Word: fissionability
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While the people in Los Alamos were working to produce their bomb, physicists in Japan were attempting to produce theirs. Professor Hidetake Kakihana of Sophia University in Tokyo was Agnew's age when he too was enlisted by his country in 1941 to assist with nuclear fission experiments at a secret cyclotron in Tokyo under the directorship of Yoshio Nishina, Japan's Oppenheimer. Unlike Agnew, Kakihana and many of his colleagues were reluctant to produce an atom bomb for their government because they had great distaste for the military regime. The physicists worked, Kakihana says today, with deliberate slowness...
...Japan's military regime really wanted to produce an atom bomb before the Americans, it put almost no money behind the effort, compared with the Americans' $2 billion. For their part, the Japanese physicists simply made the wrong scientific choice in their fission experiments, deciding to work with high-energy rather than low-energy neutrons. Even if they had been able to produce a chain reaction, there was very little uranium in the country and no way to get more. There is little doubt that if the Japanese had made a Bomb before the Americans, they would have used...
Coming to terms with nature simply means coming to terms with its neutrality, and that ultimately means coming to terms with oneself. If some "trick" was played by nuclear fission, it was people who played the trick on themselves. In a lecture to fellow scientists, Oppenheimer said, "In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose." Oppenheimer's presumption is that the physicists, as people, had not known sin before making the Bomb, which sounds like wishful confessing. Nature...
...Krauthammer's argument in favor of fear hit a home run. Although today's urgent issues are the economy, unemployment, health insurance and education, tomorrow's pressing issue will be nuclear warfare. We cannot uninvent nuclear fission and its terrifying consequences for the human race any more than we can uninvent gunpowder. Nuclear weapons in the hands of a responsible government can sit idle, serving only as a threat of retaliation against less responsible governments. Those same weapons in the hands of governments that care nothing for earthly survival can destroy the world. Frances F. Mullon Ripley...
...promises of its congressional supporters. Just as both parties have embraced President Bush's hydrogen initiative, they have also signed on to another of his long-shot proposals, one he says will provide "clean, safe, renewable and commercially available fusion energy by the middle of this century." Unlike nuclear fission, the splitting of uranium atoms that powers nuclear reactors, fusion joins hydrogen atoms to unleash far more energy. The trick is to control the fusion reaction to generate electricity. It has been an elusive goal for half a century and probably will be for many decades to come. Even...