I recently read the new Gödel biography Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel and it was pretty clear that Von Neumann played a key role in getting Gödel out of Austria just prior to WWII. Gödel had been a visiting lecturer at the IAS at Princeton off and on in the 30s but probably due to his mental illness he would go back to Austria often with little notice - which didn't put him in good stead with IAS administration. In 1938 Gödel applied to teach at the University of Vienna but was turned down (Though not Jewish, he was considered to be too tied to what was labelled "Jewish science"). He was about to be conscripted into the German army which would have been a disaster given his many health problems. When Von Neumann became aware of Gödel's dire situation he lobbied his many powerful contacts in DC to come to Gödel's aid. Through diplomacy the Germans eventually allowed Gödel to leave under the condition that he would have to come back to serve in the army. He barely made it out in late '39 and probably wouldn't have without Von Neumann's intervention.
As a side note, Gerhard Gentzen (who studied under von Neumann) was in the army from '39 to '41. It is a real pity that he was a Nazi and didn't leave Germany before the war.
The buried lede for me was that the slopes in the Pajarito ski mountain were created by one of the scientists just grabbing a bunch of explosives and blowing up trees:
- 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.
"Born in Kiev in the old Russian Empire, into "an old Ukrainian Cossack family which was part of the intellectual elite in pre-revolutionary Russia", Kistiakowsky fled his homeland during the Russian Civil War.
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."
That's super interesting. My local ski pass includes pajarito... it's hard to get me to want to ski in New Mexico but I might have to make a trip down this season
It's a nice little mountain, but depending on the year it might not have enough snow to open. People at Los Alamos sometimes do laps over the lunch break...
The more I read about the Manhattan Project, the more I become convinced that if it were not for the Manhattan Project, we might not have nuclear weapons even now.
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.
It's almost a certainty that at least enriched U-235 gun-type weapons would be made regardless of the Manhattan Project as the relatively simple technology of uranium enrichment came online. It's almost literally a cannon shooting a U-235 bullet into a U-235 sphere welded to the end of the cannon. Given the pure material (which you can make by spinning natural uranium in a tube), it's basically easy. Heck, the Manhattan Project people didn't even bother testing it like they did with the far more complex plutonium implosion device (Trinity).
The outer part was the projectile; the slug was the target. Making it the other way around - the way most of us always assumed it would have worked - would have forced the ring into criticality. So it is an easy concept, but the first guess is almost bound to be the wrong one.
Where did you hear that? It seems to me that the only thing that matters is the relative speed of the two components. Was the ring much lower mass than the core?
Edit: it was more. Nonetheless, accelerating the ring had advantages, according to WP! I didn’t know that.
It's not the mass per se, but the need for the thing to be contained at the target end. If the ring is already at the target end, you have a relatively large mass of enriched uranium surrounded by a neutron reflector. That's not going to make things go bang, but it is enough to be rather exciting. By sitting the core cylinder in the middle of the containment vessel with a gap around it and filling that gap with the ring on firing, nothing goes critical until it's supposed to go supercritical. (The ring is carried on a sort of sabot.)
I hope you understand that enriching Uranium isn't as simple as "spinning natural uranium in a tube".
The Manhattan project used multiple different processes at the time, simply because time was of the essence and they didn't know which would work and which would be most efficient when they started. At peak, they used 10-15% of total US electrical power, as well as quite a bit of important material (mostly metals for particle accelerators).
They didn't have access to centrifuge or laser based enrichment processes, which are significantly more power efficient, but neither of these are simple plants to build. Centrifuges in particular are very delicate pieces of machinery, constructed of special materials and balanced in an extremely delicate way. Oils from your hands would be enough to destroy a unit due to the crazy speeds involved. Not to mention you're still working with gaseous uranium hexafluoride which isn't OSHA approved :-).
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.
Centrifuges are delicate but they're not especially difficult for an industrial society to produce. They are comparable to jet engine shafts in terms of both loading and components. The manhattan project didn't utilize them because a single individual overlooked a simple method of making them more stable - you add a flexible section so any vibrations damp themselves out. German scientists claimed to have figured out this trick during the war, and the soviets implemented it shortly thereafter in their nuclear program, allowing them to enrich enough material for their weapons with only a fraction of industrial effort of the American project. Gas centrifuges for enrichment of chlorine isotopes had already been in use since 1934.
