Deceased--Harold M. Agnew

Harold M. Agnew, fourth from left, with other group leaders involved in the atomic bomb project. He later flew on the first atomic strike against Japan and helped perfect the hydrogen bomb.

Harold M. Agnew
March 28th, 1921 to September 29th, 2013

"Harold M. Agnew, Physicist Present at Birth of the Nuclear Age, Dies at 92"

by

William J. Broad

October 1st, 2013

The New York Times

Harold M. Agnew, the last surviving major figure to have been present at the birth of the nuclear age — a physicist who helped build the world’s first reactor and atomic bombs, flew on the first atomic strike against Japan, filmed the mushroom cloud, helped perfect the hydrogen bomb and led the Los Alamos National Laboratory at the height of the cold war — died on Sunday at his home in Solana Beach, Calif. He was 92.

He had recently been given a diagnosis of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, his family said.

Dr. Agnew was no giant of discovery, but he was ingenious technically and wielded great influence for decades as a presidential adviser and a gregarious hawk, as restless and unpredictable as the tumultuous age he helped define.

“We did pretty good,” he remarked during a 1992 flight between Moscow and Kiev, Ukraine. “We brought a quick end to a devastating war and maintained the peace, and eventually saw democracy prevail. That’s something you can hang your hat on.”

In a statement, Charlie McMillan, the current director of Los Alamos, the birthplace of the bomb in the mountains of New Mexico, called Dr. Agnew “a national treasure,” saying the United States “will be forever in Harold’s debt.”

Harold Melvin Agnew was born in Denver on March 28, 1921, the only child of a stonecutter of Scotch-Irish heritage. A natural athlete, he pitched his softball team to a Denver championship. He majored in chemistry at Denver University, graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1942 and won a scholarship to Yale.

But the secret wartime effort to build an atomic bomb intruded on his studies. Early in 1942 he was assigned to Enrico Fermi, the Italian Nobel laureate who was helping to lead the project at the University of Chicago. Dr. Agnew did what he called “grunt work,” making scientific measurements and getting a hefty dose of radiation.

Redirected because of the health danger, he helped stack tons of graphite bricks and uranium into a neat pile at a university squash court.

On a blustery Chicago day, Dec. 2, 1942, Dr. Agnew and a few dozen other people gathered to see if the pile could sustain a chain reaction. Recording pens jumped as atoms split in two. The success meant that in theory the human race now had the means to illuminate cities or level them. He was 21.

Dr. Agnew arrived at Los Alamos in March 1943 with his wife, Beverly. The couple shared a bunkhouse with another couple and a man who cooked nothing but Chinese food, even for breakfast. Amid the tall pines and deep canyons, Dr. Agnew helped build and run a particle accelerator whose data helped demonstrate the merits of various bomb designs.

When the world’s first nuclear blast lit up the New Mexico desert before dawn on July 16, 1945, Dr. Agnew was already far away, preparing for the bombing of Hiroshima. He was “aching” for the run to Japan, he recalled, because so many friends had died in the war. He autographed the bomb.

On Aug. 6, he boarded a B-29 bomber that accompanied the Enola Gay, which was carrying the bomb code-named Little Boy. Dr. Agnew and two other scientists measured the size of the shock wave and thus the bomb’s power.

Afterward, he and his colleagues took turns peering out a small window at the mushroom cloud and the ground damage. Dr. Agnew filmed the devastation with a 16-millimeter Bell & Howell movie camera he had taken along. He was the only person to witness the whole undertaking, from reactor to weapon to Hiroshima.

After the war, he studied with Fermi at Chicago and received his Ph.D. in physics in 1949. Returning to Los Alamos, he joined the hunt for a technical edge over the Soviet Union, which had exploded its own atomic bomb in 1949, surprising the West.

The first hydrogen bomb, tested successfully in 1952, weighed a staggering 65 tons. Dr. Agnew helped perfect lighter H-bombs that were deliverable over long distances.

In the 1960s, as scientific adviser to the supreme allied commander in Europe, he led the development of protective devices for nuclear arms that kept them under tight presidential control.

Returning to Los Alamos, Dr. Agnew was named head of the weapons division, which developed the warhead for the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile, among other arms. In 1970, he became director of the lab, with a staff of about 7,000. Meanwhile, political radicals at the University of California, which ran Los Alamos, labeled him a war criminal and tried him in absentia.

