Richard Rhodes - Making of Atomic Bomb, AI, WW2, Oppenheimer, & Abolishing Nukes

Tue May 23 2023

The Development of the Atomic Bomb

The development of the atomic bomb may have been inevitable even without World War II due to the discovery of nuclear fission in Nazi Germany.
Physicists realized that a small amount of energy could lead to a massive response through nuclear fusion, which led to the development of the bomb.
Scientists did not have to invent anything new to discover nuclear fission, and Niels Bohr had the right model for understanding the uranium atom.
The nucleus of an atom is like a wobbly balloon of water held together by strong force and electrical charge, and when a neutron falls into the nucleus, it sets it to wobbling around and may take a dumbbell configuration, resulting in two separate nuclei releasing energy.
The physics behind the atomic bomb was pretty obvious, but whether it would actually happen depended on other factors.

Building a factory to pull natural metal wouldn't cost more than building a battleship.
Every country with the technological infrastructure started working on nuclear weapons as soon as nuclear fusion was announced to the world.
The Germans had miscalculated the critical mass needed for a bomb.
Different countries found out about the American's work on the bomb in different ways, such as noticing top scientists going offline.
Many scientists wanted to work on the bomb because they were worried about Hitler getting it first.

The Los Alamos team did not see any reason to hide or protect themselves, which led to many people being killed.
The bomb was designed to be as much like ordinary bombing as possible, with the goal of starting mass fires.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were set aside from the target list because General Groves wanted to study the damage effects of the atomic bomb.
The military calculated that a high-level nuclear explosion can be created with two subcritical pieces of uranium, and secret designs are not necessary.
The second bomb tested by the US was a new design with twice the yield and half the weight of the first bomb.

Nuclear weapons continue to pose a threat to global security.
The scale of weaponry was the missing piece for the Air Force, which pushed for bigger bombs, but Oppenheimer opposed it.
The arms race with the Soviets was fermented due to misleading perspectives on how many weapons were needed.
The Soviet Union had been sending espionage agents to collect industrial technology since the 1930s.
Scientists who worked on the atomic bomb felt a responsibility to prevent any one country from having a monopoly on nuclear weapons.

The Atchison-Lilliamthal plan is the only plan that makes sense for international control without a world government.
Elaborate surveillance systems are in place today to detect nuclear weapons.
Non-proliferation efforts have been successful as the number of countries and nuclear weapons has not gone up for decades.
The United States did not protect Taiwan with their nuclear umbrella as promised, which could lead to them aligning with China.
Nuclear deterrence has worked in the past for the US in wars on the periphery where major nuclear powers were involved.

The use of nuclear warheads has become more complicated and dangerous over time.
In the past, it was a matter of retaliation for an attack on one's own country, but now there is a need to backstop conventional power with nuclear weapons.
The balance of forces was disrupted when the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb in 1949.
The possibility of preventing communism in the aftermath of World War II by knocking out the Soviet Union was a big bluff as we only had a few partly assembled handmade bombs at that time.

Oppenheimer was a great lab director but had a divided and insecure self.
Oppenheimer was knowledgeable and had a broad understanding of physics.
The introduction of how to control nuclear energy changed the nature of nation states.
The possibility of using nuclear weapons in a conventional war has changed the game.
The development of the atomic bomb was a vast engineering program that involved Nobel Laureate level physicists as engineers.

AI is expected to be as transformative as nuclear weapons and energy, but people have no idea what's coming.
The odds of a non-test nuclear explosion happening in the next 50 years is higher than 10%.
Even a small nuclear war would engage the whole world, and we are still in a precarious place as long as any country has nuclear weapons.