Hydrogen Bomb Quotes

You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 X 10^18 joules of potential energy—enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.

He’d misspoken. She wasn’t a blow. She was a hydrogen bomb directly aimed at his solar plexus.

These are the folks who brought us the hydrogen bomb. Forgive me, Lord, for not being more grateful to these kind souls

Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia. The curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile and of rockets that can be aimed to hit the moon.

With the use of the hydrogen bomb, the Christian era was dead, and with it must die the tradition of the Good Samaritan. And yet Randy stopped...The incident was important only because it was self-revelatory. Randy knew he would have to play by the old rules. He could not shuck his code, or sneak out of his era.

My eyes had been closed for a few minutes when he said it: "I love you," he muttered, so quiet, like a prayer whispered into my neck. "Hmm?" I was nearly asleep myself, edges blurring; I was one hundred percent sure I'd misheard. "I love you." He said it again, clearer this time, right into my ear, breath tickling. I felt like a hydrogen bomb. I tried to be very still, but I knew he could feel my entire body tensing, a runner ready to begin a race -- Get set-- Go. I opened my mouth, shut it again. Oh God. I did love him, is the awfulness of it. I'd loved Sawyer since the seventh grade, when Allie and I began keeping a list of the places we spotted him. I loved his quick, blistered musician hands and the honest soul he kept hidden safe under all his bravado, and I loved how I was still, every day, learning him. I loved his silly, secret goofy side and the way he had of making me feel like I was a tall tree, just from the way he looked at my face. I loved Sawyer LeGrande so much that sometimes I couldn't sit still for the fullness of it, but when I opened up my mouth to tell him so, nothing came out. I could do anything for him, I realized suddenly. I could give him anything. But not that. If I said that to him, I knew I could never get it back. "Go to sleep," I whispered, and he didn't say it again.

You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 X 10^18 joules of potential energy—enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point. Everything has this kind of energy trapped within it. We're just not very good at getting it out. Even a uranium bomb—the most energetic thing we have produced yet—releases less than 1 percent of the energy it could release if only we were more cunning.

[Andrei Sakharov] won his Nobel in 1975 for demanding a halt to the testing of nuclear weapons. He, of course, had already tested his. His wife was a pediatrician! What sort of person could perfect a hydrogen bomb while married to a child-care specialist? What sort of physician would stay married to a mate that cracked? "Anything interesting happen at work today, honeybunch?" "Yes. My bomb is going to work just great. And how are you doing with that kid with chicken pox?

I don’t know how Albert would have felt about this, but an unknown element was discovered in the debris of the first hydrogen bomb test in the Eniwetok atoll in the South Pacific, on November 1, 1952, and was named einsteinium in his honour. I might have named it armageddium instead.

The smart money brings a gun to a knife fight. Reacher brought a hydrogen bomb.

In this second Randy made an important decision. Yesterday, he would have stopped instantly. There would have been no question about it. When there was an accident, and someone was hurt, a man stopped. But yesterday was a past period in history, with laws and rules as archaic as ancient Rome's. Today the rules had changed, just as Roman law gave way to atavistic barbarism as the empire fell to Hun and Goth. Today a man saved himself and his family and to hell with everyone else. Already millions must be dead and other millions maimed, or doomed by radiation . . . And the war was less than a half hour old. So one stranger on the roadside meant nothing, particularly with a blinded child, his blood kin, depending on his mission. With the use of the hydrogen bomb, the Christian era was dead, and with it must die the tradition of the Good Samaritan.

Here’s a question to give you a sense of scale. Which of the following would be brighter, in terms of the amount of energy delivered to your retina: A supernova, seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth, or the detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball?

The scientist is not responsible for the laws of nature. It is his job to find out how these laws operate. It is the scientist’s job to find the ways in which these laws can serve the human will. However, it is not the scientist’s job to determine whether a hydrogen bomb should be constructed, whether it should be used, or how it should be used. This responsibility rests with the American people and with their chosen representatives.

Gloria lowered the book. “Are you allergic to gluten?” I shook my head. “Is this Emily person allergic to gluten?” I shook my head. “Then why the hell are you avoiding it? When I was a kid we were afraid of the hydrogen bomb. Your generation is afraid of gluten.” Gloria handed me the book. “Yes,

Regression analysis is the hydrogen bomb of the statistics arsenal.

Imagination is more powerful than money or hydrogen bomb.

the physicist John Wheeler once calculated that if one took all the heavy water in all the oceans of the world, one could build a hydrogen bomb that would compress matter at the center so much that a black hole would be created. (Of course, there would be no one left to observe it!)

Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. if my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad. Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken. The crowning touch, the one thing that really puts true world-class badmotherfuckerdom totally out of reach, of course, is the hydrogen bomb. If it wasn't for the hydrogen bomb, a man could still aspire. Maybe find Raven's Achilles' heel. Sneak up, get a drop, slip a mickey, pull a fast one. But Raven's nuclear umbrella kind of puts the world title out of reach. Which is okay. Sometimes it's all right just to be a little bad. To know your limitations. Make do with what you've got.

Destiny is no more than the fulfillment of purposive potentialities within us. The human cerebral cortex is a single sheet composed of more neurons than there are stars in the known universe folded like a paper crane to fit in a quart-sized cubbyhole; there is enough potential energy in a single person that if released would equal thirty hydrogen bombs. Destiny is nothing to sneeze at!

It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr’s death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb.

