What John von Neumann did at Los Alamos (2020)
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Is there a difference to the way it’s taught now compared to whenever von Neumann was studying.
What I mean is, the way I was taught maths and science in general was with a feeling of “look we basically know everything just learn this and you’ll be fine”.
Rather than that there are MASSIVE open questions and things we don’t understand at all. Please learn maths and physics and fix them, will you?
I’m basically curious how a fairly young person gets into their head a thought like “Hey, why don’t I just revolutionise a few things? That seems totally reasonable for me to do that.”
Word of caution, relative to most of you folks I am a mathematical toddler. The book may be overly simple but my calculus professor really enjoyed it.
Not sure if that’s a typo
- Hans Bethe
I would, however, like to point out that 20th century had many, many great minds, also working in the same timeframe. Claude Shannon comes to mind first, but there were many others whose contributions are the basis of technology today.
But of the people born with his tools? How many were born into a setting that even cared for intellectual things? How many of them would be born into a wealthy family that could afford to hire private tutors for all their kids?
There's always massive open questions because every question you answer generates more questions.
Which is also why most science published is hard to verify. Pretty much every topic out there is niche enough that the amount of people able to review it (let alone test it) is extremely small and they all know each other.
You don't need to be a genius just reasonably good and interested. I would think 10% of all kids take part.
Check out UKMT for the equivalent in the UK or Kangaroo competitions.
Secondary schools has a 130! year old journal (KOMAL) for competition Maths (again various difficulties) but those who go on to become mathematicians (an extremely selective subject in Hungary) pass the hardest tests as well.
So Hungary has various levels of gifted children support programs and has it for the last 100+ years (across 3-4 different government structures)
It's incredibly inspiring. What other complicated fields are just waiting for the right person to come along and discover their fundamental laws? I have a vague suspicion that partial differential equations are criminally underused in modeling for software developmemt and system design.
[1]: I wrote a short review at https://two-wrongs.com/war-what-is-it-good-for.html if anyone is curious.
There was an incredible cadre of scientists from Hungary in the early 20th century. Sadly they were exiled by fascism.
There were still lots of smart people in Nazi Germany, as evidenced by Operation Paperclip which brought ~1,600 Nazi scientists over to the US to work on rockets and help the US fight the USSR in the Cold War and space race.
Well, yes, as that's the defining characteristic of the group and why they moved to the United States and became known as the martians.
Spain under Franco and Portugal under Salazar did not persecute Jews, in fact allowed them safe passage from Vichy France.
Italy really turned antisemitic after more than a decade with the alliance with Germany to appease Hitler mostly. There's a nice book on the topic, in Italian, "Mussolini Razzista Riluttante" by Antonio Spinosa.
So it's just a matter of time an "intellectual", or any individual really, says or does something that will be used as a pretext to accuse them of not being a good enough member of in-group (this will earn the accuser status as a guardian of purity). Soon enough the society is full of people accusing others and also of those that want to appease "the authorities" by proposing the most extreme ways of purifying and enhancing the in-group. It's easy to see this is not the best environment for seekers of truth.
Of Comte, Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, the people credited with the establishment of "modern" (pre WWI & WWII) sciences of society all were "political" philosphers | thinkers that looked at the behaviour of societies.
Max Weber (1864 – 1920) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber was a German of some influence, and the pre and inbetween World War periods were a time of intense political debate in France, Germany, and surrounds.
Who are "they" to whom you refer, and what is "political" as opposed to "social" ?
One might guess (and its just that, a guess) that such regimes target the social sciences first because such departments (eg economics, political studies) are adjacent to live politics, the regime's people think they understand them and can make contributions (in reality, trying to take control of course) and of course because the hard sciences require the payment of a hard tax of mathematical skills to say anything useful, which most political hacks do not have.
> alienation is core to fascism
Fascism, a neighbour of Futurism, idolises technology, of only for its semiotic power. But then so did Soviet Communism. Stalin executed all the "bourgeois engineers" and Bolsheviks who built the industrial engine of the CCCP. Alternatively, the great leap forward in China and Pol Pot in Cambodia both rounded up the thinkers, teachers and engineers first.
So I don't think it's unique to fascism. What is common?
Seems it's a hallmark of the treachery of totalitarianism. Tyrants fear but use intellectuals. They need actual smart people to gain power, but then who is more threatening than people who know how the system works because they built it for you? So they are always betrayed. Consider Oppenheimer. Many of the great scientists and artists are put out to pasture once they've done what's useful for the party.
