of which ended up in the US or the UK. Which in turn meant that in WWII Nazi Germany was at something of a scientific disadvantage without realizing it was of their own making. Add to this the Nazi critique of of what they called "Jewish science" - things like relativity, quantum mechanics, even Gödel incompleteness theorem got this label - did not allow them free inquiry into many of these areas.
Von Braun did not give a shit about Nazi philosophy and only wanted money so he could build and test his rockets. That’s what we promised him to get him to come to to the USA.
But as I recall, there was a “secret” operation created with the singular goal of getting Nazi scientists out of Germany and to the US in ‘45 and ‘46 before the British or Soviets could recruit or just plain kidnap them.
EDIT: Operation Paperclip
The bomb arrived at a time when the US and Russia were allies. They were focused on winning the war. By the time they started snarling at each other in earnest, the Russians had the bomb (1949) and detente had been established. WWII gave us a smooth glide path to both superpowers having the bomb and MAD doctrine was established.
If instead the bomb had arrived say in the 60s, there would have been an entirely different political landscape. Perhaps even more bitter than the cold war. If one side had then got the bomb, just when they were at each other's throats, they could well have used it.
It's amusing that this is very much like how the bomb worked. Take fissile material and bring it all together into the same place at the exact same moment so that a chain reaction can occur :-)
“A Manhattan Project for X” (cancer, renewable energy, quantum computing, …) is a common political refrain, but misses what made the original successful: The scientists had a pretty good idea what was possible and how one might do it. The devil was in the details but the picture was, in outline, quite clear, if enough money were spent and the right brains harnessed.
Now, one might argue that speed still made a world-historical difference: Because the weapon was made in time to be used in the current conflict, we did not have to wait until the next conflict to fully understand its significance, at which point it might have been too late.
George then realizes that computer was a prototype built by von Neumann – one of the first "modern design" computers, ever.
That's like coming into contact with the first life, directly, physically, in a barn.
There's something magical about these origin stories. What's it like to face such a sharp historic discontinuity, to hold it in your fingers, knowing what comes next?
Yikes!
I'm reading a biography of Eisenhower, and it's remarkable what a 'steady hand' he was in some ways in terms of hot-headed notions like those. Also very much in favor of curtailing defense spending to what was strictly necessary. He had some misses, too, but I found it interesting to contemplate.
In that context it doesn't sound as sarcastic.
Even if the US bombed the USSR and prevented a counterstrike the US would have been worse off.
You don't get to subtract 100M people out of 2.7B , the 2nd country in GDP and expect things to remain as they were before.
Also the entire world would have reacted, anticipating that they too were going to be nuked as soon as they did something which would have even remotely alerted paranoid Uncle Sam.
Hard no. No one "reacted" after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were glassed.
With spies inside Project Manhattan. Both the UK and USSR reacted with what they could, meaning their intelligence and espionage.
It's kind of a selection bias considering that the only country capable of building the Atomic Bomb was the US.
I don't think anyone doubts the contributions our British friends made to the success of the project.
Von Neumann may have been advocating for a strike before the Soviets had operational nuclear capabilities.
>"You don't get to subtract 100M people out of 2.7B , the 2nd country in GDP and expect things to remain as they were before."
It is unlikely that an American nuclear strike would have wiped out the entire population of the Soviet Union; one would expect a targeted strike on critical government and army facilities, or something like what happened against the Japanese.
>"Also the entire world would have reacted, anticipating that they too were going to be nuked as soon as they did something which would have even remotely alerted paranoid Uncle Sam. "
The rest of the world didn't conquer and subjugate all of Eastern Europe, then steal from them and kidnap people in large numbers.
USSR lion share of the population is/was in Moscow and St. Petersburg. A decapitation strike would have killed many in those 2 cities for sure. Add the fires, the confusion, the famine and the fact that you must followup with an invasion because nukes radiations dissipate fast and other countries around would see it as a huge opportunity to expand. It's easy to imagine the countries of the Marshall plan abandon said plan and saying "screw it! We'll get the eastward land instead"
100M is not far fetched.
> The rest of the world didn't conquer and subjugate all of Eastern Europe, then steal from them and kidnap people in large numbers.
The US is magnanimous . Meaning like some guy who got out of the hood and lets it slide when somebody dents his Ferrari. Had that person missed on a lucky break and still be in the hood, his reaction would be very different and much more violent , and it doesn't even need to be a Ferrari, just a light fender bender on a Civic will cause trouble.
The US is magnanimous because of its standards of living , not the other way around.
By the time the nukes were dropped, the 60 or so largest cities in Japan had been decimated by bombing (Kyoto was famously spared largely because of the sympathies of a single officer). When Tokyo was firebombed over 100k civilians were burned alive in a single night, the overwhelming majority of them women, children, and old men.
Justified as it may have been, we shouldn't promote a mythology that WW2 was a clean and narrowly targeted campaign by the allies.