In 1978, Dr. Agnew advised President Jimmy Carter against seeking a comprehensive ban on nuclear testing. He argued that such an East-West stoppage would have ended the development of new arms and, more important, reduced confidence in the potency of the existing arsenal. The White House eventually dropped the ban idea.

Upon retiring from Los Alamos, Dr. Agnew sought to encourage the growth of civilian nuclear power. In March 1979, he became president of General Atomics, a San Diego-based maker and developer of innovative reactors.

From 1982 until 1989, he was a science adviser to the White House under President Ronald Reagan. After the cold war, in 1991, he participated in the first meeting between American bomb makers and their Russian counterparts, seeking ways to reduce nuclear arsenals. In 1992, he urged the United States to buy bomb-grade uranium from scrapped Soviet nuclear arms to bolster the shaky Russian economy and reduce the risk of nuclear war, accident and theft. In August of that year, the White House announced a plan to buy at least 500 metric tons of the material in a deal worth several billion dollars.

The Russian bomb uranium was diluted into fuel for nuclear reactors that make electricity, turning a major danger into a peaceful bonanza.

Dr. Agnew is survived by a daughter, Nancy E. Chapman; a son, John; four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

He also left a towering reputation at Los Alamos. Late in life, Dr. Agnew noted with pride that cars could occasionally be seen there bearing bright orange bumper stickers reading, “Harold, come back.”

Harold M. Agnew [Wikipedia]
 
This is what he photographed...

Deceased--Martyl Langsdorf

Martyl Langsdorf
March 16th, 1917 to March 26th, 2013

 

"Martyl Langsdorf dies at 96; artist created Doomsday Clock image"

Martyl Langsdorf's artwork symbolized the Nuclear Age with its minute hand near midnight, and presumed annihilation. The Midwestern artist was also known internationally for her abstract landscapes.

April 16th, 2013

latimes.com

Martyl Langsdorf, the artist who created the widely known Doomsday Clock for the first cover of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, died March 26 at a rehabilitation facility near her home in suburban Chicago of complications from a lung infection. She was 96.

Since its introduction in 1947, the drawing of the Doomsday Clock has kept watch as international incidents flared. The clock is a symbol of the Nuclear Age, whose minute hand moves closer to midnight — and presumed annihilation — with each major immediate danger.

The clock hands can also move backward, if tensions cool.

The hand has moved only 20 times during the past 65 years. It currently stands at five minutes to midnight.

Langsdorf, who worked in various media including painting, printmaking, drawing, murals and stained-glass design, made the leap from the art world into the controversy over atomic bombs through her husband.

Alexander Langsdorf Jr. was a nuclear scientist from a prominent St. Louis family. During World War II, he helped develop the atomic bomb, then joined other scientists in trying to persuade President Truman not to drop it on Japan. He helped start the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an advocacy group formed in 1945 by Manhattan Project scientists to warn the public of the dangers of nuclear weapons and power.

"She understood the deep anxiety of the scientists in 1947, and the urgency of preventing the spread or use of nuclear weapons," said Kennette Benedict, executive director of the Bulletin since 2005. "With the clock design, she gave the world a symbol that is even more potent today."

Martyl Suzanne Schweig was born March 16, 1917, into a St. Louis family that embraced the arts. Her father, Martin, owned what was the oldest photo studio in St. Louis and photographed famous people. Her mother, Aimee, was an accomplished artist who taught at the private Mary Institute.

Martyl learned to draw during Saturday morning art lessons at the St. Louis Art Museum. By age 11 she was considered a prodigy.

She graduated from Mary Institute and Washington University in St. Louis and married Langsdorf in 1942. His mother, Elsie Langsdorf, was the first St. Louis-area woman elected to the Missouri Legislature. His father, Alexander Langsdorf Sr., was dean for 40 years at Washington University's Schools of Engineering and Architecture.

Before the couple moved to Chicago in 1943, her husband and a fellow scientist built a cyclotron at Washington University to secretly produce the first plutonium for the Manhattan Project.

She became internationally known for her abstract landscapes and had some 100 solo exhibitions during her long career, in addition to many group shows. Her works have been displayed in museums throughout the country.

