"bill_joy_-_why_does_the_future_not_need_us" - читать интересную книгу автора (Joy Bill)

Within a month of that first, successful test, two atomic bombs destroyed
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some scientists had suggested that the bomb simply be
demonstrated, rather than dropped on Japanese cities - saying that this would
greatly improve the chances for arms control after the war - but to no avail. With
the tragedy of Pearl Harbor still fresh in Americans' minds, it would have been
very difficult for President Truman to order a demonstration of the weapons rather
than use them as he did - the desire to quickly end the war and save the lives
that would have been lost in any invasion of Japan was very strong. Yet the
overriding truth was probably very simple: As the physicist Freeman Dyson later
said, "The reason that it was dropped was just that nobody had the courage or
the foresight to say no."

It's important to realize how shocked the physicists were in the aftermath of the
bombing of Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945. They describe a series of waves of
emotion: first, a sense of fulfillment that the bomb worked, then horror at all the
people that had been killed, and then a convincing feeling that on no account
should another bomb be dropped. Yet of course another bomb was dropped, on
Nagasaki, only three days after the bombing of Hiroshima.

In November 1945, three months after the atomic bombings, Oppenheimer stood
firmly behind the scientific attitude, saying, "It is not possible to be a scientist
unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this
gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it
to help in the spread of knowledge and are willing to take the consequences."

Oppenheimer went on to work, with others, on the Acheson-Lilienthal report,
which, as Richard Rhodes says in his recent bookVisions of Technology, "found a
way to prevent a clandestine nuclear arms race without resorting to armed world
government"; their suggestion was a form of relinquishment of nuclear weapons
work by nation-states to an international agency.

This proposal led to the Baruch Plan, which was submitted to the United Nations
in June 1946 but never adopted (perhaps because, as Rhodes suggests, Bernard
Baruch had "insisted on burdening the plan with conventional sanctions," thereby
inevitably dooming it, even though it would "almost certainly have been rejected
by Stalinist Russia anyway"). Other efforts to promote sensible steps toward
internationalizing nuclear power to prevent an arms race ran afoul either of US
politics and internal distrust, or distrust by the Soviets. The opportunity to avoid
the arms race was lost, and very quickly.

Two years later, in 1948, Oppenheimer seemed to have reached another stage in
his thinking, saying, "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 they cannot lose."

In 1949, the Soviets exploded an atom bomb. By 1955, both the US and the
Soviet Union had tested hydrogen bombs suitable for delivery by aircraft. And so
the nuclear arms race began.

Nearly 20 years ago, in the documentaryThe Day After Trinity, Freeman Dyson