> "alienates the best thinkers" seems like a good litmus test.
Almost the whole Frankfurt School were Jewish intellectuals who fled to America.
I've written (probably in Digital Vegan) on how the Silicon Valley Billionaires, once they've built their "Social Media Digital Utopia" - a pageant of vanity, fear and cybernetic governance - would simply dispose of the coders (perhaps not as directly as Stalin). Maybe an indicator of that came early with the layoffs when some got a bit too moist about "AI". I think they hope that "AI" will be the way to pull up the ladder, leaving no challenging class.
And would you have preferred that Japan be left to the mercies of the Soviets, turning them into what North Korea and Cuba are today?
Childish naïveté, world wars, and postwar geopolitics don't mix.
Once you get to the edge, the game changes a fair bit. You'll need to know the actual experts, rather than just watching YouTube lectures or reading textbooks.
In terms of difference at the level you're talking about, the one big difference is that von Neumann's parents recognized how smart he was, and could afford to hire appropriate tutors to accelerate his learning.
There's this thing called Bloom's Two Sigma, though I'm no expert on the area it would appear that having a tutor improves results considerably. Now imagine one of the smartest kids ever born having parents who got him tutors.
Building on your sentiment, I have always felt that schools (in the US, at least) tend to teach students what to think rather than how to think. There is a huge emphasis on "here is the answer, now go find the questions" where I posit more focus should be placed on guiding a student to problem solve, think critically, and discover a few things for themselves, especially at the younger ages
That's pretty much how anything is taught in high school (and even most undergraduate programs). It's considered confusing to teach students that a lot of what we "know" is known to be incomplete and will change. I've kept some of my textbooks on immunology and other biomedical topics from the 1990s and parts of them are basically unrecognizable to what we are working on today. Sure, the basics haven't changed but the details certainly have.
I think one can learn math and physics without being at the frontier. One can appreciate the beauty of solutions of classical problems by discussing the problem in a historical context.
Then the next year they'd do it again.
We'd occasionally catch them at it when in Chemistry they'd tell us electrons worked one way and in Physics they'd say they worked another.
Anyway, I can definitely see how an enquiring mind might want to move past all this and find out The Truth.
I recommend reading about Srinivasa Ramanujan
In some contrast, von Neumann seems to have been able to take his enormous fluid intelligence and speed and apply it to pretty much whatever problem he decided, and he did it across many areas, including non-scientific ones. The stories about him are tinged with a little unease, and it's a little harder to see the human underneath his achievements.
Maybe you should look into Laslo Polgar. Another Hungarian who taught his daughters how to beat chess grandmasters.
Anecdottally, my father was only introduced to vectors and vector based calculations when at the uni. My generation was taught vectors in primary school already.
I think they opted for the different approach to make a more visual representation of the concepts, so younger minds could more easily grasp them.
Even the people a at Los Alamos had a suspicion that von Neumann operated on a different level from themselves.
From wikipedia:
Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe said "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man".[29] Edward Teller observed "von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us."
That and a few other bits in http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/03/differences-are-enormou...
https://nautil.us/the-man-who-tried-to-redeem-the-world-with...
Inventing merge sort is not a particularly impressive intellectual achievement.
Edit: adp with cards had been a thing for half a century by the time digital machines appeared. IBM was founded in 1911; NCR 1884.
For 150 cards/min, see http://www.righto.com/2017/11/identifying-early-ibm-computer...
* EDIT: like ENIAC early. By MANIAC they already had ~5K of memory, which would've been unthinkable with the dieselpunk registers used by card machines: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-k0YcX-Qhvrw/WfxzfKNG1wI/A...
The genius's genius.
Why? Ethics gets muddy, inconsistent, and nonsensical quite quickly and I am not so certain you have figured it all out compared to anyone else, so you'll find it hard for me to believe this position.
von Neumann may have had a certain game theory understanding of the world at the time, and you might as well in the opposite direction today, which one is correct is still up in the air and you won't know, and maybe in fact, you will never know.
von Neumann's fear was that nuclear war was inevitable and that the entire world would die from it should the communist parties of the world, especially the one that ran in the Soviet Union were maintained. I don't think he was far off given a few years after his death the Cuban missle crisis. Then the decades after with the US and Soviet Union clashing in various capacities and interfering respectively reducing each other's influence, or failing to do so. And today with the Soviet Union's successor.
Ethics is messy, but in this case he made an actual, verifiable prediction: that the USSR would use their nuclear arsenal and unleash nuclear war. He said "With the Russians it is not a question of whether but of when." Not that we would come close to nuclear war, or that it would have a high probability that it would happen. He stated that it definitely would happen. And he stated this very confidently.