The design of the Doomsday Clock, four dots and two lines, used a recognized object — a clock — and evoked the traditional imagery of the apocalypse (the cry at midnight) and the countdown to zero hour, or a military attack.

"It's such an intuitively tension-building image," graphic designer Michael Bierut, who updated Langsdorf's design in 2007, told the Washington Post. "To be able to reduce something that complex to something so simple and memorable is really a feat of magic."

When the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon in 1949, the scientists who guided the Bulletin moved the hands four minutes closer to midnight.

"The scientists decided to use it imaginatively as a metaphor," Bierut, who is on the Bulletin's board of governors, told the Washington Post. "To wed this almost childish cliche to this fear of the annihilation of the Earth, that's really remarkable."

Langsdorf's husband died in 1996. Her survivors include two daughters, Alexandra Shoemaker of Aptos, Calif., and Suzanne Langsdorf of Arlington, Va.; four grandchildren, two great-grandchildren and a brother.

"Tick, tick, tick..."

April 11th, 2013

by

Matt Schudel

Washington Post

Martyl Langsdorf designed one of the most enduring visual images of the 20th century, the Doomsday Clock, with its hands ticking toward midnight as a symbol of impending nuclear destruction.

She was already a successful artist when she was asked to design the cover June 1947 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Against an orange background, she set a quarter of a clock face, with a black hour hand pointing to the “12” position as a white minute hand approached 11:53.

Even without the accompanying articles about the danger of nuclear weapons, the implication was clear: The fate of the world was in doubt unless an escalating arms race could be stopped before it reached the doomsday hour of midnight.

“To be able to reduce something that complex to something so simple and memorable is really a feat of magic,” graphic designer Michael Bierut, who updated Langsdorf’s design in 2007 and is on the board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said. “It’s such an intuitively tension-building image. To be able to reduce something that complex to something so simple and memorable is really a feat of magic.”

It was the first and last magazine cover that Langsdorf designed.

Two years later, in 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon, and the Cold War began in earnest. The scientists who guided the bulletin - including Langsdorf’s husband, nuclear physicist Alexander Langsdorf Jr - reconfigured the image of the Doomsday Clock by moving its hands four minutes closer to midnight.

In one stroke, Langsdorf’s design had been reinvented as a wide-reaching symbol of the age. A powerful idea was expressed in a visual image containing four dots and two lines.

“The scientists decided to use it imaginatively as a metaphor,” Bierut said. “That’s really a complex thing. To wed this almost childish cliche to this fear of the annihilation of the Earth, that’s really remarkable.”

During World War II, Alexander Langsdorf had helped to develop the atomic bomb as a member of the Manhattan Project. After bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, leading to the end of the war, he began to have misgivings. He was one of about 70 scientists who signed a letter to President Harry S. Truman, pointing out the “solemn responsibility” of the United States to control the use of nuclear arms.

Langsdorf’s simple visual image entered pop iconography as an element in songs by the Who, Iron Maiden and Bright Eyes. It was featured in novels and nonfiction books and became a near-universal symbol of the dangers lurking in the modern world.
In 2007, Langsdorf recalled a visit to Japan with her husband in the 1970s.

“We were on a train that stopped in Hiroshima and everybody gets off to look at the monument,” she said. “He didn’t get off the train. He refused to. And he had tears in his eyes, he was so upset at that whole thing.”

Martyl Suzanne Schweig was born March 16, 1917, in St Louis. Her mother was an acclaimed artist, and her father was a photographer.

She studied piano and violin before focusing on painting at age 11. As a teenager, she had a private showing and sold a painting to composer George Gershwin, who was visiting St Louis.

As a student at Washington University in St. Louis, she once finished second in a playwriting contest. Third place went to a fellow student named Thomas L. Williams, who became better known as Tennessee Williams.

Langsdorf, who signed her work “Martyl” (pronounced mar-TILL), was also an artist with the Works Progress Administration, a Depression-era program that, among other things, employed artists to paint murals in public buildings. In the early 1940s, she painted a mural highlighting African American history at the Recorder of Deeds Building in Washington.

She and her husband were married in 1941 and moved to Chicago in 1943. After 1953 they lived in a landmark house in Schaumburg, designed by architect Paul Schweikher.

Alexander Langsdorf spent most of his career at the Argonne National Laboratory before his death in 1996.