In other words, a star is a nuclear furnace, burning hydrogen fuel and creating nuclear "ash" in the form of waste helium. A star is also a delicate balancing act between the force of gravity, which tends to crush the star into oblivion, and the nuclear force, which tends to blow the star apart with the force of trillions of hydrogen bombs. A star then matures and ages as it exhausts its nuclear fuel.

Of course, it would be much easier if we could all continue to think in traditional political patterns—of liberalism and conservatism, as Republicans and Democrats, from the viewpoint of North and South, management and labor, business and consumer or some equally narrow framework. It would be more comfortable to continue to move and vote in platoons, joining whomever of our colleagues are equally enslaved by some current fashion, raging prejudice or popular movement. But today this nation cannot tolerate the luxury of such lazy political habits. Only the strength and progress and peaceful change that come from independent judgment and individual ideas—and even from the unorthodox and the eccentric—can enable us to surpass that foreign ideology that fears free thought more than it fears hydrogen bombs. We shall need compromises in the days ahead, to be sure. But these will be, or should be, compromises of issues, not of principles. We can compromise our political positions, but not ourselves.

He wants to see, he wants to know, only to see and know. I'm aware that it is this mentality, this curiosity, which is responsible for the hydrogen bomb and the imminent demise of civilization and that we would all be better off if we were still at the stone-worshipping stage. Though surely it is not this affable inquisitiveness that should be blamed.

The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon [the 'Super', i.e. the hydrogen bomb] makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light. For these reasons, we believe it important for the President of the United States to tell the American public and the world what we think is wrong on fundamental ethical principles to initiate the development of such a weapon.

I don’t know how Albert would have felt about this, but an unknown element was discovered in the debris of the first hydrogen bomb test in the Eniwetok atoll in the South Pacific, on November 1, 1952, and was named einsteinium in his honor. I might have named it armageddium instead.

mass and energy have an equivalence. They are two forms of the same thing: energy is liberated matter; matter is energy waiting to happen. Since c2 (the speed of light times itself) is a truly enormous number, what the equation is saying is that there is a huge amount—a really huge amount—of energy bound up in every material thing.4 You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 × 1018 joules of potential energy—enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.

The scientist is not responsible for the laws of nature. It is his job to find out how these laws operate...Hydrogen bombs will not produce themselves.

The techniques of behavioral control make even the hydrogen bomb look like a child's toy.

Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia. The curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile and of rockets that can be aimed to hit the moon. In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet.

Though we became experimental creatures of our own devising, it’s important to bear in mind that we had no inkling of this process, let alone its consequences, until only the last six or seven of our 100,000 generations. We have done it all sleepwalking. Nature let a few apes into the lab of evolution, switched on the lights, and left us there to mess about with an ever-growing supply of ingredients and processes. The effect on us and the world has accumulated ever since. Let’s list a few steps between the earliest times and this: sharp stones, animal skins, useful bits of bone and wood, wild fire, tame fire, seeds for eating, seeds for planting, houses, villages, pottery, cities, metals, wheels, explosives. What strikes one most forcefully is the acceleration, the runaway progression of change - or to put it another way, the collapsing of time. From the first chipped stone to the first smelted iron took nearly 3 million years; from the first iron to the hydrogen bomb took only 3,000.

Faith is powerful enough to immunise people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunises them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb.

These Americans played with fire. Hydrogen bombs, megapower lasers, killer drones, shrunken micro-people…Americans were demon-raisers. Americans awakened technological demons they couldn’t control, yet they seemed to enjoy the power.

Love makes you feel out of the the world so does the hydrogen bomb.just the difference between them is there way of letting us feel as we are feeling at that moment are different.one let us to dream and the other makes our dangerous dream come true.

I looked for it [heavy hydrogen, deuterium] because I thought it should exist. I didn't know it would have industrial applications or be the basic for the most powerful weapon ever known [the nuclear bomb] ... I thought maybe my discovery might have the practical value of, say, neon in neon signs. [He was awarded the 1931 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering deuterium.]

If you didn’t already know this, the sun is going to die. When I think about the future, I don’t think about inescapable ends. But even if we solve global warming and destroy nuclear bombs and control population, ultimately the human race will annihilate itself if we stay here. Eventually, inevitably, we will no longer be able to live on Earth: we have a giant fireball clock ticking down twilight by twilight. In many ways, I think mortality is more manageable when we consider our eternal components, our genetics and otherwise that carry on after us. Still, soon enough, the books we write and the plants we grow will freeze up and rot in the darkness. But maybe there’s hope. What the universe really boils down to is whether a planet evolves a life-form intelligent enough to create technology capable of transporting and sustaining that life-form off the planet before the sun in that planet’s solar system explodes. I have a limited set of comparative data points, but I’d estimate that we’re actually doing okay at this point. We already have (intelligent) life, technology, and (primitive) space travel. And we still have some time before our sun runs out of hydrogen and goes nuclear. Yet none of that matters unless we can develop a sustainable means of living and traveling in space. Maybe we can. What I’ve concluded is that if we do reach this point, we have crossed a remarkable threshold—and will emerge into the (rare?) evolutionary status of having outlived the very life source that created us. It’s natural selection on a Universal scale. “The Origin of the Aliens,” one could say; a survival of the fittest planets. Planets capable of evolving life intelligent enough to leave before the lights go out. I suppose that without a God, NASA is my anti-nihilism. Alone and on my laptop, these ideas can humble me into apathy.

Ever since the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had first reached him in California, Brecht had connected Galileo's caving-in before the Inquisition as the great and perhaps ineradicable moral blot on the history of physics and the developments in modern physics that led to the atomic and hydrogen bombs.

You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 × 1018 joules of potential energy—enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.

