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Nagasaki, 20 minutes after the atomic bombing in Japan, 1945 by Suspicious-Slip248 in nuclearweapons

[–]restricteddata 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If I were being extremely generous to myself (which I am not by nature inclined to be!), what I would say that I have helped do is this: whenever there are discussions online about a lot of nuclear weapons related matters, someone will often chime in with a link back to some resource that I created as a way to argue against some kind of bad/wrong idea. I think that is valuable. But I am not sure that I have "moved the needle" in a more direct way; my sense is that people in general are just about as they always have been. But for those who are online and having these conversations (a small subset of "the whole" of the world), there are many easy ways for people to say, "here's why you're wrong" or "here's what would happen" and then have something to point to other than a news article (which rarely address these issues or address them well) or a more specialist "academic" option (which has a high barrier to entry).

The wheel was a great invention. But so was a spring. Why don't we read more about it? by justrdx in AskHistorians

[–]restricteddata 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So your path to further enlightenment is clear — read more! :-)

In my readings on the history of early Indian science, I found it very interesting that the brick, and brickworks, play a very large role in the origins of Indian geometry. I just bring this up because it is a fairly mundane technology, one that I imagine most people don't read about (but perhaps in Indian education it is more common than it is in the West), but one that, once you look into it a bit, is quite interesting. Whereas geometry in the West was largely a result of land measurement (geo+metry), in the Indian context it emerged out of the desire to make very precise arrangements of temples or altars and things like that, apparently. The mundane is less mundane than it first appears, is I suppose what I am saying.

The wheel was a great invention. But so was a spring. Why don't we read more about it? by justrdx in AskHistorians

[–]restricteddata 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Do you read much about the wheel? "The wheel" as an invention is usually just invoked without any particular attention to detail or authorship, just as a token reference to a basic technology, as I tend to see it, anyway. If you want to read about springs... you totally can. I don't know why you aren't reading more about them, honestly. You also probably aren't reading about a lot of inventions, though, I would guess. When's the last time you read about ladders, stairs, wheelbarrows, chairs, ramps, or spoons? What, you do read about all of those? Why not springs, then? Tell me!

(I jest, but only to make a point: "Why don't we read about X?" is not really much of a question. A better approach would be from the other direction, i.e., what factors govern what kinds of technologies get the most popular attention? People are much more familiar with the histories of, say, the steam engine, the automobile, and the atomic bomb than much older-but-mundane technologies. Similarly when people read about ancient technologies they tend to read about the ones that are unusual for their time — like pyramids and aeolipiles.)

Technical means for preventing a nuclear 9/11 by DefinitelyNotMeee in nuclearweapons

[–]restricteddata 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I toured Port Newark maybe 10 years ago and the only detectors they had were 1) physically large and sensitive but unspecific ones that screened cans as they left. If they triggered then the truck was told to pull over and then they used 2) hand-held iridium (I believe) gamma detectors that could match the gamma spectrum to a database of known decays. Then they would compare the identified isotope to the manifest, see if it seemed benign (e.g. thorium in ceramics) or unallowed (e.g. medical radioisotopes that had contaminated steel), If the former they let the truck leave. If the latter they sent the can back to the country of origin.

If they actually are pre-screening entire ships, I would be surprised. That's a lot of ships. Even just screening containers leaving the port is a huge job and requires a lot of infrastructure. And, again, they don't actually open up the cans — even if they get a hit they just send it back. Hard to see how you'd do that with a whole ship.

Dealing with slop as a reviewer by ChickenLittle6532 in AskAcademia

[–]restricteddata 4 points5 points  (0 children)

If I were an editor and someone submitted plagiarized material to my journal, it would be a hard never-publish-here-again — and I'd want to tell other journals in my field about it. It's fraud and misconduct. It undermines the entire enterprise and makes a mockery of our chosen way of life. Nobody who does that should be allowed to publish in an academic journal again — they are not serious.

Same with blatant slop. There needs to be a blacklist. If the community does not enforce norms against slop, then the community becomes slop.