There's an excellent documentary by Errol Morris named The Fog of War that has McNamara's very frank commentary on these issues. You also can find some letters Churchill wrote where he was engaging with these questions, such as asking himself if the fire bombing was morally much different from the use of chemical agents during WW1.
Any sort of pre-emptive strike by the US vs the USSR would have been similarly ugly, with very real human cost to ordinary people with no agency in the situation.
He lost lots of family and friends due to the nazis. He saw his people get slaughtered due to a nation with crazy ideology being technically superior. He never wanted to be put in that situation again and worked on the Manhattan project because he believed in the USA.
He viewed the USSR as another threat just like the nazis. For many it seemed like a guarantee that war would happen. Many also claimed that early attack could save lives.
I’m not here to claim what he felt was right, but given the environment and conditions he lived through, I don’t pretend that I wouldn’t hold similar views given the circumstances.
No we don't know what would happens if the US did that, because thank God they did not do it.
We saw that 2 cities in Japan was bombed with no retaliation (I'm aware the bombing itself was a pretend retaliation). If anything is to be learnt from that it would be the US can get away with killing people.
"Over twelve battalions of the 11th Landwehr Division, making up more than 7000 men, advanced after the bombardment expecting little resistance. They were met at the first defense line by a counter-charge made up of the surviving soldiers of the 13th Company of the 226th Infantry Regiment. The Germans became panicked by the appearance of the Russians, who were coughing up blood and bits of their own lungs, as the hydrochloric acid formed by the mix of the chlorine gas and the moisture in their lungs had begun to dissolve their flesh. The Germans retreated, running so fast they were caught up in their own c-wire traps.[1]"
If a film director, albeit a very gifted one, could already see in 1964 how absurd that line of reasoning really was, no hindsight was really necessary.
Intellectuals of the time loved to make fun of and satirize MAD. But the fact is it worked.
'It worked' only in the sense that cooler heads prevailed to prevent accidental holocaust[0] and that humanity was incredibly lucky[1]. That this occurred is more than a minor miracle.
[0] https://www.wjperryproject.org/books [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00963402156111...
At which they failed, but perhaps they spread enough fear of nuclear war to make MAD work better, which certainly wasn't the plan but is a kind of win on its own.
(Well, OK, maybe don't let him create a DMZ at the Chinese border and poison it permanently with radioactive cobalt, as some accounts say he wanted to do.)
Of course, the ends don’t justify the means, lest one uses this reasoning to destroy everyone you feel is about to do great harm, we are only gifted with hindsight.
My guess is that the same reasoning that led von Neumann to advocate a decisive blow against the pre-H bomb Soviet Union would have led him to oppose MacArthur's ambition towards Manchuria. His position on the Korean conflict may be on record somewhere, but I haven't run across it.
Stopping the Soviets early on, in the pre-MAD era, might actually have been worth the cost. We'll never know... and that's probably a good thing because we'd unquestionably be the bad guys in that timeline. People arguing on the Internet would accuse each other of being von Neumann instead of Hitler.
Good thing there was a "steady hand" Eisenhower that green lit dropping of the bombs on general population, otherwise who could have known what kinds of justifications the japs academics would have come up with to wash out the atrocities of their imperial administration?
As always, history is written by the winners.
[Edit]: Confused Eisenhower with Truman
"... in formulating policies regarding the atomic bomb and relations with the Soviets, Truman was guided by the U.S. State Department and ignored Eisenhower and the Pentagon. Indeed, Eisenhower had opposed the use of the atomic bomb against the Japanese, writing, 'First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.'"
> In 1953, he considered using nuclear weapons to end the Korean War, and may have threatened China with nuclear attack if an armistice was not reached quickly.
> He supported regime-changing military coups in Iran and Guatemala orchestrated by his own administration
> He approved the Bay of Pigs invasion, which was left to John F. Kennedy to carry out.
Kidding aside, I read an account by a B-52 bombardier whose plane on SIOP alert carried two B53 high yield bombs (one usually got a four-pack of B28 bombs and one B53).
His target brief went something like "when you get there (Moscow-locale leadership bunkers) you'll see a crater; put your bombs in it."
All at once? I imagine no amount of fancy timing would necessarily get both going off successfully before one or the other's shockwave disassembled the later blowing partner.
Or I'm just grossly misunderstanding the timescales at play. that's happened more than once too.
I don't know how the fuzing worked in those situations. Perhaps one weapon senses the gamma ray burst or other emission from its companion and a form of salvage fuze detonates it.
As an aside, I've wondered what I would do if I were a Soviet guard at an ICBM site or the like and a bomb was laid down nearby. It's going to sit there ticking for a little while to ensure the bomber escapes the blast radius, so you'd have a bit of time to think things over. I think I'd probably shoot the bomb in hopes of disrupting the detonation process, but I suppose just sitting on it and having a swig of vodka would be an attractive second choice.
