Oppenheimer: Vacated but Not Vindicated | Hacker News Reader

Oppenheimer: Vacated but Not Vindicated

blog.nuclearsecrecy.com

63 pointsAmorymeltzer11 comments

Why clear his name now?

I can think of a few reasons.

One, he helped deliver a major advance in nuclear capability to the US, so... gratitude.

Two, the list of national heroes, who are at the intersection of national security and Nobel-Prize-worthy intellectual achievement, who are also geniuses, is short: at the top of the list, probably Einstein and Oppenheimer. Let's put it this way, anyone else you name is likely to be the equal of Oppenheimer, not 2x smarter than him. It's not a long list.

And why might that list be important?

It's not like there's a ton of geniuses lining up to work on national security today; you could say there's a 'brain drain' problem. And, rehabilitating the reputation of one of those titanic geniuses, might be a smart thing to do at a time like this.

There's pretty much no chance you're going to get a dozen Oppenheimers; so even if you have only one in the history of your institution, you should celebrate him, if only to encourage others to follow in his footsteps.

The problem is that even if there weren’t brain drain, you’d still have less progress now because institutions trend towards bureaucratic risk “management” that all but neuters talent. You could have someone 2x an Einstein or an Oppenheimer and they will never produce what either of those two did because the institutions they would work for today are fundamentally different than the ones Einstein and Oppenheimer worked for during WWII.

> Why clear his name now?

There is a movie coming out. That's why. Everyone knew before hand he wasn't guilty of this stuff but it's a boys club, and the club holds the purse to the funding.

Yeah, I was surprised the article only mentioned this in a quick breath. Of course it's because of the movie! The DoE doesn't want the movie to come out, painting the AEC as these persecutors and bad guys, and then the public crying to the DoE to clear Oppenheimer's name.

Now the DoE can say... "yeah, we already took care of that, nothing to see here". It seems completely transparent to me.

I read American Prometheus, and I think the movie is going to be hard on Strauss and Teller. I suppose that the DOE action this month will get mentioned in the closing credits. I don't know, that might seem too little too late to get the AEC/DOE off the hook. It's unfortunate that movie makers are such powerful interpreters of history. (EG, Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind) This movie will simplify the history and perhaps not be fair to Strauss and Teller. But if I were going to tell a simple story, I think the upcoming movie would be the story I would tell.

Oppenheimer > Thanos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1vXC-vKgKg

My understanding has always been that the case against Oppenheimer was primarily a hatchet job by Teller.

Lewis Strauss. Read Richard Rhodes. Teller was icing on the cake.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Strauss

regardless . . . medium-smart developers . . . learn what today?

We can retcon Oppenheimer. What about you?

Mishandling of classified materials is a kind of strict liability process crime, of which most who handle the stuff regularly could be guilty if someone applied enough scrutiny and desired a specific outcome.

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