Manhattan Project Quotes

All I'm saying is that it's shortsighted to blame TV. It's simply another symptom. TV didn't invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression.

What the American people didn’t know was how aggressive the government was in protecting our defenses and creating weapons. FDR had already secretly approved the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb. And the government saw the waterfront as vital to our defenses. They feared that spies or other saboteurs would infiltrate the docks and interrupt the shipments of supplies or somehow obtain vital information about America’s secrets. They made a deal with the Mafia, specifically gangster Charles “Lucky” Luciano.

We planned for betrayal. They planned for deceit. No one ever thought to plan for harmony.

As the old saying went, the Manhattan Project wasn't built in a day. Or was that Rome? Something to do with Earth, anyway.

One day you have Einstein, puzzling over the theory of relativity, the next you’ve got the Manhattan Project and a big hole in the ground.

In no other type of warfare does the advantage lie so heavily with the aggressor." James Franck, The Manhattan Project neatly summarize the atmic bomb.

Don't be ridiculous! Mystic arts be damned, a dog with machine guns is always problematic.

Three times as many people worked on Apollo as on the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb.

To see what Times Square looked like before a city was there, we turn to a remarkable project called Welikia, which grew out of a smaller project called Mannahatta. The Welikia project has produced a detailed ecological map of the landscape in New York City at the time of the arrival of Europeans. The interactive map, available online at welikia.org, is a fantastic snapshot of a different New York. In 1609, the island of Manhattan was part of a landscape of rolling hills, marshes, woodlands, lakes, and rivers.

He smiled. “Did you know that the staff involved in the Manhattan Project shrank steadily before the first A-bomb test at White Sands?” I shook my head. “By the time the bomb went off, several of the prefab dormitories built to house the workers were empty. Here’s a little-known rule about scientific research: as one progresses toward one’s ultimate goal, support requirements tend to shrink.

As is now generally admitted, a Soviet bomb would not have been achieved for several years more but for the success of Soviet espionage in obtaining secret information from Western scientists associated with the Manhattan Project. That is to say, political ideas in the minds of certain capable physicists and others took the form of believing that to provide Stalin with the bomb was a contribution to world progress. They were wrong. And their decisions show, once again, that minds of high quality in other respects are not immune to political or ideological delirium....In the Soviet case, those involved thought they knew better than mere politicians like Churchill. They didn't.

The most expensive single undertaking of the Second World War was the B-29 Bomber, the Superfortress. The second most expensive was the Manhattan Project, the massive, unprecedented effort to invent and build the world’s first atomic bomb. But the third most expensive project of the war? Not a bomb, not a plane, not a tank, not a gun, not a ship. It was the Norden bombsight, the fifty-five-pound

The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book. The Bible can serve as a prototypical example. Like Wikipedia, the Bible's authorship was shared, largely anonymous, and cumulative, and the obscurity of the individual authors served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as "the literal word of God." If we take a non-metaphysical view of the Bible, it serves as a link to our ancestors, a window. The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship - the very idea of the individual point of view - is not a priority of the new ideology. The digital flattening of expression into a global mush is not presently enforced from the top down, as it is in the case of a North Korean printing press. Instead, the design of software builds the ideology into those actions that are the easiest to perform on the software designs that are becoming ubiquitous. It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. The efforts of authors are appreciated in a manner that erases the boundaries between them. The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting. Some believe it will be better; others, including me, believe it will be disastrously worse. As the famous line goes from Inherit the Wind: 'The Bible is a book... but it is not the only book' Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available.

Whether or not you agree with the outcome, the tremendous amount that the Manhattan Project accomplished in such a short amount of time–just under three years–is astonishing. It makes you wonder what other kinds of things could be accomplished with that kind of determination, effort, and financial and political support. What if the kind of money, manpower, and resources that went into the Manhattan Project went into the fight against hunger? Cancer? Homelessness?

But anyone who doesnt understand that the Manhattan Project is one of the most significant events in human history hasnt been paying attention. It’s up there with fire and language. It’s at least number three and it may be number one. We just dont know yet. But we will.

Can you tell me anything?” “It’s a bioengineering firm.” “Bioengineering,” Barney said. “Well, there’s the obvious …” “Which is?” “A DNA molecule.” “Oh, come on,” Nedry said. “Nobody could be analyzing a DNA molecule.” He knew biologists were talking about the Human Genome Project, to analyze a complete human DNA strand. But that would take ten years of coordinated effort, involving laboratories around the world. It was an enormous undertaking, as big as the Manhattan Project, which made the atomic bomb. “This is a private company,” Nedry said.

You said that the Manhattan Project was a major historical event. Is it possible to see it with any sort of perspective? We’ve been a long time without a nuclear war. Yes. Well, it’s probably like any bankruptcy. The longer you’re able to put it off the worse it’s going to be.

My father didnt sleep before the bomb and he didnt sleep after. I think most of the scientists didnt give that much thought to what was going to happen. They were just having a good time. They all said the same thing about the Manhattan Project. That they'd never had so much fun in their lives. But anyone who doesnt understand that the Manhattan Project is one of the most significant events in human history hasnt been paying attention. It's up there with fire and language. It's at least number three and it may be number one. We just dont know yet. But we will.

Mrs. Winterson didn't want her body resurrected because she had never, ever loved it, not even for a single minute of a single day But although she believed in End Time, she felt that the bodily resurrection was unscientific. When I asked her about this she told me she had seen Pathé newsreels of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and she knew all about Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. She had lived through the war. Her brother had been in the air force, my dad had been in the army -- it was their life, not their history. She said that after the atomic bomb you couldn't believe in mass any more, it was all about energy. 'This life is all mass. When we go, we'll be all energy, that's all there is to it.' I have thought about this a lot over the years. She had understood something infinitely complex and absolutely simple. For her, in the Book of Revelation, the 'things of the world' that would pass away, 'heaven and earth rolled up like a scroll,' were demonstrations of the inevitable movement from mass to energy. Her uncle, her beloved mother's beloved brother, had been a scientist. She was an intelligent woman, and somewhere in the middle of the insane theology and the brutal politics, the flamboyant depression and the refusal of books, of knowledge, of life, she had watched the atomic bomb go off and realised that the true nature of the world is energy not mass. But she never understood that energy could have been her own true nature while she was alive. She did not need to be trapped in mass.

now know about the involvement of Union Carbide in the Manhattan Project, the TNT Area, Area 51, and the Roswell Crash (where Carbide glue was found), we can assume that “nukes” and “saucers” were the exact same project. After Carbide’s Tech Center in South Charleston, West Virginia built the first atomic reactor in the late 1920s, and had

Fuck your science, Doctor... I've got a machine gun.

