Thought of the evening, Part III: In a testament to no good deed going unpunished, I was sitting here thinking about the Manhattan Project and you know there were a lot of Jewish and Eastern European scientists that were a part of building the nuclear bomb in no small part to stop the Jewish Holocaust...And what ended up happening?...By the time the bomb was first tested in New Mexico it was July 1945 and Germany had already surrendered in May 1945...So, they were in essence still working on the weapon that probably the majority or at least the leadership of the project primarily got involved with to stop the genocide of the Jews...Then what was a mainly altruistic endeavor by the scientists involved in this weapon that could destroy humanity turned into the potential genocide of the human race, which was demonstrated by the dropping of the bomb on defenseless citizens in Japan...I doubt the scientists though that their weapon to stop the Fuhrer and his minions would turn into the decimation of civilian populations and a not too subtle message to the world that Amerikkka was the man with the big stick on the block... Yet, the scientists continued to work on the project even after it wasnt going to achieve their intended goals because it was too late...This is a case of people losing sight of their objective once an unintended goal becomes the main point of focus...What I noticed in my limited reading on the subject and watching a couple of documentaries is that the scientists started to focus less on the objective of stopping the mass murder of Jews and the Nazi death march and more on the science...They started to fall in love with the bomb itself and seeing it as an exercise in their scientific skill...The merits of making a bomb like that are debatable, but the reasons why a good many of the scientists, who were left leaning and pacifist, is a testament to their initial belief in the greater good...But soon, within the framework of scientific advances superseding the overall reasoning of whether Pandoras box should be opened or not, the scientists at Los Alamos pushed themselves to their maximum mental capacity to build a weapon that was a testament to their acknowledged mental acumen and greatness even if it was a detriment to the entire world from that point forward ...What people forget about science is that the ego drives this culture the same way an athlete strives to push his or her body to its maximum limits to reach his or her full potential...To make this bomb was a testament to the ingenuity of each individual as well as the collective body as reminder of what man can achieve in this world through innovation and ingenuity... I cant say that I wouldnt have been myopic to that degree in that place and time because I am not that brilliant at anything so it is easy for me to sit here and say that I would have been more reserved and hesitant in the making of the bomb...However, I can say if I was the man I am now during this moment in history, that once the Germans would have been defeated, I would have left the project...at that juncture, there was no reason to continue it, no matter how history has rewritten this narrative of untold deaths due to a Japanese enemy that was on the brink of surrendering...Even with that moral stand, I know that the bomb would have come into being, but it would have been the right thing to do... I know it can be easy to lose your way...This is what I have seen happen in the black liberation movement that slowly turned into nothing bu the assimilation movement...or the environmental movement that quickly became a movement to push the clock forward a few decades to allow those few more generations to die off and not see the destruction that we are leaving for our kids...Man has lost its original objective in so many ways where just causes for the weak have turned into vacuous aggrandizement for the individual, many times to the detriment of the person or individuals they were initially set forth to help... For all those who havent seen the documentary The Day After Trinity, I am posting the video...It does a thorough job of discussing the thoughts and processes of the people at the helm of building the most devastating weapon known to man at that time...and you can see it still haunted some of them to the day of making this documentary... youtube/watch?v=P1DhWglFeLU&feature=kp
Posted on: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 04:52:08 +0000
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