by Lawrence Bush on September 5, 2011
Israeli warplanes destroyed a suspected nuclear facility in eastern Syria on this date in 2007. “Operation Orchard” involved years of investigation by Israeli intelligence of Syrian nuclear weaponry development with North Korea and Iran, two on-the-ground reconnaisance mission by Israeli commandos, and an airstrike involving as many as eight planes. Immediately after, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert relayed a message to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (via Turkish Prime Minister Recept Tayyip Erdogan) that Israel did not want to publicize the operation and was still interested in peace with Syria. Syria rapidly buried the destroyed site, which the International Atomic Energy Agency officially confirmed to be a nuclear reactor in April, 2011.
“The analysis was conclusive that it was a North Korean-type reactor, a gas graphite model . . . Israel estimates that Iran had paid North Korea between $1 billion and $2 billion for the project.” –Hans Ruhle, former chief of the planning staff of the German Defense Ministry
by Lawrence Bush on August 5, 2011
The first nuclear attack in history took place on this date in 1945 when the city of Hiroshima was largely destroyed by a single bomb dropped by an American B-29. Three days later, the city of Nagasaki was similarly destroyed, and Japan surrendered six days after that, ending World War II. The nuclear bomb was the product of an intensive development campaign in which Jews were prominently involved: Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, three Jewish refugees from Nazism, had co-signed an August 2, 1939 letter to President Roosevelt warning of the consequences if Germany developed an atomic bomb; J. Robert Oppenheimer, David Bohm, Rudolf Peierls, Otto Frisch Felix Bloch, Niels Bohr, Otto Hahn, and Edward Teller (as well as Wigner and Szilard) — many of whom were refugees from Nazism — were key leaders among the 6,000 scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the American bomb. After the war, a number of these scientists became leading advocates of disarmament and/or international control of nuclear weapons.
“When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.” –Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power
For a catalogue of other surprising statements of opposition to the Hiroshima bombing, click here.
by Lawrence Bush on June 19, 2011
The hot line, also known as the red phone, directly connecting the White House and the Kremlin, was installed on this date in 1963, prompted by the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962. (During the crisis, it had taken the U.S. nearly 12 hours to receive and decode the USSR’s first settlement offering.) The hot line was first used in during Israel’s 1967 Six-Day War, when the proximity of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet and the US Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean necessitated mutual assurance that the superpowers were not intervening. It was also used during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, when the U.S. actually went on nuclear alert. Stanley Kubrick featured the red phone prominently in his dark comedy of 1964, Dr. Strangelove: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb.
“President Muffley: Hello?… Uh… Hello Dmitri? Listen uh uh I can’t hear too well. Do you suppose you could turn the music down just a little?… Oh-ho, that’s much better… yeah… huh… yes… Fine, I can hear you now, Dmitri… Clear and plain and coming through fine… I’m coming through fine, too, eh?… Good, then… well, then, as you say, we’re both coming through fine… Good… Well, it’s good that you’re fine and… and I’m fine… I agree with you, it’s great to be fine… a-ha-ha-ha-ha… Now then, Dmitri, you know how we’ve always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb… The Bomb, Dmitri… The hydrogen bomb!…” –Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove
by Lawrence Bush on May 30, 2011
Solly Zuckerman, a pioneering primatologist, scientific adviser to the British military, activist for nuclear disarmament, and “the last evangelist of the Enlightenment,” as Charles Foster called him, was born on this date in 1904 in Cape Town, South Africa. Zuckerman moved to England in 1926 and taught at Oxford between 1934 and 1945. During World War II he served the Allies as an expert on aerial bombardment and helped the British design aspects of their civil defense. He was secretary of the London Zoological Society for more than twenty years and published two important books, The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes (1931) and Scientists and War (1966). Zuckerman was knighted in 1956 and was awarded a life peerage in 1971.
“Science creates the future without knowing what the future will be.” —Solly Zuckerman
Israeli warplanes destroyed a suspected nuclear facility in eastern Syria on this date in 2007. “Operation Orchard” involved years of investigation by Israeli intelligence of Syrian nuclear weaponry development with North Korea and Iran, two on-the-ground reconnaisance mission by Israeli commandos, and an airstrike involving as many as eight planes. Immediately after, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert relayed a message to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (via Turkish Prime Minister Recept Tayyip Erdogan) that Israel did not want to publicize the operation and was still interested in peace with Syria. Syria rapidly buried the destroyed site, which the International Atomic Energy Agency officially confirmed to be a nuclear reactor in April, 2011.