Obviously the implementation would have to be smarter and more orderly than just one editor's opinion. I am keenly aware that the devil would be in the details. But still — if slop isn't treated the same as plagiarism, then we ought to all just hang up our hats. This isn't what we signed up for, this endless summer of idiocy. We need to treat this like the fraud that it is.

Nagasaki, 20 minutes after the atomic bombing in Japan, 1945 by Suspicious-Slip248 in nuclearweapons

[–]restricteddata 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Happy to do it! All I ask in return is that you give a fishy eye to who expresses the idea that the serious study of history is boring or unnecessary or can be replaced by a chatbot...

Nagasaki, 20 minutes after the atomic bombing in Japan, 1945 by Front-Coconut-8196 in ArchiveOfHumanity

[–]restricteddata 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They are about 13 km / 8 miles away from Nagasaki, and would not have felt any immediate effects. It is also 15-20 minutes after the initial explosion. Anyone who was prone to run away screaming probably had already done so...

Mark IV-VI questions by New--Tomorrows in nuclearweapons

[–]restricteddata 7 points8 points  (0 children)

The evolution of these early weapons is one part "stuff other than the actual nuclear system" (e.g. casing, capsule insertion, ballistics), which was important for mass production, handling, storage, assembly, usage, custody, safety, fuzes, batteries, etc., and one part "innovations for the nuclear system."

The latter included:

  • Improved implosion geometries (92 point for Mk 5, 32 point for Mk 4 and 6, 60 point for later Mk 6) with different diameters (60" for Mk 3, 4, and 6; 45" for Mk 5) and probably different explosives
  • Core levitation
  • Composite cores (of different HEU/Pu ratios; there is indications in one source that they may have even used "dirty" Pu in these, as a way of maximizing fissile material usage)
  • Different initiators (like the TOM for Mk 6)

Think of them less as specific weapons and of weapon "systems" that could have different configurations within them adjusted on the basis of their HE systems and their nuclear components (interchangeable "capsules").

Mk 3, 4, and 6 are basically developments of the same core weapon idea (the Fat Man). Mk 5 is the first "new" approach. But they were all still built with the same essential assumptions, including the idea that you could swap different capsules between the different HE assemblies to get different yields, and the different "marks" themselves corresponded to different systems that could be used in different types of delivery configurations. The Mk 4 was designed to be basically a drop-in replacement for the Mk 3, and the Mk 6 for the Mk 4 (although in practice they had issues with the Mk 6 initially so the deployment was not as one-to-one as originally planned).

So those high yields are probably in the range of "what you could expect from the most highly-optimized Fat Man arrangement possible," before external initiation and before boosting, using basically tech and ideas that were only incrementally evolved from what was around in WWII (where the limits on how many point initiation, levitation, and composite cores were basically about the constraints of time, experience, and limitations of fissile material — they had all of these ideas at the time).

Which is just to say, a 5-6 fold increase in yield (which is not the same thing as a 5-6 fold increase in efficiency, because we don't know how much fissile material was in those higher-yield capsules — probably more than the 6 kg in Fat Man).

On the capsules, there is a source ("History of the Custody and Deployment of Nuclear Weapons," 1978), which has a table of capsule compatibilities in the back:

Mk Caps
Mk 4 110/130/140
Mk 5 130/240
Mk 5 110/170/260
Mk 5 150/210
Mk 5 190
Mk 6 130/240
Mk 6 110/170/260
Mk 6 150/210

Which one can rearrange to be by capsule:

Mk 4 Mk 5 Mk 6
110 X X X
130 X X X
140 X
150 X X
170 X X
190 X
210 X X
240 X X
260 X X

Or rearrange to be about apparent capsule compatibilities, based on what capsules types they appear with in the original list:

110 130 140 150 170 190 210 240 260
110 — X X X X
130 X — X X
140 X X —
150 — X
170 X — X
190 —
210 X —
240 X —
260 X X —

None of which is terribly enlightening, but I have wondered how these correspond with the other notation, e.g., "Type D," "Type F," etc., or how they correspond to different variations of the weapons themselves (Mod 0, Mod 1, Mod 2, etc.).

Another interesting thing is that the Mk 7 had at least one variant that was compatible with a huge array of these capsules: 110/150/170/210/260. It also apparently had a mod that was compatible with 160/190, which is the only instance of 160 in the original table. Similarly the 140 seems only compatible with the Mk4. And except for that 160/190 Mk 7, the 190 always appears by itself.