You see, not all of Henson’s projects made money. The Muppet Movie did, but The Muppets Take Manhattan didn’t.

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.

In a lot of ways it is easier to do things on a large scale. It is easier to build a skyscraper in Manhattan than it is to buy a bungalow in the Bronx. For one thing, it takes just as much time to close a big deal as it does to close a small deal. You will endure as much stress and aggravation; you will have all the same headaches and problems. It is easier to finance a big deal. Bankers would much rather lend money for a big project than for a small one. They are more comfortable investing money in a big prestigious building than they are a rundown house in a bad section of town. If you succeed with the big project, you stand to gain a lot more money.

What matters, though, is not the space you’re put in to work; what matters is the work you do in it. The Manhattan Project, the World War II race to develop the atomic bomb, also started out under a football stadium. Beneath the stands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago, a team of physicists led by Enrico Fermi built a crude fission reactor, brought its uranium fuel to critical mass, and set off a chain reaction that changed the world. We

By simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering ... an iron curtain between the masses and such facts or arguments as the local political bosses regard as undesirable, Totalitarian Propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical rebuttals. But silence is not enough. If persecution, liquidation and other symptoms of social friction are to be avoided, the positive sides of propaganda must be made as effective as the negative. The most important Manhattan Projects of the future will be vast government-sponsored inquiries into what the politicians and the participating scientist will call 'the problem of happiness' - in other words, the problem of making people love their servitude ... The love of servitude cannot be established except as the result of a deep, personal revolution in human minds and bodies.

Quite a few inventions do conform to this commonsense view of necessity as invention’s mother. In 1942, in the middle of World War II, the U.S. government set up the Manhattan Project with the explicit goal of inventing the technology required to build an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany could do so. That project succeeded in three years, at a cost of $2 billion (equivalent to over $20 billion today). Other instances are Eli Whitney’s 1794 invention of his cotton gin to replace laborious hand cleaning of cotton grown in the U.S. South, and James Watt’s 1769 invention of his steam engine to solve the problem of pumping water out of British coal mines. These familiar examples deceive us into assuming that other major inventions were also responses to perceived needs. In fact, many or most inventions were developed by people driven by curiosity or by a love of tinkering, in the absence of any initial demand for the product they had in mind.

The worst lie ever told is that it is easier to destroy than to create. This lie makes people apathetic about a number of imminently avoidable horrors, particularly the nuclear ones. But Oppenheimer didn’t just go outside one day and trip over an atomic bomb. Nuclear development required trillions of dollars and a massive sustained effort by America’s top politicians, military advisors, and scientific geniuses. Not one damn bit of it was easy. It was certainly harder that sitting down with Stalin or Khrushchev and having a talk . . . America had options. The path of destruction was a choice. It has always been America’s choice, and we citizens have always shrugged, assuming it’s too late to turn back the doomsday clock, although we’re the ones who wound it in the first place.

Some scientists, however, cling to the belief that the only obstacle to mastering common sense is brute force. They feel that a new Manhattan Project, like the program that built the atomic bomb, would surely crack the common-sense problem. The crash program to create this “encyclopedia of thought” is called CYC, started in 1984. It was to be the crowning achievement of AI, the project to encode all the secrets of common sense into a single program. However, after several decades of hard work, the CYC project has failed to live up to its own goals.

Mourning the dead led the living, as it often does, to come to terms with their own existence. Following Joyce, Benjamin sensed that this quintessentially modern trauma (the steam engine, that machine of progress, can also be a machine of mass destruction) presaged what the new century held in store.

The first reactors built in the United Kingdom used graphite as a moderator and air as a coolant; later commercial models in the United States employed boiling water as both a coolant and a moderator. Both designs had distinct hazards and benefits: water does not burn, although when turned to pressurized steam, it can cause an explosion. Graphite couldn’t explode, but at extreme temperatures, it could catch fire. The first Soviet reactors, copied from those built for the Manhattan Project, used both graphite and water. It was a risky combination: in graphite, a moderator that burns fiercely at high temperatures and, in water, a potentially explosive coolant.

In 1945, former MIT dean Vannevar Bush, who oversaw U.S. military science during World War II—including the mass production of penicillin and the Manhattan Project—authored a report at the request of President Franklin Roosevelt in which he explained successful innovation culture. It was titled “Science, the Endless Frontier,” and led to the creation of the National Science Foundation that funded three generations of wildly successful scientific discovery, from Doppler radar and fiber optics to web browsers and MRIs. “Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice,” Bush wrote, “in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.

Oppenheimer knew that in some fundamental sense the Manhattan Project had achieved exactly what Rabi had feared it would achieve—it had made a weapon of mass destruction “the culmination of three centuries of physics.” And in doing so, he thought, the project had impoverished physics, and not just in a metaphysical sense; and soon he began to disparage it as a scientific achievement. “We took this tree with a lot of ripe fruit on it,” Oppenheimer told a Senate committee in late 1945, “and shook it hard and out came radar and atomic bombs. [The] whole [wartime] spirit was one of frantic and rather ruthless exploitation of the known.” The war had “a notable effect on physics,” he said. “It practically stopped it.” He soon came to believe that

Heisenberg repeated his story about the German bomb program to anyone who would listen for the rest of his life. Goudsmit, who had access to the Farm Hall reports and had seen the pathetic remnants of the Nazi nuclear program firsthand, knew Heisenberg’s story was a fabrication. But, with the existence of the Farm Hall transcripts itself classified, Goudsmit could state only that Heisenberg was lying, without explaining how he knew. The first popular account of the Manhattan Project, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, written by the Swiss journalist Robert Jungk in 1958, repeated Heisenberg’s story almost verbatim. So did The Virus House, the first book dedicated solely to the history of the German bomb program, which relied heavily on interviews from Heisenberg and his fellow former Farm Hall detainees. (The author, David Irving, was later revealed to be a Holocaust denier.)

Oppenheimer had played an ambiguous role in this critical discussion. He had vigorously advanced Bohr’s notion that the Russians should soon be briefed about the impending new weapon. He had even persuaded General Marshall, until Byrnes had effectively derailed the idea. On the other hand, he had evidently felt it prudent to remain silent as General Groves made clear his intention to dismiss dissident scientists like Szilard. Neither had Oppenheimer offered an alternative to, let alone criticism of, Conant’s euphemistic definition of the proposed “military” target—“a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.” Though he had clearly argued for some of Bohr’s ideas about openness, in the end he had won nothing and acquiesced to everything. The Soviets would not be adequately informed about the Manhattan Project, and the bomb would be used on a Japanese city without warning.