Langsdorf was resigned to being known as the “clock lady,” but she liked to point out that she had an 80-year career as a painter and printmaker. Her art was included in exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the St. Louis Art Museum and other prestigious venues.

Her work, which consists largely of landscapes and still lifes, is in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington. At the time of her death, she was preparing for a new gallery exhibition in Chicago.

Since 1947, Langsdorf’s Doomsday Clock reappeared often on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, reflecting the changing state of the world.

From 1991 to 1995, during an era of arms reductions, the hands were pushed back to 11:43. The closest the clock has ever come to midnight was in 1953, when it reached 11:58 after the United States tested its first hydrogen bomb. A panel of scientists now meets each year to set the time of the Doomsday Clock, reflecting newfound worries about climate change and bioterrorism, as well as nuclear arsenals. When the panel released its most recent assessment in January, it concluded that, in doomsday time, it is five minutes to midnight.

Doomsday Clock [Wikipedia]

"Jornada del Muerto"...an essay on the dawn of the nuclear age

"Prometheus in the desert: from atom bombs to radio astronomy, New Mexico's scientific legacy"

by

Jesse Hicks

November 19th, 2012

The Verge

Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics. — Robert Oppenheimer

In the telling it has the contours of a creation myth: At a time of great evil and great terror, a small group of scientists, among the world’s greatest minds, secluded themselves in the desert. In secrecy and silence they toiled at their Promethean task. They sought the ultimate weapon, one of such great power as to end not just their war, but all war. They hoped their work would salvage the future. They feared it could end everything.

In the cold, rainy dark of a summer morning they readied themselves, gathered in the sand at the edge of terra incognita. Their “gadget,” so diminutively named, waited in the distance: a large metal sphere studded with wires, perched atop a tall, steel tower. A countdown began. The scientists had begun a betting pool about the device’s power, or whether it would detonate at all. One wagered whether the gadget would ignite the atmosphere. Others applied suntan lotion.

At 5:29:45 AM the time came. A light greater than the sun lit the desolate mesa and mountains in hues of gold, purple, violet, gray, and blue. The shockwave rolled out and over the landscape; moments later and miles away, the scientists felt the heat against their faces. A blind woman 150 miles north of the blast asked, “What’s that brilliant light?” Beneath the cloud, molten sand rained back to earth. It coated the ground, cooling to glassy, translucent green.

Soon after, the sun rose over the desert.

That was nearly 70 years ago, on July 16, 1945, just south of Socorro, New Mexico. At the Trinity nuclear test site, a newly risen, man-made sun marked the beginning of the atomic age, with all its newfound terrors and wonders. The bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed over 150,000 people. Japan surrendered soon after, though historians still debate the effect of the bombings.

By then the Cold War had begun, as the Soviet Union pursued its own nuclear ambitions. The weapon some in the Manhattan Project hoped would end all wars became the impetus behind a decades-long arms race, with the world’s dueling superpowers locked in the embrace of Mutually Assured Destruction.

The Trinity test has become synonymous with Robert Oppenheimer’s recollection that at the moment of truth his mind flashed on a line from the Bhagavad Gita: Vishnu saying, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." An earthier analysis came from Ken Bainbridge. A fellow physicist, Bainbridge had directed the test. Less inclined than Oppenheimer to flights of grandiosity, he declared, "Now we are all sons of bitches." Even in the heady seconds after they’d done it, the men at Trinity realized they’d become destroyer-gods or simple sons-of-bitches — or both. They had unlocked a primal force in what Bainbridge called "a foul and awesome display." And nothing could ever be the same.

Today you can stand at ground zero and try to imagine what future those men saw in the baleful column of smoke and fire swelling up before them. On two Saturdays a year, in April and October, the White Sands Missile Range opens the site to the public.

It’s not much to see. Long before it became a military facility, the Spanish called this unforgiving expanse Jornada del Muerto — the "Journey of Death." It’s flat and rocky, with intermittent patches of desert grass. A chainlink fence encircles the site, hung with historical photos documenting the Manhattan Project and test. A rectangular shelter protects part of the crater; a piece of metal footing from the test tower reaches raggedly from the ground. On a trailer bed sits the shell of a Fat Man-style bomb, like the one derived from the gadget and dropped on Nagasaki. It lies inert, vaguely comical once stripped of its atomic heart.