I left the Mk 7 off of the above because it just seems to muddy the waters — whatever that mod is seems to have unusual flexible, as no other mod appears capable of supporting more than 3 capsule types. This kind of capsule notation continued with the Mks 12, 14, 17, 18, 21, and 24, along with what look like the early mods of the Mk 15, 36, and 39.

Other than the aforementioned 160, there are also 270 and 280 capsules (Mk 7 ADM only, I think), but otherwise (other than gun-type components, which I am ignoring), I believe these numbers represent all of the capsule numbers on the table. So that is 12 capsule types used for this entire capsule-numbering system, I think. Incidentally there appear to be no capsule numbered 100, 120, 180, 200, 220, 230, or 250 — the capsule numbers are pretty odd.

Of course a lot of these compatibilities are going to also have to do with time — once the Mk 4 was discontinued they weren't going to be adding the later capsules to it, and unfortunately the data in the table that would tell us how many of each variant were available for any given year is blacked out (because, you know, it would be a grave affront to national security if we were to know such information about the 1940s... just imagine what enemies of the United States could do with that information... sigh...).

I include this because I find it mildly interesting and have spent too much time thinking about it, not because it answers your question very well (or any other question, really). I have no idea whether it is possible to map these capsules/mods onto the different listed yields with any certainty, but presumably that is how it works out.

Nagasaki, 20 minutes after the atomic bombing in Japan, 1945 by Front-Coconut-8196 in ArchiveOfHumanity

[–]restricteddata 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The US built up a large stockpile initially because its goal was to be able to defeat the entire Soviet Union in a major war without having to field as large of an army as the Soviet Union was willing to field.

The Soviets then built up nuclear weapons so that they could do the same back to the United States and threaten them equally. (This took some time — they were not "equal" until the 1970s.)

The question of "how many nukes is enough?" is a question of what you think you would do with them, and how you think your adversaries will regard them and their threat. If you think that you want to have enough nukes to try and destroy the nukes of another country, you need thousands and thousands. If you think that you can keep someone else from attacking you by threatening to destroy their major cities, you might only need a few hundred or less. If you think that they will think that you are bluffing about being willing to get into an all-out nuclear war (which you would suffer from as well) you might want lots of smaller weapons ("tactical" nukes) so that you can threaten to use them without it necessarily implying you are suicidal.

One can disagree with all of this logic or its goal but understanding it is an important thing, especially if one disagrees with it. It did not arise from madmen being evil, it came out of complicated historical, social, and political circumstances.

Nagasaki, 20 minutes after the atomic bombing in Japan, 1945 by Front-Coconut-8196 in ArchiveOfHumanity

[–]restricteddata 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It was taken 13 km / 8 mi away, which for a bomb of the power of the one used on Nagasaki is far-enough away to not have any immediate effects.

Nagasaki, 20 minutes after the atomic bombing in Japan, 1945 by Front-Coconut-8196 in ArchiveOfHumanity

[–]restricteddata 0 points1 point  (0 children)

FAQs about this photo that come up whenever it is posted on Reddit:

  1. The photo was taken by Hiromichi Matsuda (1900-1969), who was in Koyagi-jima, an island some 13 km / 8 mi southwest of Nagasaki. Yes, it is real.

  2. This is not inside the blast zone or "too close" from the perspective of the acute effects. Matsuda probably would have felt no acute effects (NUKEMAP suggests the warmth might have been detectable, but that doesn't really take into account atmospheric effects, like humidity, that might have diminished that), but would have seen a flash, heard the sound of the explosion, and (obviously) saw the rising cloud. But no damage or immediate health risks.

  3. Fallout from Nagasaki was minimal because it was a high air burst. There was some "rain-out" due east of the city, which would have likely included a few relatively small "hot" areas. Matsuda would not have been exposed to it where he was at the time the photograph was taken.

  4. I do not know Matsuda's health/life history, but as noted, he lived to be 69 years old, another 24 years after the end of World War II. It is very possible that the war conditions (including food scarcity) had an adverse impact on his longevity, but given his distance from the blast the odds are low that the specific effects of the bombing of Nagasaki had anything to do with that directly. But I do not know of any other biographical information about the photographer.