This prediction turned out to be false: the USSR collapsed before it used its nuclear arsenal aggressively, and modern Russia still has not used its nuclear arsenal in any other capacity than as a vague threat.
We can state unequivocally that he was wrong about this. Reality disproved his game-theoretic argument.
Or maybe he was playing game with his statements. There is a sociological principle (I don't know what/if it has a name) of having an extreme take to rein in a lesser extreme. It can be very informative to see your own ideas taken to an extreme. There is also the impact of an enemy knowing how calculating/cynical you are towards them. I'd say Von Neumann was a hippies hippy by all accounts.
I'm glad we don't rely on a single man's fears, whatever are his genius and rationalizations.
You have no idea how hollow this rhetoric is, especially when it comes to the numerous events that took place during the nuclear arms race. Just in the time period alone.
You may think ethics is muddy and nonsensical, but guess what? So is reality. That’s the point. Reality is nuanced and more complex than a single human mind can comprehend. Extremely intelligent people (particularly at math and other abstract fields) often seem to not understand this, preferring to believe that their variation of game theory is accurate.
All I can say is that I’m extremely glad that Von Neumann was in no position to launch weapons. Analysis has its limits.
You just made the same value claim against his position, twice. Your claim that you made no claim is a lie.
> All I can say is that I’m extremely glad that Von Neumann was in no position to launch weapons. Analysis has its limits.
Neumann was a part of the same council that launched nuclear weapons, twice.
This is exactly the sort of criticism that arises from hero worship. “Who are you to criticize the genius?”
And no, a council did not launch nuclear weapons. They advised the president, who made the final decision.
Based on what, exactly. Your claim is not provided amongst proof, just your beliefs, which is you, not from a position of authority. Your words betray your position especially since you followed from:
> > > The man was intelligent, no doubt – but that doesn’t seem to have translated into any real world ethical understanding. A good example of why “meritocratic” systems based on raw intelligence probably don’t lead to wise outcomes.
> > I didn’t claim to be have more ethical understanding than he did, but frankly, if his reported positions on nuclear strikes were actually what he thought, then yes, I think I do.
> I didn’t say I had more ethical understanding.
Its a straight line, and you admit to it, certainly not a position you invented out of thin air upon observation of stories that you read today.
> One can point out the flaws in something without involving oneself. This is…not complicated?
Nice, enjoy your belittlement, hope it tastes sweet.
> This is exactly the sort of criticism that arises from hero worship. “Who are you to criticize the genius?”
As long as we're putting words in other peoples mouths, "I always make the right decisions" is not something you can really defend here.
> And no, a council did not launch nuclear weapons. They advised the president, who made the final decision.
So, what exactly was the council for then? Von Neumann is a pivotal part of all things nuclear at the time, do explain how he is NOT responsible for any deaths.
Program stored in the same memory as data, particularly, strikes me as mixed blessing, given that it has proved over the years to be a never-drying wellspring of security vulnerabilities.
von Neumann was enormously important in early Computer Science, his contributions cannot be understated. Indeed, Knuth credits him with the one of the most fundamental concepts in all of programming, subroutines (Turing had similar ideas in England around the same time). For more specific examples, von Neumann also came up with the concept of the PRNG, and the first practical algorithm (the "middle square" method). PRNGs are not obvious: before von Neumann, people had only tried generating random numbers using a table or primitive hardware RNGs. He was the one who came up with the idea to generate random numbers using arithmetic methods already present in computers. He also came up with the worlds first practical computer algorithm for sorting, merge sort. There's a huge number of other examples, early CS is riddled with ideas that can from von Neumann.
He did not develop that architecture. It is not his idea. The article is pretty clear on that. The subroutines were not original, as Turing also came up with them.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-maniac-benjamin-labatut/196...
Gotta remember that one. Even though it wasn't JvN.
JvN leans over to Ulam and whispers, "well, at least they lie on a plane."
This leaves us at the end of the war, when the Soviets decided to steal the secret and build their own bomb. Stalin decided they'll build an exact replica of the Nagasaki bomb, which they did and tested in 1949. If only U-233 and U-235 were on the table, they would have picked one of those, rather than explored an uncertain design.
From uranium bombs to boosted uranium bombs there's a small step. So the world would have seen much bigger bombs than the ones dropped on Japan. Fission bombs were built and tested that got close to one megaton.