Nowadays we can see as never before that the peril which threatens all of us comes not from nature, but from man, from the psyches of the individual and the mass. The psychic aberration of man is the danger. Everything depends upon whether or not our psyche functions properly. If certain persons lose their heads nowadays, a hydrogen bomb will go off.

On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the largest, most powerful nuclear weapon the world had ever known. Called the Tsar Bomba, the hydrogen bomb had an unbelievable yield of fifty megatons, roughly ten times the amount of all the explosives used in seven years of war during World War II, including both nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Should the research worker of the future discover some means of releasing this [atomic] energy in a form which could be employed, the human race will have at its command powers beyond the dream of scientific fiction, but the remotest possibility must always be considered that the energy once liberated will be completely uncontrollable and by its intense violence detonate all neighbouring substances. In this event, the whole of the hydrogen on earth might be transformed at once and the success of the experiment published at large to the universe as a new star.

Castle Bravo had been built according to the “Teller-Ulam” scheme—named for its co-designers, Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam—which meant, unlike with the far less powerful atomic bomb, this hydrogen bomb had been designed to hold itself together for an extra hundred-millionth of a second, thereby allowing its hydrogen isotopes to fuse and create a chain reaction of nuclear energy, called fusion, producing a potentially infinite amount of power, or yield. “What this meant,” Freedman explains, was that there was “a one-in-one-million chance that, given how much hydrogen [is] in the earth’s atmosphere, when Castle Bravo exploded, it could catch the earth’s atmosphere on fire. Some scientists were extremely nervous. Some made bets about the end of the world.

Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up, as the students under examination had conceivably been cheered up, by a short study of the Middle Ages. The hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chioang Kaidick, Senator McCarthy himself, would then seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages

The colored people gonna have hydrogen bombs all their own,” he said. “They working on it right now. Pretty soon gonna be Japan’s turn to drop one. The rest of the colored folks gonna give them the honor of dropping the first one.” “Where they going to drop it?” I said. “China, most likely,” he said. “On other colored people?” I said. He looked at me pityingly. “Who ever told you a Chinaman was a colored man?” he said.

Richard Rhodes’s exceptionally readable The Making of the Atomic Bomb is the place to start. This sweeping chronicle of the difficult and sobering history of the endeavor called the Manhattan Project is marked by Rhodes’s insightful studies of the complicated people who were most involved in the creation of the bomb, from Niels Bohr to Robert Oppenheimer. Rhodes followed this book with Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb.

Here’s a question to give you a sense of scale. Which of the following would be brighter, in terms of the amount of energy delivered to your retina: A supernova, seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth, or the detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball? Can you hurry up and set it off? This is heavy. Applying Dr. Spector’s rule of thumb suggests that the supernova is brighter. And indeed, it is . . . by nine orders of magnitude.

If you think it’s offensive that I call alleged biblical miracles ridiculous, you should ask yourself whether or not it’s ridiculous to insist that Muhammad flew on a winged horse. Or that the earth was hatched from a cosmic egg? Or that Xenu, the dictator of the Galactic Confederacy, brought billions of his people to earth 75 million years ago and killed them using hydrogen bombs? These are all religious beliefs of others, but that doesn't mean calling them ridiculous is an insult - it's an objective fact until proven otherwise.

Dr. Edward Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” and a founder of the “Star Wars” missile defense system, proposed seeding the upper atmosphere with millions of tons of sulfur or other heavy metals to create a cloud cover to deflect sun rays and prevent further heating of the earth. Some scientists warned such a program would turn blue skies milky white and perhaps cause droughts and further ozone depletion. Teller admitted the difficulty in persuading the public to allow a program that would pollute the air with metal particles, many known to be harmful to humans.

...With a religious book it is less what we see in it than what we see through it that matters. J. R. R. Tolkien's fairy-tale epic the Lord of the Rings helps draw the distinction perhaps. Some of its admirers have tried to make it into a religion book by claiming, among other things, that the Ring of Power which must be destroyed is the hydrogen bomb. Tolkien, on the other hand, denied this unequivocally. But intended or otherwise, there can be little doubt that for many it has become a religious book. The "Frodo Lives" buttons are not entirely a joke, because something at least comes to life through those fifteen hundred pages, although inevitably it is hard to say just what. It seems to have something to do with the way Tolkien has of making us see the quididity of things like wood, bread, stone, milk, iron, as though we have never seen them before or not for a long time, which is probably the truth of the matter; his landscapes set deeper echoes going in us than any message could. He gives us back a sense that we have mostly lost of the things of the earth, and because we are ourselves of the earth, whatever else, we are given back too some sense of our own secret. Very possibly again he did not intend it. I may well be axiomatic that, religiously, a writer achieves most when he is least conscious of doing so. Certainly the attempt to be religious is as doomed as the attempt to be poetic is.

Three Moonie 65-megaton hydrogen bombs exploded nearly simultaneously at very high altitude. With no air around the bombs to absorb the initial blast of the explosions, and convert the energy into mechanical shock waves——all the nuclear energy blasted out in its electromagnetic form. It was a brutally intense pulse of Compton recoil electrons and photoelectrons that created huge electric and magnetic fields that were MURDER on sensitive electronic equipment at tremendous distances. The electro-magnetic fields, coupled with electric and computer systems, producing huge voltage spikes in the circuits and damaging current surges along all signal paths, fusing precision engineered memory and micro-boards and virtual drives and CPUs into fried silicon laced junk! Nanobots to Nanoscrap in Nanoseconds!

Why was his conduct with respect to the hydrogen bomb program disturbing? Oppenheimer had opposed a crash program to develop a hydrogen bomb, but so had seven other members of the GAC; and they all had explained their reasons clearly. What Gray and Morgan were actually saying was that they opposed Oppenheimer’s judgments and they did not want his views represented in the counsels of government. Oppenheimer wanted to corral and perhaps even reverse the nuclear arms race. He wanted to encourage an open democratic debate on whether the United States should adopt genocide as its primary defense strategy. Apparently, Gray and Morgan considered these sentiments unacceptable in 1954. More, they were asserting in effect that it was not legitimate, not permissible, for a scientist to express strong disagreement on matters of military policy.

A supernova occurs when a giant star, one much bigger than our own Sun, collapses and then spectacularly explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns, burning for a time more brightly than all the stars in its galaxy. “It’s like a trillion hydrogen bombs going off at once, supernovae are extremely rare. A star can burn for billions of years, but it dies just once and quickly, and only a few dying stars explode. Most expire quietly, like a camp fire at dawn. In a typical galaxy, consisting of a hundred billion stars, a supernova will occur on average once every two or three hundred years. Looking for a supernova, therefore, was a little like standing on the observation platform of the Empire State Building with a telescope and searching windows around Manhattan in the hope of finding, let us say, someone lighting a twenty-first birthday cake.

A week after testifying, Rabi ran into Ernest Lawrence at Oak Ridge and asked him what he was going to say about Oppenheimer. Lawrence had agreed to testify against him. He was truly fed up with his old friend. Oppie had opposed him on the hydrogen bomb and opposed the building of a second weapons lab at Livermore. And more recently, Ernest had come home from a cocktail party outraged upon being told that Oppie had years before had an affair with Ruth Tolman, the wife of his good friend Richard. He was angry enough to accede to Strauss’ request to testify against Oppenheimer in Washington. But the night before his scheduled appearance, Lawrence fell ill with an attack of colitis. The next morning, he called Strauss to tell him he could not make it. Sure that Lawrence was making excuses, Strauss argued with the scientist and called him a coward. Lawrence did not appear to testify against Oppenheimer. But Robb had interviewed him earlier and now made sure that the Gray Board

A year after Calder Hall opened, in October 1957, technicians at the neighboring Windscale breeder reactor faced an almost impossible deadline to produce the tritium needed to detonate a British hydrogen bomb. Hopelessly understaffed, and working with an incompletely understood technology, they operated in emergency conditions and cut corners on safety. On October 9 the two thousand tons of graphite in Windscale Pile Number One caught fire. It burned for two days, releasing radiation across the United Kingdom and Europe and contaminating local dairy farms with high levels of iodine 131. As a last resort, the plant manager ordered water poured onto the pile, not knowing whether it would douse the blaze or cause an explosion that would render large parts of Great Britain uninhabitable. A board of inquiry completed a full report soon afterward, but, on the eve of publication, the British prime minister ordered all but two or three existing copies recalled and had the metal type prepared to print it broken up. He then released his own bowdlerized version to the public, edited to place the blame for the fire on the plant operators. The British government would not fully acknowledge the scale of the accident for another thirty years.

on his first visit to the Los Alamos Tech Area, when he had encountered von Neumann discussing theory with dark, intense Edward Teller, the “tremendously long formulae on the blackboard” had scared him. “Seeing all these complications of analysis, I was dumbfounded, fearing I would never be able to contribute anything.” But the equations stayed on the board from day to day, which meant to Ulam that the pace of invention was relatively slow, and he soon regained confidence.1340 “I found out that the main ability to have was a visual, and also an almost tactile, way to imagine the physical situations, rather than a merely logical picture of the problems.

Liberty which is paraded in the West as a holy grail to keep the masses quiet, descends on their necks as a rubber truncheon when they organise to demand their real liberties, their basic rights to work, to land, to a secure future. There are hundreds of millions of people in the world today who have decided that liberty is something to do with everyday life and work. They are not interested in a liberty of the press to promote religious and racial hatreds; not interested in a liberty for publishers to flood bookstalls with pornographic literature; not interested in the liberty of scientists to devote their best brains to inventing hydrogen bombs or other means of destroying the world; not interested even in the theoretical liberty of the ballot box to decide between two groups of political parties both bent on maintaining the privileges of one tiny group of people over the great majority of the population. If the same advance is made in the next twenty years as has been made in the past five years in bringing real liberties to the workers and peasants of the People's Democracies, and if the Western powers give up their morbid plans to destroy the People's Democracies by force of arms and the hydrogen bomb, the whole population will be enjoying liberties of a quality not yet dreamed of in the Western world. [From Chapter 16 of People's Democracies (World Unity Publications, 1951), pp. 277-287.]

So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late. Let’s remember again the radical profession that we Christians make. We confess that Jesus is the world’s true king. We confess that Jesus is Lord...right now. The rightful ruler of the world is not some ancient Caesar, not some contemporary Commander in Chief, but Jesus Christ! Jesus is not going to be king someday, Jesus is King of Kings right now! Christ was crowned on the cross and God vindicated him as the world’s true king by raising him from the dead. This is what Christians confess, believe, and seek to live. We have no king but Jesus. And our king has nothing to do with violent power. Our king has no use for nuclear weapons. Why? Because you can’t love your neighbor with hydrogen bombs. Our king said his kingdom does not come from the world of war, which is why his servants do not fight. Jesus told Pontius Pilate, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my servants would be fighting.”[9] The kingdom from heaven that Jesus brings into the world does not come riding an M1 Abrams tank. In the kingdom of the Prince of Peace, we study war no more, we turn swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, we turn tanks into tractors and missile silos into grain silos. Our task is not to turn the world into a battlefield, our task is to turn the world into a garden. Our goal is not Armageddon, our goal is New Jerusalem. We’re marching to Zion, the beautiful city of God. Of course Governor Pilate doesn’t believe any of this.

Nevertheless, it would be prudent to remain concerned. For, like death, IT would come: Armageddon. There would be-without exaggeration-a series of catastrophes. As a consequence of the evil in man...-no mere virus, however virulent, was even a burnt match for our madness, our unconcern, our cruelty-...there would arise a race of champions, predators of humans: namely earthquakes, eruptions, tidal waves, tornados, typhoons, hurricanes, droughts-the magnificent seven. Floods, winds, fires, slides. The classical elements, only angry. Oceans would warm, the sky boil and burn, the ice cap melt, the seas rise. Rogue nations, like kids killing kids at their grammar school, would fire atomic-hydrogen-neutron bombs at one another. Smallpox would revive, or out of the African jungle would slide a virus no one understood. Though reptilian only in spirit, the disease would make us shed our skins like snakes and, naked to the nerves, we'd expire in a froth of red spit. Markets worldwide would crash as reckless cars on a speedway do, striking the wall and rebounding into one another, hurling pieces of themselves at the spectators in the stands. With money worthless-that last faith lost-the multitude would riot, race against race at first, God against God, the gots against the gimmes. Insects hardened by generations of chemicals would consume our food, weeds smother our fields, fire ants, killer bees sting us while we're fleeing into refuge water, where, thrashing we would drown, our pride a sodden wafer. Pestilence. War. Famine. A cataclysm of one kind or another-coming-making millions of migrants. Wearing out the roads. Foraging in the fields. Looting the villages. Raping boys and women. There'd be no tent cities, no Red Cross lunches, hay drops. Deserts would appear as suddenly as patches of crusty skin. Only the sun would feel their itch. Floods would sweep suddenly over all those newly arid lands as if invited by the beach. Forest fires would burn, like those in coal mines, for years, uttering smoke, making soot for speech, blackening every tree leaf ahead of their actual charring. Volcanoes would erupt in series, and mountains melt as though made of rock candy till the cities beneath them were caught inside the lava flow where they would appear to later eyes, if there were any eyes after, like peanuts in brittle. May earthquakes jelly the earth, Professor Skizzen hotly whispered. Let glaciers advance like motorboats, he bellowed, threatening a book with his fist. These convulsions would be a sign the parasites had killed their host, evils having eaten all they could; we'd hear a groan that was the going of the Holy Ghost; we'd see the last of life pissed away like beer from a carouse; we'd feel a shudder move deeply through this universe of dirt, rock, water, ice, and air, because after its long illness the earth would have finally died, its engine out of oil, its sky of light, winds unable to catch a breath, oceans only acid; we'd be witnessing a world that's come to pieces bleeding searing steam from its many wounds; we'd hear it rattling its atoms around like dice in a cup before spilling randomly out through a split in the stratosphere, night and silence its place-well-not of rest-of disappearance. My wish be willed, he thought. Then this will be done, he whispered so no God could hear him. That justice may be served, he said to the four winds that raged in the corners of his attic.

Scientists expected that the Super, a fusion or "thermonuclear" weapon, would be an awesomely destructive horror that could unleash the equivalent of several million tons of TNT. This was hundreds of times more powerful than atomic bombs. A few well-placed hydrogen bombs could kill millions of people. Among the foes of development were famous scientists who had supported atomic development during World War II. One was Albert Einstein, who took to the radio to say that "general annilihation beckons.

If the spread of Pakistani cuisine is the single greatest improvement in British public life over the past half-century, it is also worth noting that the bombs used for the failed London transport attacks of July 21, 2005, were made from a mix of hydrogen peroxide and chapati flour.

Precisely balanced gyroscopes supplanted the magnetic compass as a direction finder, enabled aircraft to fly straight and level, and led to inertial navigational systems that could guide submarines beneath the North Pole or drop hydrogen bombs on Moscow.

Alan Shepard’s successful suborbital spaceflight had settled questions for President John Kennedy who accepted that Russian rockets and spacecraft were bigger. But he was coming to realize the Soviets weren’t better because their technology could only build large nuclear warheads. They needed monstrous missiles to carry their monstrous bombs, but not America. With the significant breakthrough in size reduction in America’s hydrogen bomb warheads, the same bang could be carried to any target by a rocket a third of the size. For this reason President Kennedy was convinced we were actually ahead of the Russians in rocketry, space vehicles, and the digital computer. He felt confident that in any technological race we could beat them. And Kennedy was ready to take what many considered a huge gamble.

the conspirators had completed experiments on potent liquid explosives manufactured from hydrogen peroxide, hexamine, and citric acid. Their formula could disguise a powerful bomb as a colored sports drink, to be detonated by ordinary AA batteries.

The colored people gonna have hydrogen bombs all their own,” he said. “They working on it right now. Pretty soon gonna be Japan’s turn to drop one. The rest of the colored folks gonna give them the honor of dropping the first one.” “Where they going to drop it?” I said. “China, most likely,” he said. “On other colored people?” I said. He looked at me pityingly. “Who ever told you a Chinaman was a colored man?

Suddenly the sky collapsed into darkness and a dozen bright stars appeared. In their midst hung an awful, black ball, rimmed in ruby red and surrounded by the doomsday glow of the gray corona. No photograph can do justice to this appalling sight: The dynamic range from bright to dark is too great, and the colors are literally unearthly. (The ionized gas of the solar corona is hotter than anything gets on Earth except, momentarily, in the detonation of a hydrogen bomb, and is thinner than a laboratory vacuum.) I staggered back a few steps, like a drunken man—or like the Medes and Lydians, who stopped fighting and made peace when a solar eclipse interrupted their battle in 585 B.C. Observers more disciplined than myself have taken leave of their senses at just this moment. The astronomer Charles A. Young of Princeton University berated himself for falling into a trance during the 1869 solar eclipse in Iowa and failing to carry out his scientific tasks: “I cannot describe the sensation of surprise and mortification, of personal imbecility and wasted opportunity that overwhelmed me when the sunlight flashed out,” he recalled.

A thermonuclear weapon uses an atomic bomb inside itself as its triggering mechanism. As an internal, explosive fuse. The Super’s monstrous, explosive power comes as the result of an uncontrolled, self-sustaining chain reaction in which hydrogen isotopes fuse under extremely high temperatures in a process called nuclear fusion.

The year 1952 saw the invention of the thermonuclear bomb, also called the hydrogen bomb. A two-stage mega-weapon: a nuclear bomb within a nuclear bomb. A thermonuclear weapon uses an atomic bomb inside itself as its triggering mechanism. As an internal, explosive fuse. The Super’s monstrous, explosive power comes as the result of an uncontrolled, self-sustaining chain reaction in which hydrogen isotopes fuse under extremely high temperatures in a process called nuclear fusion

Dr. Edward Teller, "Father" of the hydrogen bomb.

lost a hydrogen bomb in the ocean near Spain,

If hydrogen, the element of lowest atomic weight, should be the building block (aside from other particles of negligible weight) then something must be lost in the process of fusing hydrogen atoms to form elements of larger atomic weight. This loss of mass, which has been known to be equivalent to energy since Einstein’s work of 1905, is called the binding energy. The idea occurred that it might perhaps be utilized. This is now done in the fusion process that takes place when a hydrogen bomb explodes and the extra mass is converted to radiated energy.

Consider a nonstatistics example: Did the U.S. invasion of Iraq make America safer? There is only one intellectually honest answer: We will never know. The reason we will never know is that we do not know—and cannot know—what would have happened if the United States had not invaded Iraq. True, the United States did not find weapons of mass destruction. But it is possible that on the day after the United States did not invade Iraq Saddam Hussein could have climbed into the shower and said to himself, “I could really use a hydrogen bomb. I wonder if the North Koreans will sell me one?” After that, who knows?

Failures as people: millions of Americans felt that this description fit them to a T. Seeking a solution, any solution, they eagerly forked over their cash to any huckster who promised release, the quicker and more effortlessly the better: therapies like “bioenergetics” (“The Revolutionary Therapy That Uses the Language of the Body to Heal the Problems of the Mind”); Primal Scream (which held that when patients shrieked in a therapist’s office, childhood trauma could be reexperienced, then released; John Lennon and James Earl Jones were fans); or Transcendental Meditation, which promised that deliverance could come if you merely closed your eyes and chanted a mantra (the “TM” organization sold personal mantras, each supposedly “unique,” to hundreds of thousands of devotees). Or “religions” like the Church Universal and Triumphant, or the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, or “Scientology”—this last one invented by a science fiction writer, reportedly on a bet. Devotees paid cash to be “audited” by practitioners who claimed the power—if, naturally, you paid for enough sessions—to remove “trauma patterns” accreted over the 75 million years that had passed since Xenu, tyrant of the Galactic Confederacy, deposited billions of people on earth next to volcanoes and detonated hydrogen bombs inside those volcanos, thus scattering harming “body thetans” to attach to the souls of the living, which once unlatched allowed practitioners to cross the “bridge to total freedom” and “unlimited creativity.” Another religion, the story had it, promised “perfect knowledge”—though its adherents’ public meeting was held up several hours because none of them knew how to run the movie projector. Gallup reported that six million Americans had tried TM, five million had twisted themselves into yoga poses, and two million had sampled some sort of Oriental religion. And hundreds of thousands of Americans in eleven cities had plunked down $250 for the privilege being screamed at as “assholes.” “est”—Erhard Seminars Training, named after the only-in-America hustler who invented it, Werner Erhard, originally Jack Rosenberg, a former used-car and encyclopedia salesman who had tried and failed to join the Marines (this was not incidental) at the age of seventeen, and experienced a spiritual rebirth one morning while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge (“I realized that I knew nothing. . . . In the next instant—after I realized that I knew nothing—I realized that I knew everything”)—promised “to transform one’s ability to experience living so that the situations one had been trying to change or had been putting up with, clear up just in the process of life itself,” all that in just sixty hours, courtesy of a for-profit corporation whose president had been general manager of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of California and a former member of the Harvard Business School faculty. A

Smart people don’t start many bar fights. But stupid people don’t build many hydrogen bombs.

A supernova, seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth, or the detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball? Can you hurry up and set it off? This is heavy. Applying Dr. Spector’s rule of thumb suggests that the supernova is brighter. And indeed, it is . . . by nine orders of magnitude.

The career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who headed the Manhattan Project, draws such questions to a focus that resembles the bead of a laser-gunsight on a victim’s breastbone. It was Oppenheimer whom the public lionized as the brains behind the bomb; who agonized about the devastation his brilliance had helped to unleash; who hoped that the very destructiveness of the new “gadget,” as the bombmakers called their invention, might make war obsolete; and whose sometime Communist fellow-traveling and opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb — a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki — brought about his political disgrace and downfall, which of course have marked him in the eyes of some as all the more heroic, a visionary persecuted by warmongering McCarthyite troglodytes. His legacy, of course, is far more complicated.

The warriors of our country, thought Mark, the protectors of our moral decline—so innocent and so lethal. They would go where they were told and do whatever was asked of them. Too bad the morality of the world’s leaders was not worthy of the trust and sacrifice of these young men and women. Too many leaders were obsessed with gaining power and money. So much energy was squandered inventing better ways of slaughtering each other just to steal the other’s shiny beads and women and oil. What had mankind given the world? Hydrogen bombs, exotic chemical agents, and anthrax letters... Humanity was a mess! We kill off a new species every day and replace their habitat with life sustaining concrete. Perhaps we had indeed earned our well-deserved extinction. The

Nuclear weapons have only been used twice, both times in the war against Japan. In each case it was used by the United States during World War II. The first was used on August 6, 1945, over the Japanese city of Hiroshima and the second was dropped three days later over the Japanese city of Nagasaki. The two bombs resulted in the deaths of nearly a quarter million people! Recently I have heard it said that since we have the second largest arsenal of nuclear bombs, we should use them to teach North Korea a lesson and reduce tensions. Perhaps we are the ones that need to learn a lesson, so let me start by saying that since these first two bombs that have been used in anger, over two thousand tests have been conducted and that it was Russia that tested the largest bomb ever detonated. On 30 October 1961, Russia which was then the Soviet Union, detonated what was called the Tsar Bomb, a hydrogen bomb with a yield of 50 megatons which is more than 3,000 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Are we and our leaders insane? It is only the “Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons” of which we are a member that can reduce the spread and possible the use of nuclear weapons. Now with North Korea being a player, its effectiveness has been questioned and we are on the brink of engaging in a contest that threatens to kill 2,000,000 people in the first day. Many of these people are American military personnel and their families stationed in in Seoul, South Korea. Following any initiative on our part, including the taunts we are making, all bets will be off and there is the possibility that other countries will see the United States as the enemy that has to be stopped!

Then the 1956 Peace Prize went to Eisenhower and Khrushchev for agreeing not to build the hydrogen bomb. That agreement was now also called the Szilard Treaty. Today the H-bomb was a threshold no one dared cross without exciting hostile moves by all other powers.

The fraction of the mass of two hydrogen atoms that is released as energy when they fuse to produce helium is 0.007 (0.7%). That is the source of the heat produced in the sun and in a hydrogen bomb. It is the amount of mass (m) that is converted to energy (E) in the famous Einstein formula E = mc2, and it is a direct measure of the strong nuclear force. If the strong force had a value of 0.006 or less, the universe would consist only of hydrogen—not very conducive to the complexities of life. If the value were greater than 0.008, all the hydrogen would have been fused shortly after the big bang, and there could be no stars, no solar heat—again, no life. As Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow put it in their book The Grand Design, “Our universe and its laws appear to have a design that both is tailor-made to support us and, if we are to exist, leaves little room for alteration.

The fraction of the mass of two hydrogen atoms that is released as energy when they fuse to produce helium is 0.007 (0.7%). That is the source of the heat produced in the sun and in a hydrogen bomb. It is the amount of mass (m) that is converted to energy (E) in the famous Einstein formula E = mc2, and it is a direct measure of the strong nuclear force. If the strong force had a value of 0.006 or less, the universe would consist only of hydrogen—not very conducive to the complexities of life. If the value were greater than 0.008, all the hydrogen would have been fused shortly after the big bang, and there could be no stars, no solar heat—again, no life. As Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow put it in their book The Grand Design, “Our universe and its laws appear to have a design that both is tailor-made to support us and, if we are to exist, leaves little room for alteration.

The fraction of the mass of two hydrogen atoms that is released as energy when they fuse to produce helium is 0.007 (0.7%). That is the source of the heat produced in the sun and in a hydrogen bomb. It is the amount of mass (m) that is converted to energy (E) in the famous Einstein formula E = mc2, and it is a direct measure of the strong nuclear force. If the strong force had a value of 0.006 or less, the universe would consist only of hydrogen—not very conducive to the complexities of life. If the value were greater than 0.008, all the hydrogen would have been fused shortly after the big bang, and there could be no stars, no solar heat—again, no life. As Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow put it in their book The Grand Design, “Our universe and its laws appear to have a design that both is tailor-made to support us and, if we are to exist, leaves little room for alteration.

The year 1952 saw the invention of the thermonuclear bomb, also called the hydrogen bomb. A two-stage mega-weapon: a nuclear bomb within a nuclear bomb. A thermonuclear weapon uses an atomic bomb inside itself as its triggering mechanism. As an internal, explosive fuse. The Super’s monstrous, explosive power comes as the result of an uncontrolled, self-sustaining chain reaction in which hydrogen isotopes fuse under extremely high temperatures in a process called nuclear fusion.

The year after Castle Bravo, the Soviets successfully tested their own deliverable hydrogen bomb. If something wasn’t done to stop it, the arms race would only continue to escalate.

But at some level even the most selfish and degenerate man knew what was expected of him. You never knew when you were going to be tested. It was what you did in such a moment that told what kind of man you were. He did not make his choice easily or without misgivings. But after those first few moments of uneasy consideration, an alteration came over him that reminded her in some way of the balloon being slowly filled with hydrogen. At first just a flaccid sack, supine on the field, but by the time it was over, inflated and shapely with power.

As for power, let no one claim that the ability of the hydrogen bomb to destroy an entire metropolis, or the promise of nuclear energy that heralds the “second industrial revolution,” or the games for grown-up children that are space exploration, have made a single person more potent and superior in himself, in his concrete being. These forms of a mechanical, external, and extrinsic power leave the real human being untouched; he is no more powerful or superior using space missiles than he ever was when using a club, except in its material effects; apart from those he remains as he was, with his passions, his instincts, and his inadequacies.

Each kilogram of heavy hydrogen equaled about 85,000 tons TNT equivalent.1622 Theoretically, 12 kilograms of liquid heavy hydrogen—26 pounds—ignited by one atomic bomb would explode with a force equivalent to 1 million tons of TNT.

The hydrogen bomb was thus under development in the United States onward from July 1942.

It must be remembered that this was 1868, before the biologists had had any great triumphs in the agricultural or medical fields. When Pasteur, a few years later, showed that the pebrine disease of silkworms could be controlled and that rabies could be cured scientists gained tremendous prestige and things were different. This attitude persisted until the 1940s, it tending to be held generally that a man who knew all about, say, compression physics was entitled to pontificate on politics, religion and anything else. After the explosion of the hydrogen bombs the world began to realize that outside their immediate field scientists could be as stupid as anyone else; inside it at times too.

By 1942 the Cornell physicist had established himself as a theoretician of the first rank. His most outstanding contribution, for which he would receive the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics, was to elucidate the production of energy in stars, identifying a cycle of thermonuclear reactions involving hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen that is catalyzed by carbon and culminates in the creation of helium.

Mines and trenches were just the obvious applications. Teller also suggested using hydrogen bombs to change the weather, to melt ice to yield fresh water, and to mass-produce diamonds. (Another unconventional suggestion attributed to him was to close off the Strait of Gibraltar, making the Mediterranean a lake suitable for irrigating crops.) Ted Taylor, a bomb designer, argued that nuclear bombs would be able to drive a rocket into deep space, even to other stars.21 Teller even found the idea of bombing the moon incredibly enticing. “One will probably not resist for long the temptation to shoot at the moon . . . to observe what kind of disturbance it might cause,” he wrote.

Dr. John Archibald Wheeler, called the father of the hydrogen bomb in some circles (others attribute paternity in that regrettable case to Dr. Edward Teller) has repeatedly urged that the simplest, most honest explanation of quantum paradoxes holds that the known universe results from the observations of those who observe it. This "observer-created universe" bears an uncanny resemblance to some of our data about "self-fulfilling prophecies," it begins to appear.

The resistance to hearing the women at Greenham Common is not unrelated to the resistance to "bizarre" information we have been examining. There are economic as well as neurological reasons why Dr. Reich and Dr. Leary went to prison, while Dr. Teller, Father of the Hydrogen Bomb, is a recognized Authority on The "Real" Universe, rich, honored and praised throughout the Citadel.

Teller told me that the fission bomb was all well and good and, essentially, was now a sure thing. In reality, the work had hardly begun. Teller likes to jump to conclusions. He said that what we really should think about was the possibility of igniting deuterium by a fission weapon—the hydrogen bomb.

The ENIAC’s first job was not firing table calculations at all but hydrogen bomb problems from Los Alamos.

The excuse given by some intellectuals that the killing of animals will help in balancing the ecological balance is dim-witted because of the other and non-violent alternatives available. Yet again, if the population were to be manipulated by slaughtering, remember that humans are the first species needed to be controlled. Everyone is well-versed with the problems of uncontrolled population growth, which is indeed a reason for many great problems of a country including unemployment and inflation. Single hydrogen or atom bombing and a majority of a particular place's population will be wiped from the face of the Earth. But it's just psychopathic and inhuman and the same is the case with the animals too.

All the uncertainty is gone. I feel like myself again. I lose myself in the plan. I’m going to need tools. A quantum pyramid scheme. A pair of physical bodies, a nugget of computronium, a bunch of entangled EPR pairs and a few very special hydrogen bombs …

Morally speaking, the fathers of the hydrogen bomb had nothing to do with the latter. They were cracking not ethics, not culture, not our soul, but a scientific and technological problem.

This was however NOT the scientist’s responsibility. Morally speaking, the fathers of the hydrogen bomb had nothing to do with the latter. They were cracking not ethics, not culture, not our soul, but a scientific and technological problem.

While Sonny loaded the truck with shovels and gunny sacks, along with gloves, jackets, and helmets—the basics—Lola phoned the other members of the local volunteer fire department. They were already awake because of the storm. With no other fire department to call on out here, neighbors had to take care of each other. Grass was money, especially now, but in this drought it was also explosively combustible. The month before there had been a fire on the other side of the mountains that shot up a plume like a hydrogen bomb. Wildfires were finishing off the West.

But before the Japanese or the Americans could build a hydrogen bomb they would have to build an atomic bomb. And in neither country was major support yet secure.

But the stupid orderlies, who had spent their time during the preliminary negotiations gawking at Guta washing the kitchen windows, grabbed the old man like a log when they were called in—and dropped him on the floor. Redrick went crazy. Then the jerk of a doctor volunteered an explanation of what was going on. Redrick listened for a minute or two and suddenly exploded without any warning like a hydrogen bomb. The assistant who told the story did not remember how he ended up on the street. The red devil got them all down the stairs, all five of them, and not one left under his own power. They all shot out of the foyer like cannonballs. Two ended up unconscious on the sidewalk and Redrick chased the other three for four blocks. Then he returned and bashed in all the windows on the institute car—the driver had made a run for it when he saw what was happening.