[quote]DON D1ESEL wrote:
I didn’t mean ‘engineers’ so literally. Also, it seems as if what you said about possible Soviet sympathies contradicts what you said about ‘flaglessness’. After V-E day, they were manufacturing an exclusively American weapon (no knowledge sharing with any of the Allies, and definitely not the Russians) for use to end the war and to deter the next enemy, of course the Communists. Those without whose intellects we would have no Bomb, the ‘waterfall chasers’ of whatever sort (to disambiguate completely), had to have some motivation whose roots were determinist/objectivist in nature in order to finish the race without an opponent running alongside.[/quote]
By flaglessness, I meant that a world at war was curiously a world united. Joe Stalin sits side by side with Churchill. Poles and Russians and French and British and Australians and Americans all regarded each other as “us”. This is how the UN got started at the close of the war. That, plus how the war ended.
In fact, the technology did get shared with the other allies, because of the cold war. Even just after Trinity, I think many observers felt the thing was definitely bigger than any single national government. They were already wondering how proliferation would be handled. Most technologists could see this was inevitable. Perhaps this was larger than any single nation state.
Many of the more important nuclear workers were what some on this site would label “ultra-liberals”. WWII was seen by many Europeans as a war between fascism and communism. But it was the FBI that decided that this meant there might be Soviet sympathizers. They had to keep an eye out in any case. But in fact there weren’t, until the era after the war.
I think people found different motives to go on. When you work on a problem for a while finding the solution becomes part of your identity. Also a team such as this, and its problem, takes on a life of its own. Finally Oppenheimer played a huge role in keeping everybody on the bandwagon. His leadership was an enormous factor.
I tend to doubt that anybody had a single motive. And it’s a pretty complicated situation; nobody’s competing at the moment, but if you stop you’ll never know until too late if somebody else does start. I suppose this qualifies as sweetness, but I think to the individuals involved the taste was more one of fear.
I think Oppenheimer’s comment embraced humanity, not merely the team working on the project. It’s not about waterfall chasers, it’s about waterfalls. Oppenheimer meant that the development was sweet to the existing state of knowledge.
Oppenheimer’s comment betrays his perspective as a Physicist. But it’s not just some physicists to be explained here, it’s the entire ‘silverplate’ phenomenon that built Los Alamos like magic in the middle of the desert, and Oak Ridge. That happened because of the fear of the Allies coming out second best to the Nazis in the world’s first nuclear arms race.
It wasn’t sweetness that built the bomb, it was fear of sweetness.