The Bitter Aftertaste of "Technical Sweetness"

Overall the atomic bombs weren't such outliers in the destruction caused by bombing raids. Everyone should know / read about this thing: https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-jap...

"The destruction caused by conventional attacks was huge. Night after night, all summer long, cities would go up in smoke. In the midst of this cascade of destruction, it would not be surprising if this or that individual attack failed to make much of an impression—even if it was carried out with a remarkable new type of weapon."

"A typical raid consisted of 500 bombers. This means that the typical conventional raid was dropping 4 to 5 kilotons of bombs on each city. (A kiloton is a thousand tons and is the standard measure of the explosive power of a nuclear weapon. The Hiroshima bomb measured 16.5 kilotons, the Nagasaki bomb 20 kilotons.)

The first of the conventional raids, a night attack on Tokyo on March 9-10, 1945, remains the single most destructive attack on a city in the history of war. Something like 16 square miles of the city were burned out. An estimated 120,000 Japanese lost their lives—the single highest death toll of any bombing attack on a city."

The article ignores the fact that e.g. Bohr and later also Oppenheimer had been discussing the ethical side of the atomic bomb a long time, and argued for full openness and multilateral inspection to contain its consequences. An important part of motiviation was that someone would build an atomic bomb anyway, in which case it was best to have it first. The aftertaste was bitter, but it was not of technical sweetness, but rather of being in the unique position to develop it.

One of those "scientists" was Theodore Hall. At 18 years old, he graduated with a physics degree from Harvard in 1944, and provided the single most detailed source of information on a complete working bomb to Russia. He was "worried about the possibility of the emergence of a fascist government in the United States". His brother Edward Hall was the father of the US ICBM program.

Theodore Hall was never prosecuted, but his security clearance was revoked due to receiving a letter from a relative in the UK asking "I hear you're working on something that goes up with a big bang! Can you send us one of them for Guy Fawkes Day?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Hall#/media/File:Brot...

Even if the fruits of your labor don't end up murdering millions, there is the hazard of mere success. Taste true accomplishment and you will likely spend the rest of your life trying to repeat it. Trapped like a bug.

I don't think the state cared whether scientists cared about the ethics of the project. But I guess Hacker News does, so let's read on!

> Scientists whose work suddenly raises the red flag — for example, those whose work gets labeled “potential dual-use research of concern” — often balk at the imposition of restrictions and the requirement of deeper reflection.

I don't care what kind of obsession you have with a task—if you know the impacts of your research, disapprove, and research anyway, I don't give a flying fuck about your intentions. You're a shitty person who evidently approves of what you enabled.

FWIW, I think basically every defense project after this is far more interesting in terms of the morals of every day workers. The bombing of two cities was, possibly, justified by the people who made the bombs. What are the excuses of everyone who trailed this action? The Cold War seemed to set humanity back by a many decades, and I'm more than happy to put this on the workers that fulfilled the vision of nuclear (& chemical, cyber, whatever) warfare. Since the USSR collapsed this regression in technological advancement has become even more pronounced.