Tag: oppenheimer

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AI History Movies Nuclear Energy Nuclear Weapons

Pondering Leo Szilard’s Nuclear Vision in the AI Age

“His mind roams compulsively through the most lethal possibilities of nuclear explosion, leaving in its wake a new generation of horrific thoughts.”

John McPhee on Ted Taylor, The Curve of Binding Energy

The immense power unlocked from the nucleus of the atom is both awe-inspiring and alarming. Seeing Oppenheimer and brought to mind some of my reading years ago about the dawn of the atomic age.

The foundations for unlocking the power of the atom were laid by pioneers like Leo Szilard, who first conceived of the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, before fission was discovered. This insight into the potential for a self-sustaining nuclear reaction was critical for both later energy production and weapons development.

The phenomenon of nuclear fission was discovered in 1938 by German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, with key theoretical explanations provided by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch. By splitting atomic nuclei, they enabled the process that Szilard had envisioned.

Alarmed by the the prospect of America’s enemies developing atomic bombs using fission, Szilard drafted a letter advocating for starting a nuclear program in the United States. This letter to Roosevelt, co-signed by Einstein in 1939, urged urgent research into nuclear fission for military purposes. This pivotal communication launched the American effort that eventually became the Manhattan Project.

A key insight from all of this history that jumped out to me is how little matter is actually converted to energy in atomic explosions – just 1 gram out of multiple kilograms of fissionable material. As noted by physicist Ted Taylor, this tiny amount of matter converted to energy was enough to destroy Nagasaki.

Taylor was a brilliant but controversial figure who helped design some of the smallest yet still devastating nuclear weapons in the early Cold War era. Writer John McPhee captured Taylor’s genius and contradictions in his fascinating profile The Curve of Binding Energy.

The stark reality of binding energies, unlocked by mere rearrangements of protons and neutrons, is both wondrous and chilling. Revisiting the origins of atomic science renews my hope that humanity will someday better master nuclear forces for peaceful purposes, while preventing catastrophic misuse.

I wonder what wisdom Leo Szilard would offer regarding our advanced technologies today. Had he lived to see the dawn of artificial intelligence, perhaps Szilard would once again urge us to ponder deeply the world we are creating. While AI holds potential to uplift humanity, he might warn that its risks could also lead to existential catastrophe if not wisely constrained.

I would wish that Szilard would be hopeful for us, counseling that with ethics and foresight, we could illuminate a brighter future, just as those nuclear pioneers dreamed before their ominous achievements. We owe it to ourselves to heed the lessons of the atomic age taught us by those men of history as we shape powerful innovations like AI to humanity’s benefit, not its ruin.

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Film Movies Nuclear Energy Nuclear Weapons

Oppenheimer – the movie

I saw Christopher Nolan’s new movie Oppenheimer yesterday. I wasn’t able to see it in 70mm IMAX but not sure that really mattered – the film still had such a dramatic impact on me. The film is based on the book “American Prometheus“ by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin which I read earlier this spring. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2006.

All of the actors in this film gave amazing performances – but Robert Downey Jr. in particular was just wonderful. Almost all of his parts of the film were in a high contrast black and white which I also really enjoyed and added to the drama of his role.

This morning I was doing some browsing and stumbled across a link to a 1966 article about Einstein written by J. Robert Oppenheimer and published in the New York Review of Books. I was struck in particular by this quote:

“Late in his life, in connection with his despair over weapons and wars, Einstein said that if he had to live it over again he would be a plumber.”

New York Review of Books – https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1966/03/17/on-albert-einstein/

Plumber indeed! Nolan’s been quoted in various interviews saying that he believed Oppenheimer (not Einstein) was the most important person that ever lived. In the film you really see his humanity, his brilliance, and just how poorly he was treated late in his life. Nolan’s message in the film seems to be in a similar vein to that quote above from Einstein – and those messages aren’t optimistic…

He was America’s Prometheus, “the father of the atomic bomb,” who had led the effort to wrest from nature the awesome fire of the sun for his country in time of war. Afterwards, he had spoken wisely about its dangers and hopefully about its potential benefits and then, near despair, critically about the proposals for nuclear warfare being adopted by the military and promoted by academic strategists: “What are we to make of a civilization which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life [but] which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everybody except in prudential and game-theoretical terms?”

from American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin

Note: see my notes from my visit in 2019 to the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in Albuquerque.

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History New Mexico Nuclear Energy Nuclear Weapons Travel

Visiting the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History

Update (July 2023): see my review of the Christopher Nolan film “Oppenheimer” based on the book “American Prometheus“ by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin.

While I was in Santa Fe in July, I took the opportunity on my way back to Albuquerque to catch my flight to stop by the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History again. This was my second visit – having initially made a quick visit to the museum in July 2018.

Roughly speaking, the museum is divided into three sections – two indoor (nuclear weapons and the peaceful uses of nuclear energy) and the aircraft and missile display area outside. The weapons section is the first part you walk through at the beginning of touring the museum. It describes the history of the development of nuclear weapons – including the race America was against countries like Germany and Japan to develop this technology. It also includes discussion of the famous letter from Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt that led to the creation of the US national effort that became the Manhattan Project.

There’s an interesting exhibit that creatively recreates the scene at the Los Alamos Laboratory as this work was underway. I was particularly struck by the several old mechanical desktop calculators in the display – as the math involved in designing these weapons wasn’t perfected using computers but, rather, slide rules and these old calculators.

The rest of the weapons section includes examples a many nuclear weapons – including facsimiles of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan that led to the end of World War II with that country. As you walk through this display of weapons, it’s striking how they start out being relatively large but then shrink down in size to much smaller dimensions.

Outdoors in the aircraft and missile display area are examples of the Boeing B-29 used over Japan along with a beautifully preserved Boeing B-52 and also a Boeing B-47. There are a number of smaller aircraft as well – along with a replica to the tower used at the Trinity test site in New Mexico where the first test of an atomic weapon was conducted.

I’ve visited this museum twice and learned new things each time. On my recent visit, they were showing a film about the B-52 bomber which was quite interesting. I didn’t know that back in the 1950’s General Curtis LeMay (heading up the Strategic Air Command) had B-52’s in the air constantly that were armed with nuclear weapons and flew toward the Soviet Union only to then turn back and return. Only after a couple of nasty accidents involving aircraft crashes with nuclear weapons on-board did this practice moderate.

The other thing I learned about Albuquerque is what a nuclear city it is. Just a few miles from the museum site is one of the largest storage sites for nuclear weapons in the world – something called the Kirtland Underground Munitions Maintenance and Storage Complex (KUMMSC) where the US stores nuclear weapons – most waiting to be removed from service and disassembled.