By the end of June, Strauss had the votes of all but one commissioner. The only scientist on the Commission, Professor Smyth had made it clear that he thought Oppenheimer’s security clearance should be restored. As the author of the 1945 “Smyth Report,” an unclassified scientific history of the Manhattan Project, Smyth was familiar with both Oppenheimer and the security issues at stake. On a personal level, he didn’t particularly care for Oppenheimer; they had been Princeton neighbors for ten years, and Oppenheimer had always struck him as a vain and pretentious man. What mattered was that Smyth didn’t find the evidence convincing. In early May, he and Strauss had lunch and proceeded to argue about the verdict. At the end of their lunch, Smyth said, “Lewis, the difference between you and me is that you see everything as either black or white and to me everything looks gray.” “Harry,” Strauss snapped back, “let me recommend you to a good oculist.

It turned out that between 1945 and 1947, 18 people were injected with plutonium, specifically: 11 at Rochester, New York, 3 at the University of Chicago, 3 at UC San Francisco, and 1, Ebb Cade, at Oak Ridge. Several thousand human radiation experiments were conducted between 1944 and 1974. In 1994, President Clinton appointed the Advisory Committee of Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) to investigate these and other experiments funded by the United States government. Their final report was published in 1996.

Now Trump just needed somebody to help run it. He consulted friends, colleagues, experts. His choice shocked nearly everyone: he picked his wife, Ivana. She, like Donald, had no experience running a casino. But she did have a sense of style, albeit an expensive sense, and she did have Donald’s trust, at least at the start. He called her “a natural manager.” Some of Trump’s friends later wondered whether he put her there so he could have affairs with women in Manhattan, or to get her away from his construction projects in New York.

TWO WEEKS after Oppenheimer wrote his June 16 memo summarizing the views of the science panel, Edward Teller came to him with a copy of a petition that was circulating throughout the Manhattan Project’s facilities. Drafted by Leo Szilard, the petition urged President Truman not to use atomic weapons on Japan without a public statement of the terms of surrender: “. . . the United States shall not resort to the use of atomic bombs in this war unless the terms which will be imposed upon Japan have been made public in detail and Japan knowing these terms has refused to surrender. . . .” Over the next few weeks, Szilard’s petition garnered the signatures of 155 Manhattan Project scientists. A counter-petition mustered only two signatures. In a separate July 12, 1945, Army poll of 150 scientists in the project, seventy-two percent favored a demonstration of the bomb’s power as against its military use without prior warning. Even so, Oppenheimer expressed real anger when Teller showed him Szilard’s petition. According to Teller, Oppie began disparaging Szilard and his cohorts: “What do they know about Japanese psychology? How can they judge the way to end the war?” These were judgments better left in the hands of men like Stimson and General Marshall. “Our conversation was brief,” Teller wrote in his memoirs. “His talking so harshly about my close friends and his impatience and vehemence greatly distressed me. But I readily accepted his decision. . . .

I don’t believe a word of the whole thing,” said Heisenberg upon hearing the news. “I don’t believe it has anything to do with uranium.” Hahn jeered, “If the Americans have a uranium bomb then you’re all second raters. Poor old Heisenberg.” After they heard the BBC report the news in great detail later that night, Heisenberg and the others accepted the truth: they had been beaten. Over the next few days, Heisenberg attempted to work out how his project had fallen so far behind; his fumbling calculations show that he had never really understood how to even build a bomb in the first place, though he had certainly thought he’d understood it. And the bickering of the other scientists at Farm Hall confirmed what documents captured by Alsos had already suggested: the Nazi bomb program, unlike the Manhattan Project, was a disorganized mess, with vital information compartmentalized and no clear vision of how to proceed. Yet, in those same few days, the Farm Hall transcripts make it clear that Heisenberg and his student, Carl von Weizsäcker, purposefully constructed a revisionist narrative of their wartime activities. According to them, while the Americans had built a weapon of death and destruction on unprecedented scales, they, the Germans, had deliberately pursued only a nuclear reactor, being unwilling to build a massive new weapon for Hitler’s Reich—thereby placing the responsibility for their failure on their supposed moral clarity, rather than their sheer incompetence.

It’s time to recognize that a broad, multidisciplinary, multi-institutional, multinational initiative, guided by a broader, more integrated and unified perspective, should be playing a central role in guiding our scientific agenda in addressing this issue and informing policy. We need a broad and more integrated scientific framework that encompasses a quantitative, predictive, mechanistic theory for understanding the relationship between human-engineered systems, both social and physical, and the “natural” environment—a framework I call a grand unified theory of sustainability. It’s time to initiate a massive international Manhattan-style project or Apollo-style program dedicated to addressing global sustainability in an integrated, systemic sense.1

I began a new project: a photo-essay about the Occupy Wall Street movement that was overtaking Manhattan. Inspired, I snapped hundreds of photographs, wanting to document this singular moment in New York’s pulsing body, watching people flooding the sidewalks like human rivers, converging at the green park as one ocean. I took shots of the sharpest signs and strangest masks; the angry bankers in their crisp blue button-downs; the lines of bored-faced cops, slouching with thick arms crossed. And peering through my viewfinder, I learned the skill of noticing more deeply; I felt a thrill—a new civil affinity budding in my dreams and in the brick-and-mortar city, simultaneously: that we, the people, were awakening to the truth that a bundle of twigs is inconceivably strong.

In the mid-twentieth century, the subfield of cosmology—not to be confused with cosmetology—didn’t have much data. And where data are sparse, competing ideas abound that are clever and wishful. The existence of the CMB was predicted by the Russian-born American physicist George Gamow and colleagues during the 1940s. The foundation of these ideas came from the 1927 work of the Belgian physicist and priest Georges Lemaître, who is generally recognized as the “father” of big bang cosmology. But it was American physicists Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman who, in 1948, first estimated what the temperature of the cosmic background ought to be. They based their calculations on three pillars: 1) Einstein’s 1916 general theory of relativity; 2) Edwin Hubble’s 1929 discovery that the universe is expanding; and 3) atomic physics developed in laboratories before and during the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bombs of World War II. Herman and Alpher calculated and proposed a temperature of 5 degrees Kelvin for the universe. Well, that’s just plain wrong. The precisely measured temperature of these microwaves is 2.725 degrees, sometimes written as simply 2.7 degrees, and if you’re numerically lazy, nobody will fault you for rounding the temperature of the universe to 3 degrees. Let’s pause for a moment. Herman and Alpher used atomic physics freshly gleaned in a lab, and applied it to hypothesized conditions in the early universe. From this, they extrapolated billions of years forward, calculating what temperature the universe should be today. That their prediction even remotely approximated the right answer is a stunning triumph of human insight.

