This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1464295
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1464295
Niklas Luhmann noted some time ago that the increasing complexity of social systems and the products they produce reveals itself in segmented social groups increasingly detached from each other in terms of comprehension including the meanings of words.
One consequence is that even experts in a field may have difficulties predicting implications of innovation unless they are both: (a) deeply involved in that innovation and (b) highly aware of implications for society generally – not a likely combination these days; everyone else is pretty much out to sea yet somehow is still expected to make social policy decisions about it.
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Point of information. Iran isn’t developing nuclear weapons, even though back in the 1970s the USA gave them the technology that makes it possible.
The Iranian leadership regards all weapons of mass destruction as un-Islamic. Ask any intelligence agency, they will tell you.
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The more I learn about technology (as an engineer approaching retirement), the more of a Luddite I become.
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makes me wonder whether hostile foreign governments may already have stolen keys to unlocking these new technologies
Or whether hostile foreign governments have keys we need to steal?
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" Iran is doing everything it can to [develop nuclear weapons]"
If you click the link and read it, you’ll find no evidence to support this assertion. In fact, the article says that Iran isn’t doing everything it can. Why do you lie?
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It may be true that Iran has halted development of a nuclear weapon, but as a result of prior efforts they now have a stockpile of enriched Uranium sufficient to build “several nuclear weapons” according to an IAEA presentation last January.
Obtaining the fissile materials is the hard part. Building a bomb is easy, especially the “gun” type used on Hiroshima. Iran lacks a delivery system, but the prime targets of Tel Aviv or Riyadh could be reached with a pickup truck.
So while it’s technically accurate to say Iran is not developing the bomb, they could do it in a matter of months if they wanted to. The leadership in Iran has used it only for political leverage so far, but it still makes them a threat to be taken seriously in the context of nuclear weapon proliferation.
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Never quite got to the Luddite stage, but it convinced me that any distinction humans make between us and chimps is strictly vanity.
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While the ‘truth’ that Oppenheimer did not spy for Russians is ‘true’ it is also true that because of his brother and lover he could never quite give up, he was deeply compromised.
I live near Los Alamos (!) and there is Oppenheimer Street where the library is located but there is nothing devoted to Dr. Teller. From people who were here AT THE TIME I gather Dr. Teller was what you would call a ‘difficult personality’ and if you disagreed with him you were not just wrong but also WRONG. If my emphasis is understood. Oppenheimer is kind of a majestic figure who was above it all.
Oppenheimer is/was a hero in town. BIG deal here. Because of his ‘martyrdom’ and it was a miscarriage of justice (glad Strauss did not get his cabinet position, so glad). (SIDE NOTE: Chris Evans first movie after Captain America/MCU was Knives Out! where he was an awful human being and he did a good job – great to see him actually act – and I think this is Robert Downey Jr’s first job after Iron Man as Strauss and it is interesting that imo both played out-and-out hideous-people jerkazoid VILLAINS).
But my husband lived under the security rules at LA for decades; I literally know NOTHING about what he did there or what was going on in any position he held. REALLY.
So even though Oppy said ‘it’s still treason’ when approached, his close associates made him a ‘risk’ because IF security had known about the Soviet outreach to Oppy, well, things could’ve turned out differently. But Frank and Jean were at risk if he talked. I get his dilemma but this is what is meant by OPPY being a risk. It is a human thing to protect those you love; he did not believe they were evil just not ‘right’ in their allegiance. Now Jean had died in 1944 so it was 10yr gone that she ‘could’ have been an ‘issue.’ I don’t know what was going on with Frank Oppenheimer at the time (1954). It was all this stuff happening in the nuclear program (aside from that ‘messy’ Who Lost China? debate!) that fed McCarthyism because, hey, there WERE spies in ‘the highest levels of government’ and McCarthy ran with that. Golly, I could hate on McCarthy all day and all night and find time to hate some more while taking a bath!
PS when I say I know almost nothing, I mean I know he left in the morning, where I dropped him off, who his co-worker was – usually one person – and THAT IS IT. Oh and when the group Summer Bar-B-Q was going to be at Overlook Park. I was shocked that over 25+ years he never told me NUTIN’ and he said it’s because he gave an oath. MY MAN!