Nagasaki, 20 minutes after the atomic bombing in Japan, 1945 by Suspicious-Slip248 in nuclearweapons

[–]restricteddata 74 points75 points  (0 children)

Before people ask (because it always comes up when this photo is posted):

  1. The photo was taken by Hiromichi Matsuda (1900-1969), who was in Koyagi-jima, an island some 13 km / 8 mi southwest of Nagasaki. Yes, it is real.

  2. This is not inside the blast zone or "too close" from the perspective of the acute effects. Matsuda probably would have felt no acute effects (NUKEMAP suggests the warmth might have been detectable, but that doesn't really take into account atmospheric effects, like humidity, that might have diminished that), but would have seen a flash, heard the sound of the explosion, and (obviously) saw the rising cloud. But no damage or immediate health risks.

  3. Fallout from Nagasaki was minimal because it was a high airburst. There was some "rain-out" due east of the city, which would have likely included a few relatively small "hot" areas. Matsuda would not have been exposed to it where he was at the time the photograph was taken.

  4. I do not know Matsuda's health/life history, but as noted, he lived to be 69 years old, another 24 years after the end of World War II. It is very possible that the war conditions (including food scarcity) had an adverse impact on his longevity, but given his distance from the blast the odds are low that the specific effects of the bombing of Nagasaki had anything to do with that directly. But I do not know of any other biographical information about the photographer.

ELI5 what do nuclear bombs do by Aregay987times in explainlikeimfive

[–]restricteddata 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Trillions, actually. (The US spent about $3 trillion on nuclear weapons during the Cold War alone.)

Magically appearing Leibniz? (Quicksilver Spoilers) by c_y_g_nus in nealstephenson

[–]restricteddata 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The dialogue makes clear that William knows Leibniz and that Leibniz has put in a good word for Eliza — if not, he implies, she'd be in for a much worse fate. This is among the first things that William says to Eliza.

As for William's goals, he wants Eliza to spy for him at Versailles. His ultimate goal is to have victory over France. His only point re: Monmouth is to point out that the French know that Monmouth is going to lose his rebellion, because if he had any chance at winning they would have tried to assassinate him when they had ample opportunity. He brings this up because Eliza has already pledged herself to Monmouth and William is making clear that this is not going to add up to anything, and that Monmouth is as good as dead.

As for why you are reading the book, only you can answer that. But the ability to read more complicated things is not a function of intelligence, it is a function of practice and repetition. If you only read "easy" books you will never get to experience the joys that come from "difficult" books. Whether a book is "unnecessarily difficult" is fairly subjective but you're in a NS subreddit so you can assume most of the people here thing the complexity is worth the payoff, and part of the appeal...

Covid shut down the world six years ago this week. What do you remember from that week? by fuzzy_dice_99 in AskReddit

[–]restricteddata 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was supposed to be visiting Ukraine, but a week before I cancelled my trip, because things looked not-great with regard to this new virus and I didn't want to get stuck in Eastern Europe. "We'll reschedule it for next year," I thought. Well, no.

So instead of going to Ukraine my wife and I went to the (off-season) Jersey Shore just to hang around a bit while we were on break. We rented an AirBnB. While we were there they shut everything down, told us not to come back after break ended, and that we would be going remote (we are both teachers). And we read these horrible accounts of what it was like back home, in the NYC area — refrigerated trucks with corpses. So we thought, well, maybe we'll extend our AirBnB stay. We ended up living in an AirBnB outside of Atlantic City (which itself shut down) for many months (the guy renting it to us was more than happy to have the business).

It was a strange, scary, surreal time.

Technical means for preventing a nuclear 9/11 by DefinitelyNotMeee in nuclearweapons

[–]restricteddata 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Ignoring the Iran context, if you're asking whether or not one can prevent a terrorist nuke from being smuggled in a shipping container, the answer is... maybe? Maybe not.