Evidence of the blast, including a crater ten feet deep and a thousand feet wide, is mostly gone, erased by bulldozers in 1952, though picking through the sand you can still find nuggets of Trinitite, the irradiated green glass produced by the explosion. In the absence of a crater stands a black stone obelisk. On it a plaque reads, "Trinity Site: where the world’s first nuclear device was exploded on July 16, 1945."

On a warm October morning people mill about, gravitating toward the obelisk before settling into their own orbits. A circle forms around the black stone. People dash in to have their pictures taken next to it, then dash out to make room for the next. In this way they’ll join their personal history to that of the bomb, mark the moment they stood at ground zero among the ping and click of radiation detectors.

There are children and teenagers, Boy Scouts and veterans, self-proclaimed geeks who’ve come from around the country to see this patch of vacant earth. A woman narrates over a loudspeaker, telling her tour group how William L. Laurence, correspondent for the New York Times, wrote of Trinity’s moment of truth: "On that moment hung eternity. Time stood still. Space contracted to a pinpoint." A small dog scrabbles through the dust, seemingly convinced he’s found a very important rock.

Buses arrive and depart, some carrying visitors to the nearby MacDonald Ranch House. There the bomb was assembled; despite being just two miles from the test site, the house received little damage. Today it’s been restored to its 1945 state, with small placards explaining how each room was used. People wander through like a crowd of dislocated house-hunters, browsing their way through the absent past.

Someone later comments on the somberness of the place, as though it were a memorial or a tomb. Yet standing in that unremarkable stretch of desert it’s hard to know what should be mourned — or who. It would be different to stand in Nagasaki, with the tragedy there all too apparent. But there’s something harder to grasp here, an immensity beyond chronology. From the distance of seventy years, the atomic test seems less a part of history than the beginning of it, some epochal gateway that, once passed through, grows opaque.

Maybe it’s merely the half-life of history. Most of the people who come here are natives of the atomic age, born into it as fish is born into water and just as incapable of imagining otherwise. The lived experience of a pre-atomic age dwindles and winks out; similarly, the world-changing events of our own time will recede into simplicity, come to seem inevitable. Creation myths for the next age.

So you stand in the barren landscape, among the scouring sand and try to reconcile all that emptiness with the story of what happened here: "Trinity Site: where the world’s first nuclear device was exploded on July 16, 1945." The bomb proliferates. By the moment of the test another, simpler type of gadget was already loaded on a ship, destined for Hiroshima. Twice it was used in war, followed by innumerable tests. It spread to enemies and allies, diffused without being defused. And wondering where it will go next, you find yourself staring into the glare of the future, as blind as the men at Trinity, shielding their eyes from the white-hot fires of the sun they’d made.

Heading west from the Trinity site carries you across New Mexico’s flat and sere terrain, the white sunlight imbuing everything with an otherworldly clarity. One of the largest and least populous states, it averages barely 17 people per square mile. Outside of the major population centers, the land takes on a prehistoric cast. You can imagine returning in a thousand years and finding everything much as when you left.

About two hours’ drive west of Trinity, Highway 60 begins a slow climb. At 7,000 feet it reaches a plateau ringed with mountains. As you approach, you notice small, white installations on the horizon. The distance and the lack of human-sized landmarks make it difficult to recognize them at first, but you’re right in the middle of another large, government-sponsored science project. One devoted not to splitting the atom, but exploring the stars.

Each of those white shapes is a 230-ton radio telescope, 28-meters in diameter. There are 27 of them spread across the plateau, their dishes pointed toward the heavens. For a disorienting moment they look like alien artifacts, some vast and inscrutable remnant of a lost civilization. But then you recognize the train tracks connecting them.

This is the Very Large Array. Completed in 1980, it’s a collection of antennas that, working in conjunction and with the help of some computerized number crunching, function as one of the world’s largest radio telescopes. It’s also one of the most widely used, operating 362 days out of the year and sending data to researchers around the world via the internet. In the four decades since its completion, it has become an iconic example of science on the very largest scale, appearing in films such as Contact and Transformers: Dark of the Moon. In something of a backhanded compliment, it even showed up as a Skynet facility in Terminator Salvation.