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.
"Gernot Zippe, an Austrian physicist, .. in the early 1950s figured out (with others) how to fix the problems that Beams had with his centrifuges. Amazingly, he did this while being a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union."
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/05/28/zippes-centrifuges...
The centrifuge has also come to play an essential role biochemistry. It is used to both separate proteins and determine their properties. A key challenge was to make something spinning above 10 000 revolutions per minute safe.
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...
Is it easy? You have to spin the tube at 50k rpm and flow a gaseous form of uranium through it. It’s dangerous and expensive and certainly hard if you’ve never built a centrifuge before.
The issue, as I understand it, is that even slight vibration mixes the UF6 enough to ruin things. Getting the centrifuges to rotate absolutely smoothly is difficult.
It's also possible that if it wasn't for the Manhattan project, there would have been nuclear armageddon in the 50s or 60s.
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.
I think that’s unlikely, and what that confluence of factors produced was speed rather than any otherwise undiscoverable knowledge.
“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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
To add to this, the USA was lucky enough to hustle a bunch of Nazi scientists out of Germany and into the US just AFTER the war, too. Werner Von Braun comes to mind, but there were others.
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.
> 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.
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 :-)
The Soviets were going to do it in a few years anyway. Maybe it would not be as quickly as they got it done. Japan even had a wisp of a program. Everybody knew that an atom bomb program was a thing to do.
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.
There's a story by George Dyson that gave me chills. He's playing in a barn as a kid and finds an ancient (clunky, weird) computer abandoned there. (George's dad, Freeman Dyson, was a heavyweight close to von Neumann & co)
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?
> He was convinced that the Soviet Union posed an existential danger to the security of the United States and advocated not just a preemptive but a preventive strike on that country; thankfully that part of his advice was not taken.
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.
Von Neumann once said of the Soviets: “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o' clock, I say why not one o' clock?”
Von Neumann's nuclear bellicosity is interesting to compare to Norbert Wiener's post-Hiroshima pacifism. Wiener was no fan of communism, but he seemed to suspect global thermonuclear war would not turn out well. Von Neumann apparently thought such a conflict could be won unilaterally.
His family got out of Hungary in 1919, to escape the Hungarian Soviet Republic of Bela Kun. The communist government nationalised estates and started a policy they themselves called the red terror
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror_(Hungary)
"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."
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."
There is something to be said for simplicity in the application of nuclear warheads. though that does make one wonder....
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 have seen footage of a B-52 laying down two B83 training shapes near-simultaneously on the same target, so I've got no doubt the scenario happens.
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.
>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.".
>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."
To be fair to Von Neumann, you’re displaying hindsight bias. It is possible that with the knowledge they had at the time, a preventative or pre-emptive attack would have been rational, maybe even with the best ‘expected outcome’.
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.
Intellectuals were more terrified than merely 'making fun' of Mutually Assured Destruction. Their satirising efforts where aimed at stemming the nuclear arms race and nuclear weapon proliferation.
'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.
> Intellectuals were more terrified than merely 'making fun' of Mutually Assured Destruction. Their satirising efforts where aimed at stemming the nuclear arms race and nuclear weapon proliferation
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.
Even more worrying, there is no guarantee that it will ever work again in the future. MAD is not effective against people who actually want to bring about armageddon/rapture/whatever. Humanity was lucky all contenders acted in a fundamentally similar cultural framework where survival was paramount.
The accidents and near misses show that MAD worked. People were reluctant to pull the final trigger because they knew the outcome would be catastrophic. Despite decades of serious diplomatic incidents, misunderstandings, and mishaps, there was no nuclear holocaust: this was exactly the outcome that MAD promised, and delivered.
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.
You have to understand where Von Nuemann came from to see why he wanted to initiate a first strike prior to the USSR developing nuclear weapons.
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.