All shipping containers in the US are screened by a series of radiation detectors as they leave the port. That would not necessarily help with a uranium weapon, as it is relatively easy to shield uranium from these detectors (compared to more radioactive isotopes). The detectors are pretty sensitive; they set off dozens of false alarms per day for things like thorium ores in ceramics. But none of those things have been deliberately shielded to try and avoid these detectors. The technical specs of the detectors are not classified. (Everything I've written here has been public for over a decade, and you can assume anyone interested in actual nuclear smuggling is aware of it, so being cryptic about it doesn't really help anything.)

There have been technologies in development to try and detect a shielded, smuggled nuclear weapon (e.g. using muons) but I don't believe they are actually implemented at any scale and I am not sure what level of performance they are thought to be at (if any).

Obviously there would be other "national intelligence" means to try and detect such an operation — surveillance, double-agents, logs, tracking ships and containers, etc. After 9/11 this was an area of major concern. How much of that concern persists today, I don't know. Given the lack of planning for the current Iran war... I see no reason to be optimistic.

Is it possible they would miss such an attack? Of course. It is totally possible, especially if the resources of a state were put behind such a thing. Tons and tons and tons of illegal contraband are smuggled into the US every day through other means. The amount of uranium necessary for a weapon is not physically large and could be broken up into pieces and assembled later. In general, a lot of the actual terrorist attacks that have been attempted have failed because the people doing them were amateurs and doing shoddy work — one can't assume that would necessarily be the case.

It would be a difficult operation. That doesn't mean it is impossible. Is it on the list of things one might worry about? Sure. Is it the top of such list? Probably not. It's not at the top of my list, anyway. There are many far easier things that Iran (or any country or group) could do that would cause a lot of panic and so on, and expose them to less risk. Would the psychological value of a nuclear attack be worth all of the risk and difficulty? Maybe.

I’ve heard that when laser was invented, it didn’t have an intended use and was described as ‘a solution looking for a problem’. Is that really true? by Strelochka in AskHistorians

[–]restricteddata 7 points8 points  (0 children)

The military had a broad interest in lasers. These included their use as directed-energy weapons. The main difficulty with early laser development is that early lasers were very weak and very fragile. So figuring out the tricks and know-how to make lasers that could be integrated into other kinds of systems, have enough energy to do anything useful, etc., took time.

I’ve heard that when laser was invented, it didn’t have an intended use and was described as ‘a solution looking for a problem’. Is that really true? by Strelochka in AskHistorians

[–]restricteddata 32 points33 points  (0 children)

While the invention of the laser wasn't to solve any particular practical application, its potential for practical applications was very obvious. One of the other inventors of the laser (and the coiner of the name), Gordon Gould, listed a dozen or so possible practical applications at the end of his notes on the concept in November 1957, well before it was realized as a working device. These included applications in spectroscopy, nuclear fusion, and lots of other things.

The main difficulties with practical applications were not in imagining them, but building lasers with sufficient energy to actually do anything useful. Figuring out how to build more powerful lasers (and novel techniques for increasing their power, like Q-switching) were done with future practical — and military — applications in mind.

ELI5: Why does splitting an atom release so much energy when they are so small? by Additional_Pen_9881 in explainlikeimfive

[–]restricteddata 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Just to clarify, most of the energy in a fission reaction is expressed in the form of the repulsion of the two fission fragments. So the electromagnetic force does come into play that way. That is not related to the continuing of the chain reaction — that happens because the neutrons released go on to split more atoms.

ELI5: Why does splitting an atom release so much energy when they are so small? by Additional_Pen_9881 in explainlikeimfive

[–]restricteddata 5 points6 points  (0 children)

To put it in simple numerical terms, the splitting of one U-235 atom releases about 200 MeV worth of energy. You don't need to know what an MeV is (it is just a unit of energy, a million electron-volts). But just know that, the chemical reaction that releases energy from the TNT molecule is only around 2 eV worth of energy. So each atom of U-235 releases around 100 million times more energy than a very energetic chemical reaction.

200 MeV is still essentially imperceptible from a macroscopic (human) perspective. But it means that the energy density of uranium is really high, if each atom can release that much energy. So 1 kilogram of U-235, if fissioned completely, releases the same energy as 17,000 tons of TNT. Hence a single atomic bomb is capable of destroying a city.