>Nuclear fratricide
>In relation to nuclear warfare, nuclear fratricide denotes the inadvertent destruction of nuclear warheads or their delivery systems by detonations from other warheads in the same attack. The blast, EMP and debris cloud may knock them off course, cause damage or destroy them.
>Theory
>Estimating fratricidal effects is complex. One source states that "It appears that two weapons targeted on a silo must arrive at least ten seconds apart to avoid fratricidal fireball effects, and less than one minute or more than one hour apart to avoid fratricidal nuclear dust cloud effects." Hence "deconflicting" attack patterns and using staggered "walking barrages" became part of U.S. and Soviet nuclear tactics.
>This theory was put forward as a defense mechanism for the LGM-118 Peacekeeper missile deployment, reasoning that multiple detonations would be required to knock out an entire battery of missiles if sufficiently protected. This strategy was ultimately rejected though, as enemy launches can be staggered through time to ensure warheads reach their target with enough delay between them to prevent the phenomenon.
>This method of using staggered launch was described by a missile combat crew, whose members revealed that on receiving a launch command "Some [missiles] fly immediately, some with a delay to prevent nuclear fratricide when the bombs approach their targets in 20 to 30 minutes.".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_warfare#1980s
>However, comparisons with supervolcanoes are more misleading than helpful due to the different aerosols released, the likely air burst fuzing height of nuclear weapons and the globally scattered location of these potential nuclear detonations all being in contrast to the singular and subterranean nature of a supervolcanic eruption. Moreover, assuming the entire world stockpile of weapons were grouped together, it would be difficult, due to the nuclear fratricide effect, to ensure the individual weapons would go off all at once. Nonetheless, many people believe that a full-scale nuclear war would result, through the nuclear winter effect, in the extinction of the human species, though not all analysts agree on the assumptions that underpin these nuclear winter models.
"Fire all of your guns at once and explode into space."
"In China a war for peace, as it were, is taking place. The question of peace greatly preoccupies the Soviet Union as well, though we have already had peace for the past four years. With regards to China, there is no immediate threat at the present time: Japan has yet to stand up on its feet and is thus not ready for war; America, though it screams war, is actually afraid of war more than anything; Europe is afraid of war; in essence, there is no one to fight with China, not unless Kim Il Sung decides to invade China? Peace will depend on our efforts. If we continue to be friendly, peace can last not only 5-10 years, but 20-25 years and perhaps even longer."
https://china.usc.edu/conversation-between-soviet-unions-jos...
Even in USSR it was a problem to explain why our trustworthy allies have suddenly became evil and took a couple of years.
As for the Cold War period which I, too, lived through on the other side, in both sides the level of hostility was achieved after very concentrated efforts by both governments.
Which one, out of curiosity?
I like reading/listening to biographies, so I'm always interested in good recommendations.
see: https://medium.com/young-spurs/the-unsung-genius-of-john-von...
"This experience marked a formative period in von Neumann’s political views, as his passionate anti-Communism was forged, an animus which he would carry for the rest of his life."
"You know, Herb, Johnny can do calculations in his head ten times as fast as I can. And I can do them ten times as fast as you can, so you can see how impressive Johnny is".
- Enrico Fermi
The most jarring thing about this article is the author insisting on using "Johnny Von Neumann" rather than "John Von Neumann".
I get that if you quote someone referring to Von Neumann by a nickname, you wouldn't change the quote to the name the public knows him by, but "Dick Feynman" or "Al Einstein" just seem odd to me, and "Johnny Von Neumann" is just as jarring for this reader.
The funny thing is, Richard Feynman often referred to him as "Johnny von Neumann." See "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" for examples.
I'm sure I will not find anything. But it would be interesting for people to analyze the outliers.
But, I've just learnt an anecdote about Neumann, Einstein and Godel.
When Neumann signed for Princeton, he had two conditions: a 16k annual salary (others earned ~2k at that time) and to bring in that two people who are smarter than he.
(Source, in Hungarian, someday we will have the subtitles from the AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pu6xoHlr0zk)
UPDATE: The talk is about miracles and geniuses. According to the speaker, a genius is somebody who sees something which wasn’t in the air, up until that time. Neumann wasn’t a genius, rather a polymath who saw all what was in the air at that time
Man, he was one of very few geniuses who is celebrated everywhere. May be not in pop culture but everywhere else.
On the other hand, in a sense, Neumann is truly underrated. I mean you can talk about him for days and still you'd barely scratch the surface. His genius is so mysterious to me.
But its fun to put famous names in the article I guess.
Messing with security protocols is actually a good thing to ensure they keep getting followed
To me it seems disrespectful. I don’t understand why it was done.
What did I miss, if anything?
(As an aside my first name happens to be John.)
The book "Influx" presents another possibility which both interesting and depressing.