That would be if the US bombed every single inch of Russia. There was not that capability for a while. Not saying killing any people is okay, let alone millions or hundred million. But I don't believe the intention of a strategic first strike on the USSR was to kill every person. Knocking out 1/2 cities would have accomplished their goals, resulting in the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in their mind saving more millions from the believed inevitable global nuclear WW3. Again, not saying it's justified, you're just viewing this from the future where you can see the outcome.
The war plans in the 60s against an industialized nuclear power were very different than the war plans in the 40s when von Neumann was advocating this.
> you're just viewing this from the future where you can see the outcome
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.
>"Even if the US bombed the USSR and prevented a counterstrike the US would have been worse off."
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.
> or something like what happened against the Japanese.
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.
I'd expect, if there would still have been functioning-ish USSR forces after the strike, assuming the first strike wouldn't have targeted central Europe as well, a near-suicidal conventional counter attack against Germany, France and UK and US forces in continetal Europe. With the expected result in civilian losses. Overall, a very bad idea. Because how much damage would you really do with a handful of nukes against the USSR?
It's interesting to appeal to the plight of Eastern Europeans given that they were also on the list of targets. The Soviets are harming Eastern Europeans, we must nuke the Eastern Europeans!
> 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.
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.
The UK provided key expertise to the Manhattan Project, so to say that they were "spying" is not fair. The UK bomb project had been going on for longer, and making it a joint US/UK project sped up development.
Members of the UK delegation were spies for the Soviets, and other members looked as hard as they could to find advantage for their own country. I certainly do not look askance upon the latter, and would have done the same.
I don't think anyone doubts the contributions our British friends made to the success of the project.
It may have been rational to pre-emptively murder millions of people by dropping nuclear bombs on them? That's quite a claim. We should be eternally thankful that the political leaders of the time had the good sense not to listen to certain geniuses.
It's the ultimate trolley problem. Is murdering a million OK if it saves 50 million?
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.
Same with MacArthur's obsession with using nuclear weapons in North Korea. If he had been given a free hand in 1951, it's very possible that the country would be in better shape today, with less net suffering.
(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.)
This is an interesting point I like to bring up. The incredible integrated suffering of the NK people at some point will surpass a single (theoretical) turning point event that MacArthur envisioned.
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.
I actually think that particular end would have justified the means, at least at the time. However, the larger effect of normalizing the use of nuclear attacks as instruments of policy would almost certainly have been worse for everyone in the long run.
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.
that is the difference between theory and practice. Von Neuman is a genius of theory, and the idea of atomic bombing of USSR into oblivion has significant theoretical appeal even with hindsight of today. Eisenhower was battle experienced military general, not far from [if not the] pinnacle of practice. Eisenhower saw USSR soldiers, and the history of the guerilla war on Nazi occupied territory was well known. As long as few Soviet soldiers or even just some general population survive the atomic bombing ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_of_the_Dead_Men:
"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]"
that would open the game for China who was quickly coming online - until of course China is bombed too. Though no occupation could cover the territories beyond Ural Mountains, so China would become the main player either way, and much larger than it is today. Basically USSR would be like US in the "Man in the High Castle" - the part close to Europe occupied by US/NATO, large unoccupied wild middle and the huge East by China. Such configuration had already happened centuries ago - Crusading European Knights on West and Mongols on the East https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kyivan_Rus%27_1220-1240.p...
It would be hard to sell the attack on the USSR to the american public, after years building them as good allies in their fight against Hitler. Such things take 2-3 years of concentrated efforts by state propaganda.
Even in USSR it was a problem to explain why our trustworthy allies have suddenly became evil and took a couple of years.
You never lived through a period of warm relations during ww2. It didn't change to hatred overnight.
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.
This was probably back in Stalin's days, where an attack by the Soviet Union on the West was reasonably viewed as a matter of time. The whole idea of separate spheres of influence and mutual deterrents wouldn't become believable until Khrushtchov.
Citation needed for "reasonably viewed". For example, Stalin said this to Mao in 1949:
"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."
Yeah, these are the parts conveniently ignored in almost all documentaries on this subject. There was also a legal dispute between Eckert-Mauchly and von Neumann about precedence of invention of early computer architectures.
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?
> Good thing there was a "steady hand" Eisenhower that green lit dropping of the bombs on general population
"... 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.'"