The VLA captures the imagination in much the same was as Trinity, but without the latter’s dubious legacy. If Trinity represents an omega point of applied science — the almost inevitable outcome of work hypothesized by Fermi and Szilard, warned of by Einstein, and executed by Oppenheimer and his fellows — the Very Large Array epitomizes pure science, motivated only by inexhaustible curiosity. Yet that curiosity, that yearning to better know the world around us, produced a scientific apparatus unique in the world.

Why do it? It’s a question we keep asking, especially when it comes time to consider budgets, to assess national priorities. The bomb, it’s been argued, ended a war. What does the VLA do? "Research is like a window to the future. It opens up new things," says Rick Perley, a National Radio Astronomy Observatory astronomer. "It is also by doing this kind of research we inspire the next generation — not necessarily to do astronomy or physics — but into exploring their curiosity, to understand their environment." To be curious. To be attentive. To think.

To visit both of these sites in a single day, to stand at Trinity and feel as a small, involuntary participant in the nightmare of history and then, hours later, to stand among the antennas of the VLA and feel that, despite its myriad flaws and foibles, mankind is still capable of great feats of inspiration — well, it’s not just the thinner air at 7,000 feet that makes you a bit lightheaded. It’s the sense that in the desert sands of New Mexico, yes, there are craters where our past is dimly visible but not forgotten, and, better still, places where our future is still being made.

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Deceased--Robert F. Christy

Robert F. Christy
May 14th, 1916 to October 3rd, 2012

"Robert F. Christy, Atom Bomb Physicist, Dies at 96"

by

William J. Broad

October 4th, 2012

The New York Times

Robert F. Christy, who as a young Canadian-born physicist working on the Manhattan Project came up with a critical insight that led to the creation of the world’s first atom bomb, died on Wednesday at his home in Pasadena, Calif. He was 96.

His death, after a brief respiratory illness, was confirmed by his family.

Dr. Christy later turned his mind to the riddles of space and served as provost of Caltech. But he was more widely known as one of the last surviving leading scientists to have worked on the atomic bomb.

Dr. Christy was present at important junctures in the early atomic era, including the debut in 1942 of the world’s first nuclear reactor in Chicago. Most notable was his contribution to the design of the explosive core of the first atom bomb, which lit up the New Mexico desert during a nighttime test in 1945. The atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki also used his design.

The first bomb, developed in secrecy during World War II at Los Alamos, N.M., relied on implosion. The plan was to detonate a sphere of conventional explosives, the blast from which would compress a central ball of nuclear fuel into an incredibly dense mass; that in turn would start a chain reaction that would end in a nuclear explosion.

But the Los Alamos team discovered that the interface between the detonating explosives and the hollow sphere could become unstable and ruin the crushing power of the blast wave.

Dr. Christy, while studying implosion tests, realized that a solid core could be compressed far more uniformly, and he worked hard in the days that followed to convince his colleagues of its superiority. He succeeded, and the hollow core was replaced with one made of solid plutonium metal.

A 1993 book, “Critical Assembly,” sponsored by the Department of Energy, which maintains the nation’s nuclear arsenal, said Dr. Christy’s insight reduced the risk that the core would lose its spherical form and thus fail to explode.

And Robert S. Norris, an atomic historian and the author of “Racing for the Bomb,” called Dr. Christy’s breakthrough, known as the Christy pit, “a conservative solution to a problem they were having” that “increased the likelihood of a successful detonation.”

Robert Frederick Christy was born May 14, 1916, in Vancouver and studied physics at the University of British Columbia. He was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, under J. Robert Oppenheimer, a leading theoretical physicist who became known as the father of the atomic bomb.

After completing his studies in 1941, Dr. Christy worked at the University of Chicago before being recruited to join the Los Alamos team when Oppenheimer became its scientific director.

After the war, Dr. Christy joined Caltech in theoretical physics and stayed at the university for the rest of his academic career, serving as a faculty chairman, vice president, provost (from 1970 to 1980) and acting president (1977-78). He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Christy came to question the wisdom of further developing nuclear arms, though he never became an activist on the issue.

His love of nuclear physics led him to study cosmic rays and to investigate what drove the pulsating brightness of an important class of stars used as yardsticks to measure cosmic distances.

In 1967, he won the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society for his work in theoretical astrophysics.