But the hydrogen bomb is fundamentally an implosion bomb. The hydrogen bomb was a side-effect of the deeper understanding of the implosion design. In particular, the US figured out that if you can do implosion with conventional explosives, you can do it even better with nuclear explosives, so it designed and tested a two stage fission bomb, the Castle Nectar bomb. It's the only non-thermonuclear bomb ever detonated that had a yield above 1 MT (it was 1.8 MT).
The research into this two-stage bomb is what Ulam was doing, and he told Teller that maybe what works for a second stage that is a fission bomb could work for a second stage that's a fusion bomb. Teller added his own insights, and eventually it was done.
This. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann
> In 1955, von Neumann became a commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)
> He used this position to further the production of compact hydrogen bombs suitable for intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) delivery
> He was adamant that H-bombs delivered deep into enemy territory by an ICBM would be the most effective weapon possible
It seems much of his life was dedicated to applying Game Theory.
Did they decide or was it gifted to them? My speculation is that USSR supported creation of Israel as a quid pro quo.
"Connections" by James Burke is a wonderful documentary that first helped me to really understand this.
First: it took many years for the Ulam-Teller design to be discovered. Teller came up with the idea of a fusion bomb in 1942. The actual Ulam-Teller design was invented in March 1951, basically 9 years later. In this 9 years, for at least 2 years, people were searching frantically for a workable design. It's very easy to say, after the fact, that "X-Rays thermal transport would have been discovered as well" because we know this is what worked in the end. But before the fact, nobody was looking for X-Ray implosion.
Second: During WW2, plutonium was considered superior to uranium because it was cheaper to manufacture. U-235 was being manufactured via a very expensive separation process. But U-233 can be bred in a thorium reactor just like Plutonium is bred in a uranium reactor. They both come with their challenges (U-232 for U-233, Pu-240 for Pu-239), but in a scenario where the Manhattan project did not figure the implosion design in a hurry, the US would have shifted the resources to U-233. Here's a quote from wikipedia [1]
> A declassified 1966 memo from the US nuclear program stated that uranium-233 has been shown to be highly satisfactory as a weapons material, though it was only superior to plutonium in rare circumstances. It was claimed that if the existing weapons were based on uranium-233 instead of plutonium-239, Livermore would not be interested in switching to plutonium.
Crucially, such a weapon did not need to use any type of implosion.
In a scenario where the US does not develop the implosion knowledge because it can build a 1 MT weapon without, then it is not at all a given that someone else would have looked for an implosion-based design of a thermonuclear weapon. We would still have had the layer-cake design, but that is not a game changer, and it's not clear that the extra yield was worth the extra complexity.
Now, in today's world: Most of US's nukes have yields around 100 kT [2]. They are thermonuclear but the same effect can be achieved with (boosted) fission bombs. The largest current US nuke, the B83, has a yield of 1.2 MT, but the US is looking to retire it, and replace it with B61, with a maximum yield of 400 kT.
My point is that a superpower can service all its deterrence needs with nuclear weapons with yields that are achievable with boosted fission.
Why did we then go and build thermonuclear monster bombs in the 50's and 60's? Because at the time the ICBM precision was limited, and you needed something with a mile-sized fireball to make up for the lack of precision. But the ICBM technology advanced at an incredible pace. If we had been 10 years late coming with the design for a thermonuclear bomb, it would not have been needed at all.
Yet another thing is this: the destructive power of a nuke does not grow linearly with its yield. Ten bombs with a 100 kT yield are more destructive than on single bomb with a 1 MT yield. Oppenheimer knew that, and advised the US to focus on more rather than bigger. He was not listened to, and the US build both more and bigger. But we do know that you can devastate the world with 100 kT bombs, just as much as you can devastate it with 1 MT bombs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-233#Weapon_material
For this it's instructive to look at China's nuclear program [1]. Wikipedia does not mention, but the origin of China's program is a uranium bomb design that was developed in the US, stolen by the Soviets and passed unchanged to the Chinese. The first 7 Chinese tests were all based on uranium bombs. The 6th one was a real, two-stage, thermonuclear bomb, with a yield of 3 MT. But the one before it, the Chic-5 test was a boosted fission design with a yield of 300 kT.
300kT exceeds the upper limit of any of the tests done by India, Pakistan or North Korea, and they are all considered bona-fide nuclear powers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests_...
They were not very high yield, only about 10 kT. But it's very likely the design was exceptionally safe, considering that so many were built, and the idea for these nukes were to be used in a field of battle and fired using regular (although quite large) howitzers.