Who is going to fight them off, Randy?” “I’m afraid you’re going to say we are.” “Sometimes it might be other Ares-worshippers, as when Iran and Iraq went to war and no one cared who won. But if Ares-worshippers aren’t going to end up running the whole world, someone needs to do violence to them. This isn’t very nice, but it’s a fact: civilization requires an Aegis. And the only way to fight the bastards off in the end is through intelligence. Cunning. Metis.” “Tactical cunning, like Odysseus and the Trojan Horse, or—” “Both that, and technological cunning. From time to time there is a battle that is out-and-out won by a new technology—like longbows at Crecy. For most of history those battles happen only every few centuries—you have the chariot, the compound bow, gunpowder, ironclad ships, and so on. But something happens around, say, the time that the Monitor, which the Northerners believe to be the only ironclad warship on earth, just happens to run into the Merrimack, of which the Southerners believe exactly the same thing, and they pound the hell out of each other for hours and hours. That’s as good a point as any to identify as the moment when a spectacular rise in military technology takes off—it’s the elbow in the exponential curve. Now it takes the world’s essentially conservative military establishments a few decades to really comprehend what has happened, but by the time we’re in the thick of the Second World War, it’s accepted by everyone who doesn’t have his head completely up his ass that the war’s going to be won by whichever side has the best technology. So on the German side alone we’ve got rockets, jet aircraft, nerve gas, wire-guided missiles. And on the Allied side we’ve got three vast efforts that put basically every top-level hacker, nerd, and geek to work: the codebreaking thing, which as you know gave rise to the digital computer; the Manhattan Project, which gave us nuclear weapons; and the Radiation Lab, which gave us the modern electronics industry. Do you know why we won the Second World War, Randy?” “I think you just told me.” “Because we built better stuff than the Germans?” “Isn’t that what you said?” “But why did we build better stuff, Randy?” “I guess I’m not competent to answer, Enoch, I haven’t studied that period well enough.” “Well the short answer is that we won because the Germans worshipped Ares and we worshipped Athena.” “And am I supposed to gather that you, or

the military-industrial-scientific complex, because today’s wars are scientific productions. The world’s military forces initiate, fund and steer a large part of humanity’s scientific research and technological development. When World War One bogged down into interminable trench warfare, both sides called in the scientists to break the deadlock and save the nation. The men in white answered the call, and out of the laboratories rolled a constant stream of new wonder-weapons: combat aircraft, poison gas, tanks, submarines and ever more efficient machine guns, artillery pieces, rifles and bombs. 33. German V-2 rocket ready to launch. It didn’t defeat the Allies, but it kept the Germans hoping for a technological miracle until the very last days of the war. {© Ria Novosti/Science Photo Library.} Science played an even larger role in World War Two. By late 1944 Germany was losing the war and defeat was imminent. A year earlier, the Germans’ allies, the Italians, had toppled Mussolini and surrendered to the Allies. But Germany kept fighting on, even though the British, American and Soviet armies were closing in. One reason German soldiers and civilians thought not all was lost was that they believed German scientists were about to turn the tide with so-called miracle weapons such as the V-2 rocket and jet-powered aircraft. While the Germans were working on rockets and jets, the American Manhattan Project successfully developed atomic bombs. By the time the bomb was ready, in early August 1945, Germany had already surrendered, but Japan was fighting on. American forces were poised to invade its home islands. The Japanese vowed to resist the invasion and fight to the death, and there was every reason to believe that it was no idle threat. American generals told President Harry S. Truman that an invasion of Japan would cost the lives of a million American soldiers and would extend the war well into 1946. Truman decided to use the new bomb. Two weeks and two atom bombs later, Japan surrendered unconditionally and the war was over. But science is not just about offensive weapons. It plays a major role in our defences as well. Today many Americans believe that the solution to terrorism is technological rather than political. Just give millions more to the nanotechnology industry, they believe, and the United States could send bionic spy-flies into every Afghan cave, Yemenite redoubt and North African encampment. Once that’s done, Osama Bin Laden’s heirs will not be able to make a cup of coffee without a CIA spy-fly passing this vital information back to headquarters in Langley.

Thirty seconds after the explosion came first, the air blast pressing hard against people and things, to be followed almost immediately by the strong, sustained, awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to the Almighty.

Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief.

The Manhattan Project is America’s go-to shorthand for our deep conviction that if we gather the smartest scientists together and give them billions of dollars and a sense of urgency, we can achieve what otherwise would be impossible.

Way back, about a century ago, physicist Enrico Fermi and his colleagues, taking a lunch break from the Manhattan Project, found themselves discussing life in the cosmos. Some younger scientists claimed that amid trillions of stars there should be countless living worlds inhabited by intelligent races, far older than ours. How interesting the future might be, with others to talk to! Fermi listened patiently, then asked: “So? Shouldn’t we have heard their messages by now? Seen their great works? Or stumbled on residue of past visits? These wondrous others … where are they?” His question has been called the Great Silence, the SETI Dilemma or Fermi Paradox. And as enthusiasts keep scanning the sky, the galaxy’s eerie hush grows more alarming.

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.

Raised in privilege, Robert Moses was always cushioned from real life; from the age of nine, he slept in a custom-made bed and was served dinner prepared by the family’s cook on fine china. As Parks Commissioner, he swindled Long Island farmers and homeowners out of their land to build his parkways—essentially cattle chutes that skirted the properties of the rich, allowing those well-off enough to own a car to get to beaches disfigured by vast parking lots. He cut the city off from its waterfront with expressways built to the river’s edge, and the parks he built were covered with concrete rather than grass, leaving the city grayer, not greener, than it had been before. The ambient racism of the time hardly excuses his shocking contempt for minorities: of the 255 new playgrounds he built in the 1930s, only one was in Harlem. (Physically separated from the city by wrought-iron monkeys.) In the decade after the Second World War, he caused 320,000 people to be evicted from their homes; his cheap, sterile projects became vertical ghettos that fomented civic decay for decades. If some of his more insane schemes had been realized—a highway through the sixth floor of the Empire State Building, the Lower Manhattan Expressway through today’s SoHo, the Battery Bridge whose approaches would have eliminated Castle Clinton and Battery Park—New York as we know it would be nearly uninhabitable. There is a name for what Robert Moses was engaged in: class warfare, waged not with armored vehicles and napalm, but with bulldozers and concrete.

Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia University student who made waves as an activist against sexual assault, ended her school year as she began it: carrying a mattress. Ms. Sulkowicz carried her mattress around campus throughout her senior year to raise awareness to her school’s handling of sexual assault. On Tuesday, she brought it with her to her graduation ceremony, and walked with it during the processional. Four fellow female graduates helped her carry the mattress as she walked across the stage to cheers from the audience. Ms. Sulkowicz has said she was raped in her dorm by a classmate who was later cleared of the crime in what she said was a flawed university disciplinary proceeding. She has spent approximately the past nine months carrying her mattress on campus as part of a school-sanctioned art project, “Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight),” vowing to carry it as long as she and the accused student attend the same school. The project sparked debate on and off campus. In January, Ms. Sulkowicz was the guest of New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand at President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. The accused student, Paul Nungesser, and Ms. Sulkowicz both graduated Tuesday. Mr. Nungesser has said he didn’t rape Ms. Sulkowicz and last month filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court against Columbia for allowing what he says is sustained harassment against him. As part of the lawsuit, his attorney requested that Columbia bar Ms. Sulkowicz from carrying the mattress at graduation. The school almost did. On Monday, it sent out graduation guidelines that said: “Graduates should not bring into the ceremonial area large objects which could interfere with the proceedings or create discomfort to others in close, crowded spaces shared by thousands of people.” Students saw the guidelines as a reference to Ms. Sulkowicz, they said. But she showed up on Tuesday, mattress in hand. Some students wore red tape on their graduation caps in solidarity with Ms. Sulkowicz, referencing No Red Tape, Columbia’s anti-sexual-assault activist group. Mr. Nungesser’s attorney, Andrew Miltenberg, criticized Columbia. “Once again, Columbia has irresponsibly allowed Ms. Sulkowicz to create a spectacle, the purpose of which is to vilify and humiliate Mr. Nungesser,” Mr. Miltenberg said. “Shame on Columbia for forcing the entire class of 2015 to bear silent witness to the victimization of Mr. Nungesser, on a day set aside to celebrate their academic achievements.” Ms. Sulkowicz, who graduated magna cum laude, and her

False Fail. In rescuing Apple, Jobs demonstrated how to escape the Moses Trap. He had learned to nurture both types of loonshots: P-type and S-type. He had separated his phases: the studio of Jony Ive, Apple’s chief product designer, who reported only to Jobs, became “as off-limits as Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project.” He had learned to love both artists and soldiers: it was Tim Cook who was groomed to succeed him as CEO. Jobs tailored the tools to the phase and balanced the tensions between new products and existing franchises in ways that have been described in many books and articles written about Apple. He had learned to be a gardener nurturing loonshots, rather than a Moses commanding them.

There he became a Canadian citizen, founded a charter boat business (earning him the title of Captain) and became the science director of a uranium mining company. (According to one account, Hubbard had something to do with supplying uranium to the Manhattan Project.) By the age of fifty, the “barefoot boy from Kentucky” had become a millionaire, owner of a fleet of aircraft, a one-hundred-foot yacht, a Rolls-Royce, and a private island off Vancouver. At some point during the war Hubbard apparently returned to the United States, and he joined the OSS shortly before the wartime intelligence agency became the CIA.

Was this cathedral just a figurehead, a way of disguising the wealth of a too-powerful nation trying to catch up with history and culture-oriented Europe by tolerating a cathedral on some of the most valuable real estate in Manhattan? What in the European burg represented the heart of the social life of the community, seemed to survive here as an empty symbol. In my old and tranquil Transylvanian town, there was something magical about the Black Church, but in the American cathedral, the chaotic city was the enemy of any contemplative attempt. The cathedral was not a place of dialogue; Bach was missing and God was missing as well. There was a loss of mystery watching the Gothic shadows of the cathedral projected on the tall, ultramodern building, among screaming ambulances, elegant women and tourists eating their french fries on the stairs. New York City was closer to a factory than a temple. I have learned that it makes a difference if behind the cathedral you find a mountain or a well-designed skyscraper. From "On the Mountain, The Cathedral and the Fast-Food Culture (A Tale of Two Worlds)" in New to North America

Roosevelt had returned from Hyde Park troubled that Felix Frankfurter and Bohr had somehow breached Manhattan Project security, Bush and perhaps Conant had talked to Bohr and the two administrators had submitted to Stimson at his request a more detailed proposal incorporating Bohr’s ideas. In doing so they had explicitly recommended that the United States sacrifice some portion of its national sovereignty in exchange for effective international control, understanding as they did so that they would have to answer vigorous opposition:

In 1941, new results from a group of atomic scientists in England convinced Bush otherwise. Bush made the case to FDR and Henry Stimson, his secretary of war, that even if the chances that a nuclear weapon could be built were small, the US could not risk Germany or Japan getting it first. FDR accepted his argument and put Bush in charge. Bush launched an aggressive research program, built support among military and political leaders, and then handed the program over to the military as the Manhattan Project.

Cuomo and de Blasio also agreed to cut $3 billion from the capital program and reduce funding for the second phase of the Second Avenue subway from $1.5 billion to $500 million. In October 2015, the MTA board approved a revised capital program. The Second Avenue subway advocates, however, still had some political clout. At a rally on 96th Street, a coalition—including city council members, state legislators, contractors, the Regional Plan Association president, the city comptroller, the Manhattan borough president, environmentalists, and labor unions—urged the MTA to restore the $1 billion that was cut from the project’s second phase. They were afraid the MTA would abandon future phases after it opened the stations at 72nd Street, 86th Street, and 96th Street. Extending the subway to East Harlem had become an issue not only of transportation but of environmental justice, with the funding cut seen as a slap in the face to East Harlem’s predominantly Hispanic community.18 State legislators all across the city understood the need to relieve crowding on the Lexington Avenue line, according to Assemblyman Brennan. He said, “The concept of abandoning the Second Avenue subway, especially for the Manhattan delegation, was not even discussable, not even conceivable.” Even though the mayor had agreed with the governor in private to cut funding for the second phase, de Blasio joined all of Manhattan’s elected officials in criticizing the MTA.19 Behind

George Abramovich Koval … was an American who acted as a Soviet intelligence officer for the Soviet atomic bomb project. According to Russian sources, Koval's infiltration of the Manhattan Project as a GRU (Soviet military intelligence) agent "drastically reduced the amount of time it took for Russia to develop nuclear weapons." … Koval was born to Russian Jewish immigrants in Sioux City, Iowa. … George Koval attended Central High School, a red-brick Victorian building better known as "the Castle on the Hill". Neighbors recalled that Koval spoke openly of his Communist beliefs. … He graduated in 1929 at the age of 15. … Abram Koval became the secretary for ICOR, the Organization for Jewish Colonization in the Soviet Union. Founded by American Jewish Communists in 1924, the group helped to finance and publicize the development of the "Jewish Autonomous Region" – the Soviet answer to Jewish emigration to the British Mandate of Palestine then being undertaken by the Zionist movement.

