The alien hypothesis?

[Blake Stacey]

Quoting jporter <jp3214 at earthlink.net>:

>
> What were Feynman's feelings, if any, about the development
> of the atomic bomb and its being dropped on hundreds of thousands
> of civilians? Or doesn' t that image intrude through the "faintly
> falling" snow at MIT?
>

He joined the Manhattan Project while doing his doctoral work at 
Princeton. Initially, he was reluctant, but fear of the alternative got 
him to join. Quoting roughly from memory, **Surely You're Joking, Mr. 
Feynman!** says, "The
Germans had Hitler, and the possibility of a bomb was obvious."  Like many of
the Los Alamos scientists (perhaps the majority of them), he joined because of
the German threat.  In a filmed interview, which is transcribed in the volume
**No Ordinary Genius**, he says that "what I did immorally" was failing to
reconsider the situation after Germany fell and if Japan represented a similar
threat -- a threat frightening enough to warrant the Bomb.

Again, I have to quote from memory, but in the same interview, he talks about
the elation which spread through Los Alamos after the Trinity test was a
success.  He ran around playing drums and dancing on the hood of a Jeep, and
everyone else was about as enthusiastic.  At the same time, "people were
suffering and dying in Hiroshima."

After Trinity, he wrote that "everything was perfect except the aim.  The next
one was aimed at Japan instead of New Mexico" (a letter to his mother, 
I think,
included in Gleick's biography).

Whether or not the Bomb should have been made or, once made, dropped 
upon Japan
is of course a vast subject with no clear resolution.  Nevertheless, it is a
considerable part of why, as Gleick says, "physicists did not make natural
hippies."

Blake