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That’s always been the point that’s hard to make. For years they didn’t have adequate quantities of enriched uranium to make the bombs within technical reach. There’s no reason to believe they haven’t been doing the research to design more efficient bombs, and the people are harder to target than the facilities.
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An elderly coworker in the 1990s told me that, as a young woman in the 1930s, she was enamored with the promise of communism and socialism.
She said all her friends felt the same way— that, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, capitalism had been shown to be a failure.
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What? The Soviet’s stole the nuclear secrets, you mean the Rosenbergs didn’t do it?
What a surprise or really was it during the age of McCarthyism (where the GOP wants to go back to).
The PBS short series on Oppenheimer starring Sam Waterson had his wife, when talking to security agents, who were IMO in that play, trying to push his wife to be ‘disloyal’ to Oppy, said, IF YOU REMEMBER THOSE DAYS AS THEY REALLY WERE people were looking for solutions to the obvious failure of ‘the system’ practically everybody she knew was studying communism and going to meetings to ‘save America’ and she did not budge on her husband even when told Oppy was meeting with Jean.
THEY had bugged their home and knew he had not told her he was visiting Jean but did not know that she KNEW he was seeing Jean that they had discussed it and Jean’s ‘issues’ and agreed for him to be ‘supportive’ of Jean. I remember AT THE TIME thinking WHAT a wo-man!
And the fact that their ‘big’ reveal was that KITTY had been a ‘comm symp’ (term at the time, I am an old lady and everybody was looking for COMMIE SYMPATHIZERS at the time, whatever that meant) just floors me.
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The article states that Julius Rosenberg was a spy as was his brother-in-law David Greenglass. It’s in paragraph 17 of the article. (David worked at Los Alamos in security and passed info to Julius who passed it to other Soviet agents.)
I don’t know if Mrs. Rosenberg was actually involved or just considered to HAVE to be involved.
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An interesting article here about the brain drain in US nuclear policy experts, due to complacency after the end of the Cold War. The RAND Corporation used to be big news back in the duck-and-cover era. Not so much, these days.
I’m not sure how much taxpayer money should be spent on policy wonks sitting around a table playing war games. But if the shit hits the fan, we don’t want to have our government responding with impromptu, ad-hoc ideas either. Especially now that China is getting serious about the strategic overkill game.
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We had an energy wonk in the Obama administration, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.
He had an impressive background in physics, and with his detailed knowledge of nuclear physics, helped negotiate the most comprehensive and invasive system of verifications and inspections for the Iran nuclear agreement.
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To the firs point, somewhere between none and a lot more than we do. How do you even calculate that. For the second point, that is the reason the GOPs war on competence seems so baffling.
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" Moreover, they had a (misguided) defense – that the Soviet Union was America’s wartime ally, so they were “only” delivering secrets to an allied government. But as Nolan correctly shows in the movie, when Chevalier approached Oppenheimer with the same argument, Oppenheimer retorted that it was still treason."
Misguided in what sense? Fortunately, the Soviet Union’s spy efforts were successful. A U.S. government full of itself, especially in the decade or two after the War, was/is difficult enough for the rest of the world to deal with, let alone imagine if they were the only ones with the Bomb.
Are you saying Rick Perry was not the Brainiac his smart glasses might suggest?
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I was part of that academic generation, caught on the wrong end of the transition. Much of it had to do with the total collapse of the job market in favor of neo-liberal “approaches” to the post-Cold War Era.
You obviously watched too many rounds of Risk in the college cafeteria. Very little of my graduate eduction or post-doc activities dealt with gaming in that particular sense.
That being said, I fear that the article’s author hyperventilates a bit much for my taste. Not surprising since he’s not actually trained as a “nuclear expert”. He isn’t even old enough to have experienced the transition away from strategic studies. And while it’s certainly laudable that he’s received numerous awards for his reporting on the revolving door the defense industry maintains for retired generals it’s not much of a foundation upon which to build his so-called “expertise” in nuclear deference.
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