Our project had not been under way six months before we hit another problem. The workbook was about five feet thick! If we had stacked up the 100 copies serving programmers in our offices in Manhattan's Time-Life Building, they would have towered above the building itself. Furthermore, the daily change distribution averaged two inches, some 150 pages to be interfiled in the whole. Maintenance of the workbook began to take a significant time from each workday.

And yet, as a Red Army officer, she was heading into a new battle. History was pivoting around her. Before the war, she had spied against fascists and anti-communists, Chinese, Japanese, and German; during the conflict, she had spied against both the Nazis and the Allies; after it, and henceforth, she would be spying against the West, the new enemies in a Cold War. A photograph of the Summertown neighborhood victory party includes a beaming Ursula, happily celebrating Hitler’s downfall. One man is wearing an army uniform. Another raises two fingers in the V for Victory sign. But behind the image of shared relief, triumph, and optimism lay a hidden ideological divergence that would soon erupt in a new conflict. “Everyone hoped for a better world,” she wrote. “But here our visions of the future differed.” — TWO MONTHS LATER, in the remote deserts of New Mexico, scientists of the Manhattan Project detonated the first nuclear device, in a test code-named “Trinity,” releasing a blast equivalent to twenty thousand tons of TNT.

The ink had run, but I was able to read the words to him: "'In battle, in the forest, at the precipice in the mountains, on the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows, In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame, The good deeds a man has done before defend him.' Ora says that's a quote from Bhagavad Gita." "I got it out of a biography on Robert J. Oppenheimer." he said, almost without embarrassment. "The head of the Manhattan Project. It was a favorite verse of his. I figured the man who brought the atom bomb into the world knew more about shame and self-doubt then most people.

There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely inhumane (nobody cares much about that nowadays); it is demonstrably inefficient - and in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude … If persecution, liquidation [killing] and other symptoms of social friction are to be avoided, the positive sides of propaganda must be made as effective as the negative. The most important Manhattan Projects of the future will be vast government-sponsored inquiries into what the politicians and the participating scientists will the call 'the problem of happiness' - in other words, the problem of making people love their servitude … The love of servitude cannot be established except as the result of a deep personal revolution in human minds and bodies.

In Manhattan, appreciation of history is exemplified in Collect Pond Park, a one-acre green space in Manhattan’s Civic Center whose name commemorates a pond where many pivotal events took place in the first two centuries of the city’s history. In 2012, the city began a reconstruction project that included a reflecting pool to evoke the park’s namesake pond. To

envisioning System/360 was one thing. Making it a reality required the equivalent of a man-on-the-moon program. It cost nearly as much. Tom Watson’s memoir noted that the investment required—$5 billion (that’s 1960s dollars!)—was larger than what the Manhattan Project cost.

The crash program for building the “super” dwarfed even the Manhattan Project. The AEC nearly tripled in size, growing from a handful of sites and 55,000 employees to 142,000 employees spread across more than a score of sites. It would devour nearly 7 percent of the nation’s entire electrical output, and, according to historian Richard Rhodes, exceed in capital investment the combined market capitalization of Bethlehem Steel, U.S. Steel, Alcoa, DuPont, Goodyear, and General Motors.

An 11th U-boat, U-234, turned for America following the German surrender, yielding the to Americans and providing them with a full cargo of technical documents, as well as 7.7 lbs of uranium-235, which likely ended up at the Manhattan Project's Oak Ridge facility in Tennessee. Thus, some of the products of Third Reich science ended up being used directly against their ally Japan prior to its surrender.

We take it for granted that great individuals—Gandhi, Kennedy, Martin Luther King—can have great positive impacts on the world. But we are loath to believe the same about negative impacts—unless the individuals are obvious monsters like Hitler or Stalin. But small numbers of people can have large, negative impacts, especially if they are organized, determined, and have access to power. Seitz, Jastrow, Nierenberg, and Singer had access to power—all the way to the White House—by virtue of their positions as physicists who had won the Cold War. They used this power to support their political agenda, even though it meant attacking science and their fellow scientists, evidently believing that their larger end justified their means. Perhaps this, too, was part of their professional legacy. During the Manhattan Project, and throughout the Cold War, for security reasons many scientists had to hide the true nature of their work. All weapons

Standing out from the (New York City) map's delicate tracery of gridirons representing streets are heavy lines, lines girdling the city or slashing across its expanses. These lines denote the major roads on which automobiles and trucks move, roads whose very location, moreover, does as much as any single factor to determine where and how a city's people live and work. With a single exception, the East River Drive, Robert Moses built every one of those roads. (...) Only one borough of New York City—the Bronx—is on the mainland of the United States, and bridges link the island boroughs that form metropolis. Since 1931, seven such bridges were built, immense structures, some of them anchored by towers as tall as seventy-story buildings, supported by cables made up of enough wire to drop a noose around the earth. (...) Robert Moses built every one of those bridges. (He also built) Lincoln Center, the world's most famous, costly and imposing cultural complex. Alongside another stands the New York Coliseum, the glowering exhibition tower whose name reveals Moses' preoccupation with achieving an immortality like that conferred on the Caesars of Rome. The eastern edge of Manhattan Island, heart of metropolis, was completely altered between 1945 and 1958. (...) Robert Moses was never a member of the Housing Authority and his relationship with it was only hinted at in the press. But between 1945 and 1958 no site for public housing was selected and no brick of a public housing project laid without his approval. And still further north along the East River stand the buildings of the United Nations headquarters. Moses cleared aside the obstacles to bringing to New York the closest thing to a world capitol the planet possesses, and he supervised its construction. When Robert Moses began building playgrounds in New York City, there were 119. When he stopped, there were 777. Under his direction, an army of men that at times during the Depression included 84,000 laborers. (...) For the seven years between 1946 and 1953, no public improvement of any type—not school or sewer, library or pier, hospital or catch basin—was built by any city agency, even those which Robert Moses did not directly control, unless Moses approved its design and location. To clear the land for these improvements, he evicted the city's people, not thousands of them or tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands, from their homes and tore the homes down. Neighborhoods were obliterated by his edict to make room for new neighborhoods reared at his command. “Out from the heart of New York, reaching beyond the limits of the city into its vast suburbs and thereby shaping them as well as the city, stretch long ribbons of concrete, closed, unlike the expressways, to trucks and all commercial traffic, and, unlike the expressways, bordered by lawns and trees. These are the parkways. There are 416 miles of them. Robert Moses built every mile. (He also built the St. Lawrence Dam,) one of the most colossal single works of man, a structure of steel and concrete as tall as a ten-story apartment house, an apartment house as long as eleven football fields, a structure vaster by far than any of the pyramids, or, in terms of bulk, of any six pyramids together. And at Niagara, Robert Moses built a series of dams, parks and parkways that make the St. Lawrence development look small. His power was measured in decades. On April 18, 1924, ten years after he had entered government, it was formally handed to him. For forty-four years thereafter (until 1968), he held power, a power so substantial that in the field s in which he chose to exercise it, it was not challenged seriously by any (of 6) Governors of New York State or by any Mayor of New York City.