Sorry, I confused Truman with Eisenhower. Still, I have a feeling I can find similar views even from him:
> 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.
The biography was interesting. Other big misses were essentially keeping in place the health care system we have today, and not being much of a leader on civil rights issues.
For non mathematical topics "John Von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much More" by Macrae is reasonably well sourced although the author's self admitted lack of mathematics does show. A biography reasonably covering mathematical topics too doesn't really exist yet given the wide range of von Neumann's work but if you're more interested in mathematical legacy there was an AMS symposium on him in 1988 whose proceedings are available online https://bookstore.ams.org/pspum-50 and other various smaller papers on his technical legacy over the years.
I found "John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death" excellent, if you don't mind learning about Norbert Wiener as well :).
There's a fairly old book by William Poundstone "Prisoner's Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb". I can't vouch for it, as I read it long ago and don't remember just how much of a biography it was. It's very readable though.
"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".
Lots of good material here, but I was annoyed how the author chose to keep calling Von Neumann "Johnny". That's a bit like a biography of Richard Feynman in which the author almost always refers to him as "Dick" or "Ricky".
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.
> Lots of good material here, but I was annoyed how the author chose to keep calling Von Neumann "Johnny". That's a bit like a biography of Richard Feynman in which the author almost always refers to him as "Dick" or "Ricky".
The funny thing is, Richard Feynman often referred to him as "Johnny von Neumann." See "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" for examples.
Neumann is underrated. Everything might be relative, but one thing is sure: we are all reading this on a computer running on the von Neumann architecture.
I’m not sure he’s “underrated”, almost everything I’ve heard about him describes him as one of the most intelligent people to have ever lived. I have seen more than one article proposing cloning his DNA as the best way to save humanity
I mean, underrated in popular culture compared to Einstein, let's say.
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.
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
"How is it that Hungary produced so many geniuses in the early 20th century?" Wigner said. "I don't understand the question. There was only one genius: John von Neumann."
You are probably making a comment on diversity, but men's DNA encodes everything needed for a women simply by duplicating the X chromosome. Of course, more likelihood of genetic defects due to a single copy of an X as men are.
Von Neumann wasn't that important in development of the present-day computers. He just wrote a paper where he formalized the designs that were already appearing in real life due to other people - computer pioneers like Konrad Zuse and Eckert & Mauchly (ENIAC). Then other people started calling standard computers "von Neumann architecture". Pretty sure we would have similar to present-day computers without John von Neumann.
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 the Eckert/Mauchly story is much more egregious in that they were co-inventors of the "von Neumann architecture" and were ripped off by Goldstine and von Neumann.
Funny they list Feynman in the familiar 'cast of characters' responsible for the Los Alamos effort. He was a lowly graduate student at the time, responsible for organizing others in the compute lab using mechanical calculators (if I remember his biography right). Not a shining star. More of a pain in the side - he messed with security protocols and made life hard for everybody.
But its fun to put famous names in the article I guess.
Feynman was the youngest group leader at Los Alamos. He was also fairly instrumental in ensuring Oak Ridge didn't have an accidental criticality incident due to the way they were storing uranium oxide.
Exactly! Popular history is very much driven and sometimes twisted by the colorful characters that people like to talk about. Feynman wasn't important in Los Alamos at that time, he wrote a book of his favourite stories some of which were about his time at Los Alamos. He became famous/important later, due to his work on quantum theory, his lectures and the Challenger investigation.
The people he was leading definitely used it (against original instructions), and most likely invented, to his surprise. But he does not credit himself for it in Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman.
I know that. Freeman Dyson was his friend. The author of this article was not his friend, so it would be cool to use "Johnny" in a quote. Using it in every reference is weird, false familiarity, kind of disrespectful.
How do you feel about calling William Jefferson Clinton "Bill Clinton"?
That is, was "Johnny" something his friends called him, or what he called himself in general when introducing himself to people? I'm getting the impression it was more the latter.
Lack of geniuses of this caliber today is reason why we don't have to fear AI dominance (or hope for fully autonomous vehicles 99,99999%). There is nobody capable of creating it.
