David > David's Quotes

“It is impossible to describe the utter despair of all classes of Jews in Germany. 718 The thoroughness with which they are being hounded out and stopped short in their careers is appalling. Unless help comes from the outside, there is no outlook for thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, except starvation or [suicide]. It is a gigantic “cold pogrom” and it is not only against Jews; Communists of course are included, but are not singled out racially; Social Democrats and Liberals generally are now or are coming under the ban, especially if they protest in the least against the Nazi movement. . . .”
― Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

“About one hundred refugee physicists emigrated to the United States between 1933 and 1941.727”
― Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

“They pictured the uranium nucleus as a liquid drop gone wobbly with the looseness of its confinement and imagined it hit by even a barely energetic slow neutron. The neutron would add its energy to the whole. The nucleus would oscillate. In one of its many random modes of oscillation it might elongate. Since the strong force operates only over extremely short distances, the electric force repelling the two bulbs of an elongated drop would gain advantage. The two bulbs would push farther apart. A waist would form between them. The strong force would begin to regain the advantage within each of the two bulbs. It would work like surface tension to pull them into spheres. The electric repulsion would work at the same time to push the two separating spheres even farther apart. Eventually the waist would give way. Two smaller nuclei would appear where one large nucleus had been before—barium and krypton, for example:”
― Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

“Thus in the first months of 1940 it was already clear to two intelligent observers that nuclear weapons would be weapons of mass destruction against which the only apparent defense would be the deterrent effect of mutual possession.”
― Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

“Within twenty-four hours of Franklin Roosevelt’s death two men told Harry Truman about the atomic bomb.”
― Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

“Some called it the “Super,” because it could release 1,000 times as much explosive energy as the atomic bombs that were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the war. It was a thermonuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb.”
― Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon

“On November 1, the first hydrogen bomb—produced at Los Alamos—was exploded, as part of codeword Operation Ivy, off the Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific. They called the bomb Mike. It exploded with the power of twelve megatons, causing the tiny island of Elugelab, the site of the blast, to vanish from the face of the earth.”
― Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon