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The last witness of the Manhattan Project, which created the weapons that threaten humanity again

2022-04-24T14:53:06.628Z


A new book collects the testimony of Roy Glauber, a physicist who at the age of 18 participated in the laboratory that created the atomic bomb


Roy Glauber poses for a photo in December 2006. Chavez, Dominic Globe Staff (Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Roy Glauber recounts that at the Los Alamos Laboratory most of the scientists "were very busy creating families."

In just over two years, some of the greatest minds of the 20th century have turned civilization's greatest intellectual successes into a weapon that can annihilate it.

Nuclear war became an existential threat in the decades that followed to families across the globe, including those made up of the Manhattan Project scientists, mostly in their twenties and thirties, as they applied their knowledge of the atomic nucleus and explosives to the creation of the ultimate weapon.

Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and until the start of the war in Ukraine, the radioactive hecatomb was replaced by another sword of Damocles, product of scientific and technological progress;

climate change has represented the probable apocalypse for the last generation.

Now, the threats of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in his offensive against Ukraine, have once again reminded us why a group of scientists (led by soldiers and politicians) in the middle of the Second World War changed the history of humanity forever.

The statements of Glauber (1925-2018), then an 18-year-old boy, are part of

the last voice

(Ariel), a recently published book that contains conversations with one of the youngest scientists who participated in the construction of the bomb.

The memoirs, written by José Ignacio Latorre and María Teresa Soto-Sanfiel, are an interesting first-hand account of a physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 2005 for his contributions to quantum optics.

The scientist's narration mixes the epic, the discussion of scientific and technical aspects and the personal story.

Glauber, like many other young physicists of the time, was spared combat in the Pacific by his scientific talents.

The US government justified the use of the bomb as a way to shorten the war and save the lives of many other young people.

Although Glauber, like many other Los Alamos scientists, was aware of the end of that gigantic project, there are not many moral disquisitions about his work and he tells how life went on while working on the most important scientific and technological project in history. .

The director of the laboratory, Robert Oppenheimer, married, escaped from Los Alamos for a couple of days to visit Jean Tatlock, an old girlfriend affiliated with the Communist Party.

The sentimental life was still fundamental for those prodigious minds embarked on one of the greatest epics in history.

Glauber himself comments that there were few girls in the lab and that the ones that were were in high demand.

Also, when Richard Feynman was around, almost everyone was listening to his stories.

Glauber insists that he was an observer, that he did not make big decisions, and did not publish in any magazine the resolutions of some relevant problems that he reached during his time in the Manhattan Project.

He didn't want to be remembered for it.

In this he agrees with Lise Meitner, who together with Otto Hahn made possible the first fission of the atom in 1938, showing that the atomic bomb was possible.

She refused to join the project when it was proposed to her.

"I will never have anything to do with a bomb," she said then.

Although physicists made the bomb possible, they were never allowed to decide what to do with it.

Robert Wilson, who years later was the architect and first director of Fermilab, the great US particle physics laboratory, was among those who asked for the project to be stopped after the fall of the Nazi regime, in May 1945, two months before the Trinity test, the first detonation of the plutonium bomb.

Despite the fact that Japan had no known project to build the atomic weapon, the military leaders decided to go ahead with the project and with the idea of ​​demonstrating all its destructive power over two cities, instead of carrying out a demonstration of the power of the bomb in a uninhabited place, as almost all the scientists of Los Alamos wanted.

Glauber does mention that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

with hundreds of thousands of dead, it was not very different from what happened daily during World War II, something that surely helped the participants in the Manhattan Project to cope with the results of their work.

The authors remind us of a gesture by the United States Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, who reminds us of the weight that those responsible for the conflicts attribute to the future and to history and to the people who suffer from war in the present.

Stimson convinced President Truman to remove Kyoto from the list of potential atomic bomb targets.

He had visited the city twice and was moved by its beauty, it had to be preserved for the Japanese of the future.

something that surely helped the participants in the Manhattan Project to cope with the results of their work.

The authors remind us of a gesture by the United States Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, who reminds us of the weight that those responsible for the conflicts attribute to the future and to history and to the people who suffer from war in the present.

Stimson convinced President Truman to remove Kyoto from the list of potential atomic bomb targets.

He had visited the city twice and was moved by its beauty, it had to be preserved for the Japanese of the future.

something that surely helped the participants in the Manhattan Project to cope with the results of their work.

The authors remind us of a gesture by the United States Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, who reminds us of the weight that those responsible for the conflicts attribute to the future and to history and to the people who suffer from war in the present.

Stimson convinced President Truman to remove Kyoto from the list of potential atomic bomb targets.

He had visited the city twice and was moved by its beauty, it had to be preserved for the Japanese of the future.

that recalls the weight that those responsible for the conflicts attribute to the future and to history and to the people who suffer from war in the present.

Stimson convinced President Truman to remove Kyoto from the list of potential atomic bomb targets.

He had visited the city twice and was moved by its beauty, it had to be preserved for the Japanese of the future.

that recalls the weight that those responsible for the conflicts attribute to the future and to history and to the people who suffer from war in the present.

Stimson convinced President Truman to remove Kyoto from the list of potential atomic bomb targets.

He had visited the city twice and was moved by its beauty, it had to be preserved for the Japanese of the future.

There is probably no project in the history of mankind with such transformative results as the nuclear bomb and it was far from the only contribution of the scientists gathered in that remote place in New Mexico.

Hans Bethe, director of the Los Álamos theoretical area, explained how stars produce their energy;

James Chadwick discovered something as unthinkable for almost all the intellectuals of almost all of history as the neutron;

and Luis Álvarez proposed a credible hypothesis that told us that more than 60 million years ago an asteroid hit what is now the Yucatan Peninsula and precipitated the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Glauber's own work has also been useful in trying to build quantum computers, a type of machine that would revolutionize computing.

Neither these men, who thought much further than almost everyone else, nor the families that some created during their stay in Los Alamos, suffered the tragedy of seeing the power of their most powerful achievement unleashed.

However, unraveling the secrets of matter did not free them from the small and great sufferings that matter must face when it takes on the human configuration.

After leading the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer was questioned in hearings organized by his government for having relations with communists or for his donations to the republicans in the Spanish civil war.

Edward Teller, one of his associates at Los Alamos, testified against him.

Together with his wife, Katherine, who, according to Glauber and other testimonies, suffered from alcoholism, he had a son, Peter, in 1941, and a daughter, Toni, in 1944,

when he was running the lab.

Toni committed suicide in 1977, ten years after the death of his father.

Glauber also suffered from the envy of his scientific colleagues, who used all kinds of tricks, extensively detailed in the book, to overshadow his pioneering contributions to quantum optics in the mid-1960s. In 1975, he says, his wife decided to divorce and He gave him custody of his two children, whom he raised alone.

This work, of which Glauber is proud, slowed down his contributions to physics, which were not so brilliant again.

The Nobel call, in 2005, four decades after the publication of the works that made him deserve it, seemed like a joke to him, because he had almost forgotten the power of his results.

Like the inhabitants of the world, who for two decades hid from his memory the destructive potential of what was achieved almost eighty years ago in a laboratory in New Mexico.

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Source: elparis

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