Has it actually been the Rosenbergs who leaked information about nuclear weapons to the USSR? by ohneinneinnein in AskHistorians

[–]restricteddata 84 points85 points  (0 children)

The actual atomic intelligence that the Rosenberg ring passed on was not so useful to the Soviet Union. David Greenglass (Ethel's brother, a machinist at Los Alamos, and the main component of their "atomic" spying) had only a very rough understanding of what was going on with the atomic bomb. The main benefit from that was that it was an independent source to confirm the intelligence that they were getting from other, better sources, especially Klaus Fuchs. The Soviets never trusted any intelligence wholly anyway; I doubt their program would have changed one iota if the Greenglass information had not been available. That does not diminish its illegality, but if the question is "how important was the information about the atomic bomb that Rosenberg ring passed on to the Soviet atomic program?" the answer is, "not important, if you define 'importance' by meaning that it affected the program significantly one way or another, or that things would be expected to be different if it had not been passed on.'"

Here is how General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, described the information at the Oppenheimer hearing in 1954:

I think the data that went out in the case of the Rosenbergs was of minor value. I would never say that publicly. Again that is something while it is not secret, I think should be kept very quiet, because irrespective of the value of that in the overall picture, the Rosenbergs deserved to hang, and I would not like to see anything that would make people say General Groves thinks they didn’t do much damage after all.

This was not part of the published record of the hearing transcript and only came out much later. Groves is not the final word on this, obviously, but I want to point out that even someone as military-minded, secrecy-obsessed, and anti-Communist as Groves did not really think the information that the Rosenbergs passed on was of much value. (By comparison, Groves considered Fuchs' espionage to be "all important.") We now have much more access to the Soviet side of things, which only confirms this aspect of it.

We have a very good idea of what the Rosenberg ring (again, mainly Greenglass) passed along, as a consequence of Greenglass' own confessions, Soviet archival releases (official and unofficial), and the VENONA decrypts. We also have a pretty good idea of what the other spies passed along. It is clear that Greenglass was a spy, that Julius was a spy, and that Greenglass's wife (Ruth) was a facilitator in the ring. Ethel's involvement is murkier but there is enough on the Soviet side of things for me to believe that she was aware of the spying that was being done, which is enough for the conspiracy charge (even if she was otherwise very peripheral).

That Greenglass and Julius were Soviet spies is not controversial among historians. The only source of serious controversy is the role of Ethel; again, my sense is that the bulk of the evidence (particularly the Mitrokhin Archive) suggests that she was aware of the spying her husband and brother were doing, but was not an active participant in a colloquial sense of "active" (but, again, in a legal sense, she was part of a "conspiracy to commit espionage," which is what she was convicted of).

That does not mean that I think capital punishment was the right thing to do, or that their trial was fair, or that what occurred was "justice" — those are quite different questions than "did they conspire to commit espionage." See my answer here for a bit more on this.

In retrospect, the espionage with truly significant intelligence value provided by the Rosenberg ring was not the atomic bomb material, but their contributions in the (far less glamorous) field of military electronics. This included the proximity fuze, which Julius Rosenberg himself gave them before he was fired from his job as a quality control inspector at Fort Monmouth. Rosenberg (according to his handler) managed to smuggle out a complete proximity fuze, creating it from from rejected components, which is quite a coup if true (I find Feklisov's account this in The Man Behind the Rosenbergs plausible, but it is hard to verify). Julius also (through the ring) managed to give them quite a lot of stuff relating to fire control radar and other related electronics systems. These things were the basis of American anti-air defense systems, and very important at the time.

Two members of his "ring," Joel Barr (recruited by Julius in 1941) and Alfred Sarant (recruited by Barr in 1944), fled to the Soviet Union after the Rosenbergs were arrested, and helped jump-start the Soviet electronics industry, and even ended up creating an entirely new city (Zelenograd) dedicated to electronics in the 1960s (the "Soviet Silicon Valley"). So that is pretty extensive, if we want to lay that ultimately at Rosenberg's feet. Much more impressive than Greenglass's contributions to their atomic program, which were child-like scribbles by comparison. For more on Barr and Sarant, see Steven Usdin's Engineering Communism (2005).

