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gregbrown's review against another edition
4.0
Interesting snapshot of 1946 thought, and astonishing for how much of the thinking around nuclear weapons had already crystallized—even on a public level using only non-secret information.
They'd already realized that nuclear weapons could be mass-produced, that it would only be a matter of years before another country could acquire them (despite the optimistic predictions of Truman and Groves on a few occasions). They'd already figured out that any defense against nuclear weapons—even if the technical issues were worked out—would let enough warheads through as to still create almost unthinkable destruction. They already anticipated the situation stabilizing in a sort of mutual deterrence, with the necessity being a large enough counter-force to be a credible second-strike attempt.
In fact, they got so much correct that the interesting part almost becomes what they didn't predict. There's the biggest one, more a hope really: that the world governments would band together to collectively control the use of nuclear weapons, materials, and technologies. (We got some international treaties, not always followed, and bilateral agreements between the US and USSR.) And in the worse case scenarios, they imagine one solution never followed: geographically disperse the US population and infrastructure, so a single bomb couldn't cause very much damage. We created the nuclear sponge of missile silos in remote parts of the west, but larger bombs and better targeting made any further dispersal more expensive and less effective.
Anyways, an interesting and brisk book that transformed my idea of how widely people had figured out the wealth of problems created by atomic bombs, and how quickly they did so. Also funny to note that the one professional writer in the book, Walter Lippmann, also contributes the most inscrutable chapter. All the scientists take such pains to write simply and clearly, while Lippmann's rhetorical tics are clearly unedited and deeply obfuscating.
They'd already realized that nuclear weapons could be mass-produced, that it would only be a matter of years before another country could acquire them (despite the optimistic predictions of Truman and Groves on a few occasions). They'd already figured out that any defense against nuclear weapons—even if the technical issues were worked out—would let enough warheads through as to still create almost unthinkable destruction. They already anticipated the situation stabilizing in a sort of mutual deterrence, with the necessity being a large enough counter-force to be a credible second-strike attempt.
In fact, they got so much correct that the interesting part almost becomes what they didn't predict. There's the biggest one, more a hope really: that the world governments would band together to collectively control the use of nuclear weapons, materials, and technologies. (We got some international treaties, not always followed, and bilateral agreements between the US and USSR.) And in the worse case scenarios, they imagine one solution never followed: geographically disperse the US population and infrastructure, so a single bomb couldn't cause very much damage. We created the nuclear sponge of missile silos in remote parts of the west, but larger bombs and better targeting made any further dispersal more expensive and less effective.
Anyways, an interesting and brisk book that transformed my idea of how widely people had figured out the wealth of problems created by atomic bombs, and how quickly they did so. Also funny to note that the one professional writer in the book, Walter Lippmann, also contributes the most inscrutable chapter. All the scientists take such pains to write simply and clearly, while Lippmann's rhetorical tics are clearly unedited and deeply obfuscating.
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