While working for the National Research Council during the 1980s and ’90s, Dr. Christy studied the effects of atomic radiation on the Japanese people resulting from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings to help determine safe radiation levels and better understand radiation’s medical risks.

He is survived by his wife, I. Juliana Christy-Sackmann; two daughters; two sons from a previous marriage, which ended in divorce; and five grandchildren.

Dr. Christy may be best remembered for a bitter encounter that crystallized the resentment that many American scientists felt toward Edward Teller, considered the father of the hydrogen bomb.

During the height of American cold war fears of Communist influences, Teller, a veteran of the Manhattan Project, had testified against Oppenheimer before the Atomic Energy Commission, questioning his judgment and recommending that the government revoke his security clearance.

Shortly after the testimony, in the summer of 1954, scientists attending a conference at Los Alamos were preparing for a picnic lunch on a terrace. Teller saw Dr. Christy, an old friend, and hurried over to greet him.

But Dr. Christy, a former protégé and colleague of Oppenheimer’s and known to be a courteous, genial man, threw back an icy glance and walked away.

“I was so stunned that for a moment I couldn’t react,” Teller recalled in “Memoirs,” a 2001 book. “Then I realized that my life as I had known it was over.”

Robert F. Christy [Wikipedia]

Interviewed by Sara Lippincott

 
Historical event in 1942 at the University of Chicago

Chicago and the Manhattan Project

December 2nd, 1942 and Henry Moore 1967

July and August anniversaries...atomic weapons

Anniversaries are arriving soon: July 16th, 1945 marks the first atomic bomb tested at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in a remote section of desert near Los Alamos, New Mexico and August 6th, 1945 marks the atom bomb detonated over Hiroshima. I discovered this short essay in The New York Times by Issey Miyake and his thoughts regarding the devastation of Hiroshima. Few of us have ever experienced such a tragedy and it is essential to remind ourselves of the downside of science and technology.

"A Flash of Memory"

by

Issey Miyake

July 14th, 2009

The New York Times

IN April, President Obama pledged to seek peace and security in a world without nuclear weapons. He called for not simply a reduction, but elimination. His words awakened something buried deeply within me, something about which I have until now been reluctant to discuss.

I realized that I have, perhaps now more than ever, a personal and moral responsibility to speak out as one who survived what Mr. Obama called the “flash of light.”

On Aug. 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on my hometown, Hiroshima. I was there, and only 7 years old. When I close my eyes, I still see things no one should ever experience: a bright red light, the black cloud soon after, people running in every direction trying desperately to escape — I remember it all. Within three years, my mother died from radiation exposure.

I have never chosen to share my memories or thoughts of that day. I have tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to put them behind me, preferring to think of things that can be created, not destroyed, and that bring beauty and joy. I gravitated toward the field of clothing design, partly because it is a creative format that is modern and optimistic.

I tried never to be defined by my past. I did not want to be labeled "the designer who survived the atomic bomb," and therefore I have always avoided questions about Hiroshima. They made me uncomfortable.

But now I realize it is a subject that must be discussed if we are ever to rid the world of nuclear weapons. There is a movement in Hiroshima to invite Mr. Obama to Universal Peace Day on Aug. 6 — the annual commemoration of that fateful day. I hope he will accept. My wish is motivated by a desire not to dwell on the past, but rather to give a sign to the world that the American president’s goal is to work to eliminate nuclear wars in the future.

Last week, Russia and the United States signed an agreement to reduce nuclear arms. This was an important event. However, we are not naïve: no one person or country can stop nuclear warfare. In Japan, we live with the constant threat from our nuclear-armed neighbor North Korea. There are reports of other countries acquiring nuclear technology, too. For there to be any hope of peace, people around the world must add their voices to President Obama's.

If Mr. Obama could walk across the Peace Bridge in Hiroshima — whose balustrades were designed by the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi as a reminder both of his ties to East and West and of what humans do to one another out of hatred — it would be both a real and a symbolic step toward creating a world that knows no fear of nuclear threat. Every step taken is another step closer to world peace.

[Issey Miyake is a clothing designer. This article was translated by members of his staff from the Japanese.]

Hiroshima Mon Amour

Here is the entire film...

