Radioactive Rivers

[Adam J. Thornton]

> Based on the truckloads of documents I gained from more than 50 DOD/DOE
> FOIA requests over the past 7 years, there's really not that much from
> which to track Nobert's adventures with the atom. Two contracts, most of
> the text redacted in typical DOE fashion. Nevertheless, it seems clear that
> Wiener was probably enticed to work for Hanford on two false promises:

Can you provide some reference number or somesuch for these documents so I
can get hold of them too?

> 1.  That some aspects of the Hanford Nuclear project would benefit
> medical research; 2. That the project would lead to that elusive
> wet-dream of the perpetual Dynamo crowd: the fusion reactor.

Just as I suspected.  What do you mean "probably"?  Is it just that there
is no record of *why* one N. Wiener would take these contracts which
presumably violated every principle he seemed to stand for?  Or is there
actual evidence, although slight, which gives some clue?

Finally, are you absolutely positive you haven't misread "Wiener" for
"Wigner," namely one Eugene Paul Wigner, physicist out of Princeton, N.J.,
who most certainly *was* instrumental in the design of the Hanford plant,
and from what little I know of him would have needed little or no
encouragement to do so.  I can't figure why the government, who already
viewed Wiener with Grave Misgivings, would have *wanted* him at Hanford.

Again, you have the documents and I don't.  If it's clearly Norbert, it's
Norbert.  But in the little research I did on Hanford, Wigner appears as
one of the most prominent figures, and the picture you paint of Wiener is
so utterly at odds with everything else I know about him, that I'm somewhat
suspicious.  I'd rest easier with a few citations so that I can check, to
my own satisfaction, that you're hanging the right man.  If you *are*
hanging the right man, then I'd be *extremely* interested to know what
caused the ideological reversal between 1946 and 1953.

> Even so: suffice it to say that Wiener's understanding of the mechanics of
> nuclear reactors--downplayed by his defenders--was certainly sophisticated
> enough to realize the following:

...The usual problems of mining uranium and building fission plants.
Again, a callous disregard that seems out of place for Wiener, but entirely
in character for Wigner.  This is the root of my problem: if Wiener
discarded his concern for the Working Class (and, Steely, you still have
never responded to the argument that Wiener explicitly disavowed the
sterile, machine-controlled future you imputed to him) and the general
well-being of mankind, then that represents a huge change in his thinking
that deserves investigation.

> For more on Wiener and these matters you'll just have to wait until my book
> on Hanford is published in the spring of '98: Radioactive River: The
> Hanford Nuclear Reservation and the Destruction of the Columbia, Essential
> Books, Washington DC.

Meany.  Can you at least tell us how we can acquire your source documents?

> Although I tend to find myself agreeing, almost reflexively, with most of
> what David C. sez (perhaps it is the crystalline lucidity of his prose), to
> say Wiener was not a scientist is bizarre. Math is an art and not a
> science? I always assumed that the SHROUD/SHOCK section of V. was a step
> into Dr. Norbert's lab.

It's not clear--speaking as a historian of technology within a history of
science program within a history department (and one who hates the phrase
"an historian" since I, by God, pronounce the "h")--just *how* to treat
math when you're doing its history.  I don't think mathematicians think of
themselves as scientists, as they understand science, and I don't think
scientists think of mathematicians as scientists, as *they* understand
science.  Not, really, an art, but not based on empirical results the way
Bacon--and almost every physicist on the planet--would like science to be.
An exercise in formal logic, maybe?  Something different: mathematics is
not grounded in the physical world.  Maybe.  If you're a Platonist, anyway,
which most mathematicians I know are.  On the other hand, if you're an
Aristotelean, you can claim that mathematics is knowledge abstracted from
experiential knowledge of the behavior of the physical world.
Newvertheless, I suspect that *Norbert* would have claimed a philosophical
difference between his trade and that of scientists, or at least those he
disliked.

Adam
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