If Prof. X is paid by the government to invent weapons to kill people, some will inevitably wonder about the moral character of Prof. X. If Prof. Y claims that Prof. Z the parapsychologist is untrustworthy, some will wonder if Prof. Y himself can be trusted fully, and if science is truly "impartial." In a world of TOP SECRET stamps and FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, some will inevitably wonder how much is being hidden from them by the Citadel, as the Manhattan Project was hidden in the 1940s and C.I.A. drug research was hidden in the 1960s and 1970s.

he had worked under Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish and had designed and built the Harvard cyclotron that now served the Manhattan Project’s purposes on the Hill.

Hungary was drawn along in the same vortex of intellectual excitement and scientific progress that enveloped the rest of the empire. An extraordinary constellation of the twentieth century’s leading physicists and mathematicians were the product of its equally exceptional educational system at the turn of the century—John von Neumann, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, Theodor von Kármán, Paul Erdös, and George Pólya, among many others. All came from Hungary’s Jewish middle class, all would flee Hitler’s Europe, and many would end up working during the Second World War for the Manhattan Project, helping to ensure that America, and not Germany, would be the first to build the atomic bomb. The educational reforms instituted in the era of ascendant liberal values in the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire emphasized creative thinking and experimental curiosity over rote learning.

In 1929 the firm received their largest project to date, the one that might have won the day for them on the Empire State project—they built the Bank of Manhattan Building at 40 Wall Street, which was pitted against Chrysler in the race for the world’s tallest. The foundations were started in May 1928, before the site was entirely cleared; less than a year later, the bank moved in. The seventy-story, 927-foot-high building was completed in eleven months.

In a math department that thrived on its collective intelligence—where members of the staff were encouraged to work on papers together rather than alone—this set him apart. But in some respects his solitude was interesting, too, for it had become a matter of some consideration at the Labs whether the key to invention was a matter of individual genius or collaboration. To those trying to routinize the process of innovation—the lifelong goal of Mervin Kelly, the Labs’ leader—there was evidence both for and against the primacy of the group. So many of the wartime and postwar breakthroughs—the Manhattan Project, radar, the transistor—were clearly group efforts, a compilation of the ideas and inventions of individuals bound together with common purposes and complementary talents.

That's not to say that Trump didn't say or do unwise things... But whenever great challenges have faced American presidents, the question is whether they achieve the big things, not the little things. When Roosevelt began commanding U.S. forces in World War II, or when the Manhattan Project began, or when Abraham Lincoln defended the Union, they made mistakes, some of them major. But these presidents were still credited for the big things they got right. But the media obsessed over mistakes made by Trump, failing to credit him for tearing down the bureaucratic barriers preventing a quick development of a vaccine and devoting considerable resources to Operation Warp Speed... (and developing) a lifesaving vaccine in record time.

...There were dozens of construction projects where members were coerced into working in dangerous conditions for free...We were paying for the privilege of being forced to build for Sharon and others. The projects always involved impossible deadlines set arbitrarily by Sharon or other leaders...I'll never forget the sight of 65-year-old Joni, with her chronic illnesses, standing on a 10-foot ladder at 2:30 AM with a paint roller in her hand, furiously painting the ceiling before the 3:00 AM deadline.

The most expensive single undertaking of the Second World War was the B-29 Bomber, the Superfortress. The second most expensive was the Manhattan Project, the massive, unprecedented effort to invent and build the world’s first atomic bomb. But the third most expensive project of the war? Not a bomb, not a plane, not a tank, not a gun, not a ship. It was the Norden bombsight.

Project Lincoln—or Lincoln Laboratory, as it was renamed in 1952—they sound a lot like veterans of the Manhattan Project, or the Radiation Lab, or even the Apollo moon program of the 1960s.

I’m the Manhattan Project. Ramses is the doppelgänger Oppenheimer.

15 billion people were born in the 19th and 20th centuries but try to imagine how different the global economy and the whole world would be today if just seven of them never existed Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Gavrilo Princip, Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Martin Luther King. I'm not even sure that's the most meaningful list. But almost everything about the world today from borders, to technology, to social norms would be different if these seven people hadn't left their mark. Another way to put this is that 0.000000 00004% of people were responsible for perhaps the majority of the world's direction over the last century. The same goes for projects innovations and events. Imagine the last century without the Great Depression, World War II, the Manhattan Project, vaccines. Antibiotics, ARPAnet, September 11th, the fall of the Soviet Union. How many projects and events occurred in the 20th century? Billions, trillions, who knows? But those eight alone impacted the world orders upon orders of magnitude more than others.

Theremin’s mentor, Soviet physicist Abram Ioffe, was reporting to Stalin with information leeched from the Manhattan Project, espionage that helped the Russians birth their own atomic bomb by 1949—an effort Theremin was likely involved in. Bob had no clue that Theremin had concocted elaborate bugging devices to spy on Western powers, or that he was still working for the other side in the Cold War, deeply entrenched in Soviet intelligence organizations

The most important Manhattan Projects of the future will be vast government-sponsored inquiries into what the politicians and the participating scientists will the call 'the problem of happiness' - in other words, the problem of making people love their servitude.

What began as Szilard’s personal crusade to harness the nuclear chain reaction would eventually become the federal government’s $2 billion program to make atomic bombs: the Manhattan Project.