Hiroshima Mon Amour [1959] by Alain Resnais

Hiroshima

by

John Hersey

ISBN-10: 0679721037
ISBN-13: 978-0679721031

eNotes.com

Hersey is probably best known as the author of Hiroshima, a nonfiction account of the explosion of the first atomic bomb. Like many of Hersey's World-War-II writings, Hiroshima focuses on the moral problems associated with war. The work, which is written in straightforward prose, combines a thorough analysis of subject matter with a novelist's attention to narrative. Hersey gathered material for Hiroshima in the actual rubble of bomb-crippled Hiroshima itself, interviewing survivors and probing their agonies and triumphs. Hersey's efforts helped supply Hiroshima with a strong sense of the human consequences of the bombing. Previously, most of the material written about the bombing tended to focus on the science and engineering behind the bomb itself—for example, the force of the blast, the physical principles governing the explosion, and the mass devastation to the landscape of Hiroshima. By contrast, Hiroshima awakened Americans to the bomb's impact on everyday human beings leading everyday lives. Originally published as an entire issue of The New Yorker on August 31, 1946, Hersey's book forced a nation to grapple with its conscience in the wake of a seminal—and signal—act of war.

In Hiroshima, the dropping of the bomb is experienced through the eyes of six survivors: two doctors, Terufumi Saski and Masakazu Fujii; two religious figures: Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German missionary, and Reverend Kioyoshi Tanimoto, a Japanese Methodist minister; and two women, Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in a factory, and Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a poor tailor's widow with several children. Hiroshima recreates the entire experience from the victims' points of view, beginning fifteen minutes before the explosion and covering the period directly thereafter. The six whose stories Hersey tells are probably not truly representative of the average Hiroshima survivor; indeed, critics have noted that the six were more fortunate than most. But by weaving vignettes of the bomb's tragic effects, Hersey created powerful images, sensitively detailing internal emotions by describing external actions. The impact on readers was enormous. According to Charles Poore, "Hiroshima penetrated the tissue of complacency we had built up. It penetrated it all the more inexorably because it told its story not in terms of graphs and charts but in terms of ordinary human beings."

Hersey intentionally created Hiroshima as a relatively objective, non-judgmental account of the bombing. His purpose was to jar the American reading public, upon whom an atmosphere of complacency had descended in the days and months following the blast. Hersey attempted to counteract this reaction by portraying the Japanese people as human beings, not as just an enemy in war. Readers of Hiroshima were made to visualize the terror the six survivors experienced and to understand the horrific human suffering caused by the bomb. The book's message is fundamental: Grave consequences follow grave acts. Hersey does not directly confront the moral issues surrounding the blast, choosing instead to spur serious, personal reflection on the part of all readers. Having read Hiroshima, each reader could hardly help facing this essential question: When, if ever, is it right for a nation to carry out such an act?

When Hiroshima originally appeared in The New Yorker in 1946, the issue was quickly sold out. Many alternative sources for gaining access to the text—for example, readings on national radio, free copies to Book-of-the-Month-Club members (on the grounds that nothing else in print "could be of more importance at this moment to the human race"), and complete reprintings in other publications—were quickly established. The immediate response was overwhelmingly positive—Albert Einstein ordered 1000 copies of the book, Bernard Baruch ordered 500, and numerous other readers purchased multiple copies. A few critics feared Hiroshima would create unwarranted sympathy for the Japanese, but even these commentators recognized the work's important cultural impact. In general, critics praised Hiroshima's humanistic view of war. A few, including Kingsley Widmer, faulted Hiroshima on stylistic grounds—Widmer claimed that "artful detail substitutes for moral intelligence"—but most were impressed by Hersey's simple, straightforward narrative technique. Today, commentators value Hiroshima as one of the most gripping works to emerge from the horrors of World War II. The work continues to reach a wide audience, ranging from young students in educational settings to more advanced students of philosophy, war, and geopolitics.


Just a reminder...July 16th, 1945

Pathos and irony...children of radiation and James Yamazaki

"Doctor Atomic"--Great Performances at the Met

PBS on Monday evening [December 29th] will offer Great Performances at the Met's opera "Doctor Atomic"..."John Adams's contemporary masterpiece explores a momentous episode of modern history: the creation of the atomic bomb. Movie director Penny Woolcock makes her Met debut with this production. Baritone Gerald Finley plays J. Robert Oppenheimer, the title character, in this gripping adaptation of a story that changed the course of world history. Alan Gilbert conducts...."


"Doctor Atomic"