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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: average joe who wrote (42380)	1/16/2002 12:04:44 PM
From: Solon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

The men who made the bomb were certainly educated In later years, by a vote of 4-1, Oppenheimer was refused security clearance by the Atomic Energy Commission... Oppenheimer was an extremely brilliant man. resources.secondnature.org "When you come right down to it the reason that we did this job is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and values... It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spread of knowledge, and are willing to take the consequences (Rhodes, 1986, p. 761). For Oppenheimer, the scientist is a Promethean hero who must bring fire and other great marvels to humanity, regardless of the consequences. Prometheus paid a heavy price for his gift, and so did Oppenheimer: he was eventually stripped of his security clearance and banned from the kind of high-level activities he had become used to during the war and afterwards. This investigation is exactly the sort of thing Americans became used to during the McCarthy years, even though McCarthy himself was not involved. Oppenheimer never got to see the full evidence against him until he was examined by the prosecution, and his lawyer could not be present during this key portion of the trial. The prosecutor tied Oppy in knots over his relationships with Communist sympathizers early in World War II. But the real motive for the trial was Oppenheimer's ambivalence about pursuing a hydrogen bomb. He wanted to rein his Frankenstein in a bit, if possible -- not set out immediately to make a much more powerful monster. Edward Teller, one of the fathers of the Hydrogen bomb, testified that Oppenheimer did not deserve clearance, helping to seal his fate (Goodchild, 1981). The distinguished physicist I.I. Rabi, in a conversation with Bill Moyers' wrote Oppy's epitaph: Here was a man who had done so greatly for his country. A wonderful representative. He was forgiven the atomic bomb. Crowds followed him. He was a man of peace. And they destroyed this man. There were scientists among them. One reason doing it might be envy. Another might be personal dislike. A third, a genuine fear of communism. I don't think he was a security risk. I do think he walked along the edge of a precipice. He didn't pay enough attention to the outward symbols. One might also add that he never took the full hero's journey inward -- never came to grips with the fact that he was a discoverer, and inventor, a man of peace and a maker of weapons, a man who believed it was right to take the path of technological sweetness and at the same time experienced grave moral doubts. Later in life, in the summer of 1964, at a conference he had helped organize to think about how to achieve a more peaceful civilization, Oppenheimer remarked "We most of all should try to be experts on the worst among ourselves" (Goodchild, 1981, p. 278). This comment suggests he was taking that final step in his inward journey, and urging others to do the same..."