Without Rebecca West’s kiss H. G. Wells would not have run off to Switzerland to write a book in which everything burns, and without H. G. Wells’s book Leo Szilard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction and without conceiving of a nuclear chain reaction he would never have grown terrified and without growing terrified Leo Szilard would never have persuaded Einstein to lobby Roosevelt and without Einstein lobbying Roosevelt there would have been no Manhattan Project and without the Manhattan Project there is no lever at 8.15 am on 6 August 1945 for Thomas Ferebee to release 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, there is no bomb on Hiroshima and no bomb on Nagasaki and 100,000 people or 160,000 people or 200,000 people live and my father dies. Poetry may make nothing happen, but a novel destroyed Hiroshima and without Hiroshima there is no me and these words erase themselves and me with them.

That rough sketch was the only respectable piece of artwork by my father that I ever saw. After he died in 1960, and Mother and I moved into our little two bedroom shitbox out in Avondale, we hung it over our fireplace. That was the same fireplace that would eventually kill Mother, since its mantelpiece had been made with radioactive cement left over from the Manhattan Project, from the atomic bomb project in World War Two.

We're three women from two different centuries, trying to save the world from oblivion. I don't know about you, but that's way above my pay grade.

Many of the men we wanted were used to living in cities or near large metropolitan areas and were a bit dubious about the prospects of life in a remote, sparsely populated area. We had somewhat similar trouble with the engineering people, although they were not so concerned at being isolated.

The most important military invention in the history of China was gunpowder. Yet to the best of our knowledge, gunpowder was invented accidentally, by Daoist alchemists searching for the elixir of life. Gunpowder’s subsequent career is even more telling. One might have thought that the Daoist alchemists would have made China master of the world. In fact, the Chinese used the new compound mainly for firecrackers. Even as the Song Empire collapsed in the face of a Mongol invasion, no emperor set up a medieval Manhattan Project to save the empire by inventing a doomsday weapon. Only in the fifteenth century – about 600 years after the invention of gunpowder – did cannons become a decisive factor on Afro-Asian battlefields. Why did it take so long for the deadly potential of this substance to be put to military use? Because it appeared at a time when neither kings, scholars, nor merchants thought that new military technology could save them or make them rich.

In fact, it took the resources of three countries to produce the bomb: the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. But there was more to it than that. In some sense it took some of the most valuable scientific talent of all Europe to do it. Consider this partial list: the Hungarians John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller; the Germans Hans Bethe and Rudolf Peierls; the Poles Stanislaw Ulam and Joseph Rotblat; the Austrians Victor Weisskopf and Otto Frisch; the Italians Enrico Fermi and Emilio Segrè; Felix Bloch from Switzerland; and, from Denmark, the Bohrs, Niels and his son Aage. This talent, the B-29 heavy bomber program that could deliver the bombs, plus Manhattan Project efforts—all together cost more than fifty billion in today’s dollars. Wilhelm

Murray in the face of growing controversy over his 1994 book, The Bell Curve, which correlated race and low IQ scores to argue that blacks were less likely than whites to join the “cognitive elite,” and was loudly and convincingly discredited. The Manhattan Institute fired Murray over the controversial project.

December 2, a bitterly cold, windy day in Chicago. Today for the first time the pile was supposed to go critical. Greg was there to observe the experiment on behalf of his boss, General Groves. He hinted jovially to anyone who asked that Groves feared an explosion and had deputed Greg to take the risk for him. In fact Greg had a more sinister mission. He was making an initial assessment of the scientists with a view to deciding who might be a security risk. Security on the Manhattan Project was a nightmare. The top scientists were foreigners. Most of the rest were left-wingers, either Communists

By contrast, the IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC), installed in New York in 1948, refused such easy reading. It was called a calculator because in 1948 computers were still people, and the president of IBM, Thomas J. Watson, wanted to reassure the public that his products were not designed to replace them.20 IBM built the machine as a rival to the ENIAC – but both were descendants of von Neumann’s earlier Harvard Mark I machine, which contributed to the Manhattan Project.

First, though, I had to find us a place. And I do mean I, because my husband promptly delegated the apartment-hunting project to me. This was ostensibly logical since, as the mother of a very young child, I had rearranged my work schedule as a writer to be “flexible” and “freelance”—I could put it on hold for days or weeks at a time. We also had a part-time nanny who could watch my son while I searched. But there was a deeper cultural logic at work, too: in Manhattan, the woman is in charge of finding a place for the family to live. She might also pay for it, or for half of it. But in heterosexual marriages, regardless of who does what, it’s usually the woman who finds the apartment.

Man·hat·tan Pro·ject   the code name for the American project set up in 1942 to develop an atom bomb. The project culminated in 1945 with the detonation of the first nuclear weapon, at White Sands in New Mexico.

Finally... On other earths, on other universes, I learned that evil itself was a universal constant... And that it had a face, and that it had a name.

With time as the controlling factor we could not afford to wait to be sure of anything,” wrote General Groves.112 Instead, the Manhattan Project rushed ahead based on educated guesses, building two, then three different kinds of uranium separation plants and two different kinds of bombs. Redundancy was their best hedge against failure. If one technology did not work, there would be another as backup.

But they were all in, 100%, for much the same reason that many of the world’s top physicists joined the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons: they were convinced that if they didn’t do it first, someone less idealistic would. The AI they had built, nicknamed Prometheus, kept getting more capable. Although its cognitive abilities still lagged far behind those of humans in many areas, for example, social skills, the Omegas had pushed hard to make it extraordinary at one particular task: programming AI systems. They’d deliberately chosen this strategy because they had bought the intelligence explosion argument made by the British mathematician Irving Good back in 1965: “Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.” They figured that if they could get this recursive self-improvement going, the machine would soon get smart enough that it could also teach itself all other human skills that would be useful.

President Truman called the development of the atom bomb, “the greatest achievement of organized science in history.”248 The Manhattan Project scientists, engineers and private contractors had done what few believed possible: they had built three new towns—Oak Ridge, Hanford and Los Alamos—and a behemoth industrial plant as large as that of all of America’s automobile manufacturers put together.249 They had transformed Fermi’s historic nuclear chain reaction, a reaction yielding only enough energy to light a flashlight bulb, into the most powerful weapon mankind had ever known. And they had done it in just over a thousand days.

Your freedom it says. What is that? Some kind of illusory concept where the people in charge let you have comfortable distractions. Enough THINGS so that you don't see your chains. I respect your work too much to let you endure that kind of self-deception.

The Manhattan Project employed two hundred thousand people. It had eighty offices and dozens of production plants spread out all over the country, including a sixty-thousand-acre facility in rural Tennessee that pulled more power off the nation’s electrical grid than New York City did on any given night. And no one knew the Manhattan Project was there. That is how powerful a black operation can be.