Two earlier designs were the Mk-8 and Mk-11 [2]. Both were of the Hiroshima type, using only U-235, and had a yield of up to 30 kT. A few dozen were built of both types.
Bottom line: uranium-only bombs could be made safe. They could also be made to have very high yield, up to 300 kT, as shown by the Chinese test Chic-6.
I don't have direct proof that a Hiroshima-type bomb could be made to be both high-yield and safe, because all major nuclear powers preferred to use Plutonium. But I think it's very plausible that if Plutonium had not been successful during WW2, the US, and the rest of the other nuclear powers, would have found ways to build large and safe such uranium bombs, where the uranium would have been either U-235 or U-233.
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb488/
Uranium implosion is far more efficient than a uranium gun-type bomb, and is the only demonstrated way to make a high yield (hundreds of kilotons) fission bomb. The Ivy King device from the US was the largest known uranium-only bomb. It used implosion:
I read about the Chinese bombs in "Atomic Adventures" by James Mahaffey, but reading again, I see that only the Chic-4 bomb originated from the US W-33 warhead, which was copied by the Soviets and became their 3BV3 bomb. All these had a yield of about 10 kT. As I mentioned in my previous reply, there were gun-type uranium bombs with up to at least 30 kT.
I think your original point was that in order to get yields 10 times as high, you would need much more uranium, and this would be unsafe.
The Ivy Mike bomb that you mentioned had a fairly crude, but effective, safety measure: a chain containing boron (very strong neutron poison) in the middle of the assembly, to be removed only immediately prior to deployment. I don't see why this would not work with a gun-type design.
Still, you could say that the implosion brings together fissile metal from all directions, and at huge speed too, while the gun-type brings the metal from only 2 directions and at much lower speed, and therefore the implosion can assemble a much higher hypecritical mass. So inherently the implosion design can result in a higher yields. And that is absolutely true, and it is very likely the reason that nuclear powers prefer the implosion design, even in some weapons that use uranium.
From the post-WW2 history, it looks like gun-type was used specifically for smaller yields. An artillery shell should not have a megaton yield, for the simple reason that you want to survive after you fire it.
Yet, from the same book I learned that during the Manhattan project 20000 explosions were used to understand and fine-tune the implosion design, and for each explosion that happened at least 20 were analyzed on paper before. More than 1000 scientists and engineers worked on nailing that design, and it was by far the most expensive part of the entire Manhattan project.
Immediately following WW2, the US switched to a different method of uranium enrichment, that made uranium cheaper to produce than plutonium. I don't know if it was cheaper by mass or by yield, probably the first.
Still, let's imagine an evolutionary path where the US finds itself after the end of WW2, with a tried, tested and practical design based on uranium and the gun-type, and which needed a fissile material that was getting much cheaper. And knowing that it's possible to get an alternate design based on plutonium, but with that required an unknown amount of additional fundamental research and then engineering effort. That would have very likely been the situation if von Neumann did not get involved.
A lot of organizations faced with such a dilemma choose the incremental gains from an existing design, rather than exploring a potentially revolutionary, but risky alternative.
In such an alternate history, would the scientists be able to increase the yield of a gun-type uranium bomb to 100 kT, or 500 kT? The boosted fission design was developed between 1947 and 1949, and there is no reason it would not work with a gun-type bomb. Once a boosted version of a gun-type is developed, a version that uses a lot of boosting and an additional U-238 temper around the core can deliver a lot of extra-yield, without increasing the U-235 mass, and the chance of pre-explosion. I'm sure motivated scientists could have come with many more ideas.
Here's a similar scenario of incremental changes to an existing design: after WW2, Admiral Rickover chose the pressurized water design for his submarines. He was a very smart man, and I have no doubts that he made the right choice. However, there are hundreds of possible reactor designs, and for applications other than submarines it is very likely other designs could be much better, yet 75 years later, and PWR is by far the most widespread design.
The lion's share of the project spending was for uranium enrichment at Oak Ridge. The Los Alamos experiments and all R&D together accounted for only 8% of the Manhattan Project cost:
https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/05/17/the-price-of-the-...
The gun-type Little Boy bomb had a yield of 12-15 kilotons from 63 kilograms of highly enriched uranium:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy
The Ivy King uranium implosion bomb had a yield of 500 kilotons from 60 kg of HEU:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_King
That's about 35 times more efficient without even having to manufacture tritium for boosting (and tritium is, gram for gram, by far the most expensive material in the nuclear weapons complex.) I think that implosive fission bombs would soon have been developed after the war even if they hadn't been part of the original Manhattan Project effort. I do think that with a less intense USA-USSR rivalry after the war it's plausible that thermonuclear weapons based on radiation implosion would not have been developed, or developed much later.
Regarding the expensive part. The actual word in the book ([1], p 174) was "difficult", not expensive, I misremembered.
> The United States Corps of Engineers at the secret Los Alamos Laboratory, consisting of 1,500 scientists, engineering specialists, and precision machinists, solved the problem of spherical shock-wave propagation in 1945 in the Manhattan Project. It was the most difficult task in the entire project, in which highly abstract theoretical physics was turned into a weaponized device. It took twenty thousand test explosions to perfect the technique, and for every test explosion there were probably twenty experimental configurations that were found to be not worth testing.
However, imagine von Neumann did not get involved in the project. There's a good chance it would have taken the team a few more months to solve the implosion puzzle. If such had been the case, Groves and Oppenheimer would have pulled the plug, and focused fully on the uranium design.
Now, fast forward a few more months until the end of WW2, when Oppenheimer and the vast majority of the scientists and engineers at Los Alamos had gone home. Norris Bradburry is the new boss. The US Navy comes and tells him they want to set up Operation Crossroads in the Pacific, in mid 1946, and he needs to provide 3 atomic bombs for that, and maybe a spare or two. What would he do? Tell them that he needs some extra time to work on some potential great alternative design, or reply "Yes, Sir" and go ahead and make, with whatever handful of scientists and engineers he had left, a few replicas of the Little Boy? My guess is that he would have chosen the second option.
In such a scenario, when the Soviets build their own atomic bomb, it is also a gun-type, because that's the working design they steal.
It is perfectly reasonable that the US sees implosion as a game changer (as it was) and perfect the design after the war, but the urgency is down by a factor of 10, as is the scientific manpower. A large number of scientists refused to work on atomic weapons after the end of WW2, now aware of their monstrous effects.
And here we both agree that it's quite plausible that the arms race would between the US and the Soviet Union would have been less intense. It would have taken a few extra years to get to the Ivy King level of technology, and by that point the ICBM precision would have been high enough that radiation implosion thermonuclear weapons would not have been really needed.
[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Atomic_Adventures/wxokD...
Is anyone else getting a LLM vibe from this?
I've just watched it, and it was very interesting (though a low quality copy). From 1966, it has many people who knew him talking about him.
Makes me slightly bothered he didn't get so much as a cameo in the Oppenheimer film.
The book the author referenced, Turing's Cathedral, is a great read for anyone who enjoyed this and wants to know more.
Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28673376
What John von Neumann Did at Los Alamos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28673376 - Sept 2021 (152 comments)
Well, that got dark towards the end.
Maybe it was something personal, but (as someone who spent their youth worrying that the Big One might arrive anytime in the next 5-30 minutes, depending upon flight time) I see a lot of geopolitics going on around that date.
Now I was fortunate: the US was already out of Vietnam before I was draftable, and I emigrated early in this century, before it was apparent that Afghanistan and Iraq would become slogs, so my life has had a lot of peace, with only minor engagements[0] of either of my countries.
Compare KDvN: born in 1911, WWI+Kun 1914-1919, Hitler+WWII 1933-1945, Cold War 1947-, Korea 1950-1953, US involvement in Vietnam 1961-, plus Bay of Pigs 1961, Cuban Missile Crisis 1962, and chaos in Vietnam mid 1963[1]; worked on at least the A-bomb[1,5] and therefore knew what the H-bomb was capable of, but had no empirical evidence that MAD[2] would turn out to be effective, as that acronym was only coined in 1962 and doctrine announced sometime after. If I try to take her priors (as someone who had already started fleeing communism at 8, and had had, it seems, a life full of hope only between the ages of 9 and 22?) I wouldn't have put a lot of weight on peaceful outcomes then either.
(then again, Stefan Zweig also committed suicide[3], so I'm not sure how much of a culture shock the New World was to former Austro-hungarians in general)
[0] Lebanon, Grenada, Tanker War, Panama, Gulf I, Somalia, Bosnia&Croatia, Haiti, Kosovo (+ Libya raid & misc. no-fly's)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War#Kennedy's_escalati... ; she fortunately missed Kennedy getting cancelled by 11 days.
[1,5] EDIT: JvN died young from cancer, which, as an atomic scientist, leads to obvious suspicions.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
[3] having left The World of Yesterday as a book-length note?