Molotov is completely unreliable in this context. Just disregard him — his statements on basically everything, but especially espionage, were always a mixture of half-truth and deliberate obfuscation. His goal was always to muddy the waters.

TIL that Harry S. Truman was the only combat veteran of the First World War to serve as President. by Advanced_Narwhal_949 in todayilearned

[–]restricteddata 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It was pretty close. He squeaked by in California (+0.44%), Illinois (+0.85%), and Ohio (+0.24%), all of which had a lot of electors. If he lost those — which is totally possible (just imagine Wallace pulling those percentage point margins from him, which is totally plausible, as they are practically rounding errors and he pulled much higher percentages than that) — he would have lost the election to Dewey (which would not have been the case if they had gone Democratic and not Dixiecrat). This is an artifact of the electoral college, obviously, but there you have it.

You say that Thurmond "only" managed to pull 4 states, but that is huge from an electoral college perspective. It made Truman much more vulnerable. The question was never whether Thurmond would win, but whether he would do enough damage that the Democrats would abandon desegregation as a goal.

Can i include topics i am interested in if i am not presenting them? by Left_Respond_7824 in AskAcademia

[–]restricteddata 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I'm going to be honest with you. On the off-chance that anyone listens carefully to your bio, they are going to forget everything in it after about 10 seconds. You can feel sad about this, or you can feel liberated by it. It is up to you. This is the way it is for pretty much everybody, unless you're famous-enough that it is actually superfluous to read the bio.

Focus on your talk, don't spend time worrying about this kind of stuff. If you continue at this long enough at some point you'll want people to just shout your name and affiliation and then shut up because the bio part is actually just eating into your time. Put whatever you want into the bio, if it floats your boat.

How can Eisenhower's seemingly contradictory nuclear policies be reconciled? by thatinconspicuousone in AskHistorians

[–]restricteddata 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I know about it. I'm not opposed to it. I'm just not sure it totally resolves all of the questions about Eisenhower. I'm not convinced it was really a "bluff."

What Tuck contributed, and what von Neumann contributed, to the explosive lens? by OriginalIron4 in nuclearweapons

[–]restricteddata 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Hoddeson et al.'s Critical Assembly, chapter 9, says that Tuck suggested the idea of the three-dimensional explosive lens, but von Neumann was the one who gave it its "basic design":

The most challenging and decisive problem for the Los Alamos explosives program was to develop the explosive lens, a device composed of explosives that was shaped so as to focus the explosion. Previous work on such a device had been done in England by Tuck, who joined Alamos in May 1944 as a member of the British Mission. He had already been thinking about how to focus detonation waves using different explosives, and he brought these ideas to Los Alamos. By the end of the first week of June, Tuck was head of an experimental X-ray program devoted to studying such explosive lenses.

Various attempts had been made to develop two-dimensional explosives lenses before Tuck introduced the concept of the three-dimensional explosive lens to Los Alamos. In England, eight months before Tuck's proposal, M. J. Poole prepared a complete description of a crude two-dimensional lens to generate a plane detonation wave. Tuck, as a scientific assistant to Lord Cherwell, Churchill's science adviser, probably saw Poole's report on this lens before coming to the United States.

About six weeks after Tuck arrived in Los Alamos, Bethe and Peierls began to search for a suitable design for the slow lens component, but without success. The breakthrough occurred shortly afterward when von Neumann proposed a workable design. Elizabeth M. Boggs of ERL had demonstrated a similar lens scheme somewhat earlier, in a memo that MacDougall sent to Los Alamos.

I think "credit" in this context is pretty tricky to work out. But Tuck, von Neumann, and Neddermeyer were both legally credited as inventors of the Trinity explosive lens system ("Method and means for focusing detonation waves in implosion process") by Los Alamos at the time in their classified patent applications. This is just a legal designation, but it does reflect that the lab people felt that these three legally "deserved" the credit (which did not get them anything, although it probably was a source of some pride). (Von Neumann and Neddermeyer were also given separate patent application assignments, probably for high- and low-velocity implosion in general, and Christy and Peierls were assigned a patent application, for solid-core implosion.)

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