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Id like to help you with this but Im a little busy at the moment

Theres a reason I'm not blogging much at the moment. The reason is right in this picture:

I cant get a laptop to set level on the deck and everytime the boat moves, the laptop falls into the water. Whoopsie Daisy..! And you know what? Theres no Wifi out here! I'll have to get Slartibartfast to correct that error with Earth 2.0.

That's little old me in my kayak this week out on Fidalgo Bay, with Mt. Baker in the background. I'm the only person on earth who goes to Puget Sound and gets a suntan, but I have a good reason. Its been in the 80's all week, with nary a cloud in the sky the entire time. The locals of course think they are sizzling on the Devils Own Hibachi whereas I, a member of that deranged tribe of "Desert Dwellers" to the South think that this is exactly how it should always be. Of course if it was, it would be brown rather than green and not nearly as staggeringly beautiful as it is.

I'm not really here right now, meaning that I'm not sitting around the office with my laptop. I'm out and about, on the water and off with the occasional effort to gointo the city to wrap up some business which is the actual purpose to my visit up here, but blogging? Eh, no, not right now. I have a ton of things rattling around to blog about but I'm really not in a position to sit down and write at the moment, so bear with me here...

I'll be back soon, but for now think about a couple of things and we shall discuss when I return.

Ahem...

July 16, 1945 was the date of the First Nuclear Explosion in History.
There are a couple of things about this pivotal event that I want you to think about, for example:

A) What would have happened if the bomb didn't go off? Billions of dollars were spent on this project. Is it at all possible that General Leslie Groves and Dr. Robert Oppenheimer could have somehow gotten away with not delivering the 'finished goods' without a demonstration of what all the money was spent on? Witness what happened to Howard Hughes after the war with acusations of "War Profiteering" over his undelivered wartime projects. Witness the fact that then Senator Truman was already near to uncovering the Manhattan Project because of the tremendous cost that was being expended on the project. Could they simply have walked away from it all?

B) Since the Trinity test was to confirm the design of the Plutonium bomb, would the US have gone ahead with the U-235 Bomb and dropped it on Japan if Trinity didnt work? Remember, the U-235 had serious limitations which is why the Plutonium Bomb was necessary.

C) Here's one thats always bothered me. Given the large amount of Soviet espionage that was underway in the Manhattan Project and at work at high levels of the US Government at the time, why didnt the Soviets try to sabotage the bomb? Let's say they did, the US then walks away from the design, convinced that the bomb can never deliver more than a fizzle. Then in 1949, the Soviets demonstrate that the bomb actually does work. During the year it would take to catch up, would the Soviets have used the same restraint against the US and the West as we did towards the Soviet Bloc?

D) What if the bomb simply didn't work? What if the design was flawed and the flaw itself was to go unresolved? Would the bomb eventually have been created by someone else later? How could any follow on team ever received the amount of funding necessary to make that project happen with the political mindset of "It failed with brighter minds than your working on the problem, so who do you think you are that you can solve it?" to fight against. If the smartest minds in the world say it cant be done, do you still try? If so, why? A world where there is no bomb sounds like a dream but I'm not so sure it works out that way and I find that rather interesting idea to consider.

Here's the big question. If there was no bomb, was another World War and this time with the Soviets, an actual certainty? In 1949 over Berlin or in Korea? Did the existence of the bomb and the demonstrable use of it on the Japanese change human civilizations view of the limits of warfare? How many times since 1945 did the bomb actually serve as a firebreak against the horrors of "World War"?

Oh, and another thing. We know about the Manhattan Project because it worked but have you ever thought about the possibility that there were other major projects that didnt work that we never found out about because, well, they did fail. Sometimes things fail because they are silly ideas that dont work and could never work and sometimes things fail because of poor timing. As we all know "Success has a thousand fathers but failure is always an orphan". If there was another "near-hit' project out there like the Manhattan project, how would we know?

Ok, now back to the water. Now where did I put my drybag...

Posted @ July 16, 2008 08:45 PM | Current Affairs

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