Natura Corroditur
9 August 2k15
“The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass and beyond there is a different country.” ~Dr. J Robert Oppenheimer
“Our world faces a crisis as yet unperceived by those possessing power to make great decisions for good or evil. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” ~Albert Einstein, New York Times, 25 May 1946
“Natura Potest Fieri Furioso” ~Unknown
Seventy years ago today, The United States of America, and her Allies, completed the first Atomic bombing campaign in human history when we dropped the Plutonium bomb, Fat Man, on the city of Nagasaki, Japan.
Three days earlier, Little Boy, the first and last Uranium bomb, was dropped on Hiroshima. In the months and years to come the whole world would learn the devastating impact that nuclear weapons cause to life itself; rendering the very Earth a poisonous, parched heap of scorched rubble. We know now the genetic blight that nuclear weapons bring.
However, there was one man who never saw the risk of nuclear weapons as being too high for their perceived value. He never admitted, to my knowledge, that the building and stockpiling of these weapons–the much vaunted Mutually Assured Destruction strategy–was a kind of paranoid madness that overcame much of humanity in the wake of the our thunderous entry into the Nuclear age.
Yet, more importantly for this discussion, I am speaking of the creation of the Hydrogen Bomb. Many—Scientists, Citizens, and Generals alike—argued that such weapons were completely unnecessary. But our man championed them. That man, widely considered to be the father of the H-Bomb, was Edward Teller.
Here was an archetype Mad Scientist if I ever beheld one.
It was he who put the final nail in the the career of Dr. Oppenheimer, who was an opponent of the Hydrogen bomb project.
Influential in many world-changing events such as being among the main driving forces behind Operation Crossroads (the July 1946 Plutonium bombing of Bikini Island and the Ghost Fleet), and other subsequent Nuclear tests, Edward Teller is also widely held to be directly responsible for Dr. Oppenheimer being exiled from Washington D.C., and losing his security clearance during a Witch Hunt. A vicious stab in the back to a man who gave his brilliant mind and most of his career to his country. Regardless of how we may personally feel about Dr. Oppenheimer, the man deserved better.
Edward Teller did not escape the consequences of his political machinations; nor did his single-minded pursuit of the Hydrogen bomb come without fallout. Indeed, I understand that a great many of Teller’s colleagues despised him for what he did to Oppenheimer, for his part in Operation Crossroads, and for his part in ensuring the proliferation of the most frightening and dangerous weapons Humanity has ever created. As for his legacy, Dear Reader? Being as we are history, I invite you to read more about Teller…then you be the judge.
~*~
Untitled Poem 235
Edward Teller has died, at last;
I shall curse him no more.
Still, I want to send him dead roses.
Petals fetid, craven thorns and all;
blossoms fattened on brine and nox,
—yes, and with sick, withered leaves
tied demure in a pink, cardboard box.
For siring the Hydrogen bomb
he deserves no less, and likely much more.
By now it has been explained to him
that security is a superstition;
that we can neither love, nor even live
—without consequences;
that, like electrons, life moves in a circle;
and that what goes around, really goes around.
By now Edward has gustily slurped
the quark soup of our beginning
and found all of his answers, in the end.
Maybe there are no superstrings to bind our hands.
But, perhaps there should be…
From Edward Teller, at least,
there will not spring
any further ghastly surprises.
He has become glass without bubbles.
He has been struck on the Big Collider
—split, fissured, unharnessed.
And I will not curse him
for he has enough to worry about as it is.
by DC McKenzie
6 August 2k5
—end transmission—
Dawn Runs Amok 