"The Making of the Atomic Bomb", by Richard Rhodes, best nonfiction book I ever read. Covers German and Japanese efforts, as well as giving a history of modern physics, beginning way back in the 19th century.
Did you know that Einstein was strikingly muscular, and at one point in his life had been deeply religious, until deciding that much of religion was "lies"?
There is also a frightening history of World War I, of Jews in Europe, and biographies all the scientists involved in the US nuclear effort. Totally amazing.
I also read "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb", and "Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust". The latter is deeply, profoundly, sickeningly graphic, and contains more information than you ever knew existed.
Absolutely, Richard Rhodes's book is a gem. You not only read about the Manhattan project, you read about the entire history of Europe between 1900 and WW2, with a bit more focus on quantum physics developments.
More specifically about the Japan's atomic program, I found "Atomic Adventures" by James Mahaffey to give a slightly better coverage. Bonus: you will also understand the origin of the UFOs. Bonus 2: you'll get a very funny/sad first hand account of the first cold fusion debacle.
Richard Rhodes' books are essential reading for anyone interested in the history of nuclear weapons and their development. I will add a second reference, "The First War of Physics" by Jim Baggott which covers the American, German and Soviet weapons programs. Not much on Japan's plans though.
Paperclip continued to deliver German scientists, engineers, and technicians to the United States for years past the end of WWII. One of the most important of these was Friedwardt Winterberg, who was brought to America before the ink was dry on his PhD in 1955. Winterberg is important because his doctoral supervisors were the wartime nuclear physicists Werner Heisenberg and Kurt Diebner, the latter of whom was much more important than the former.
Winterberg's career looks respectable if not particularly noteworthy at first glance; he spent his working years at the University of Nevada - Las Vegas as a physics professor. But it is in his writing that you get major clues as to what wartime German nuclear science was really up to. Winterberg's books explore various means of provoking nuclear detonations, often with an emphasis on prompt fusion, or fusion in synergy with fission, rather than fission alone. Most modern nuclear weapons incorporate this concept, broadly speaking, but what I am getting at here is a particular concept known as a "Prandtl - Meyer hydrogen bomb". This bomb design utilizes shock waves as described in earlier investigations of how those behave in water (hydrodynamics). It appears very likely that wartime SS scientists, most of them Austrian, attempted to build a megaton class hydrogen bomb based on Prandtl - Meyer principles rather than the Soviet "sloika" or the later US Teller - Ulam configuration. There is fragmentary but consistent information about this in the most recently discovered archival documents.
Bench press wasn't a popular lift until the late 50s, so it's unlikely the man ever performed the motion, much less in such a way that anyone wrote down a PR.
Recommend "The Bastard Brigade" (The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb) by Sam Kean. Crazy stories, larger than life characters.
No they hadn't, no they didn't. No it wasn't. No they didn't... in that order.
The Nazi's had no atomic programme advanced enough to create a reactor, even less a bomb. They certainly knew it was theoretically possible, but didn't pursue it thinking that development would take years longer than they anticipated the war to take.
Yeah they’re is so wrong on this that I’m honestly curious where they got that idea from. It sounds like comic book style WWII fanfiction, like something from a Hellboy or Wolfenstein AU
How is Edwin Black on the Holocaust? I thought he was pretty good, but I caught him writing some terribly inaccurate stuff about early Islamic history recently, and was disappointed.
> The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust
What scares me most is that the political climate is such that I'm fairly sure that some country will go down this path again. Too many wannabe camp guards at large already.
I really feel like my childhood education did me a disservice by fostering the misconception that there was something special or unique about Nazis - there wasn’t. Not only are there potential nazis everywhere, there are fractional and even full-blown-but-less-institutionally-powerful nazis everywhere. In our own country, in our communities, at work, on the bus, in the government.
Wannabe camp guards indeed. It was a sickening and sobering realization as an adult.
from a psychology point of view, a "warning" with scary words just adds fuel to crisis-mentality, the last thing that anyone wants in a general population. Literally, since the one-third plus one-third plus one-third equals "everyone" .. the quote instills fear. Though it may be insightful in an ugly way, repeating this kind of thing with emphasis is how to start fires IMHO
On one hand, what you say is the most important lesson IMHO, but I don't think it goes far enough down that path:
You and I are biologically the same as people who became Nazis; we have the same potential in us. When we imagine we are not is when we do wrong. Lots of ordinary Germans; smart, sophisticated people; and other people in many countries supported the Nazis.
At the same time, the people who embrace Naziism, or go along, or tacitly allow it, also have good in them. A tactic of such ideologies is a display of aggression, to scare you off; it's a political tactic that solidifies their movement by distancing members from everyone else; it also dehumanizes outsiders (also through disdain from them), allowing violence. In the end, it's a tactic, a display, a barking, scared dog. It may bite, but they are the same as we are, and have the same good inside, and have allowed themselves to be misled.
The classic citation is to Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil':
>I really feel like my childhood education did me a disservice by fostering the misconception that there was something special or unique about Nazis
The point of WW2 propaganda was to demonzie Nazis so much, and to distance them so much from the likes of you, me or your neighbour, in order to dehumanzie them in order to justify going to war with them and make killing them easier on the psyche for those who had to pull the trigger or send their sons on the battlefield to die fighting them, becasue in WW1 they discovered humans don't naturally want to kill other humans and will hesitate to pull the trigger making them shit soldiers, but if you demonzie and dehumanize the enemy enough, that hesitation loosens.
It's basic war propaganda 1-0-1. You now just realized Nazis are literally everywhere, not just in 1939 Germany.
This. The more history you read the more it becomes clear that basically everyone was a Nazi before the 20th century. Even Marx and Lenin were white supremacists and FDR, Woodrow Wilson and other liberals were too or at least appeased Nazis. LBJ was probably the first anti-Nazi president
That's exactly it. For me the turning point was to read some 'letters to home' written by the good little Nazi's about how they just incinerated a couple of hundred sub-humans doing them a favor in the process and by the way how is little Helmut and has Heidi's lung condition cleared up, your loving husband and father, Sigmund...
It's also why certain groups respond very lively when you call them by their true name: they are utterly in denial about their possible futures give or take an unlucky turn of events or two. The veneer is very thin. You find them in the halls of politics, in the police force, in the armed forces, in the offices of just about any company, at your local soccer club and just about everywhere else. And none of them is going to come out to admit it. I seriously wonder how big a fraction of a society has the subscribe to this kind of ideology before it is unavoidable that it will be expressed but I wouldn't be surprised at all if it was well under 50%.
>It's also why certain groups respond very lively when you call them by their true name: they are utterly in denial about their possible futures give or take an unlucky turn of events or two. The veneer is very thin. You find them in the halls of politics, in the police force, in the armed forces, in the offices of just about any company, at your local soccer club and just about everywhere else. And none of them is going to come out to admit it. I seriously wonder how big a fraction of a society has the subscribe to this kind of ideology before it is unavoidable that it will be expressed but I wouldn't be surprised at all if it was well under 50%.
This is like saying that people are offended when called racial slurs because there's some truth to what the slur means.
Racial slurs don't always say a person is not a person, I can only think of one that has that implication. They mostly mock a person's choices and behavior by associating them with stereotypes implied by the slur.
> It's also why certain groups respond very lively when you call them by their true name: they are utterly in denial about their possible futures give or take an unlucky turn of events or two.
I don't think that follows. Or rather, it might be true, but I'm not sure it's meaningful. I'm a pretty peaceable individual, generally wish good things for others, consider people as individuals, etc. I stay away from political activism. I would still be pretty upset if someone called me a Nazi.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, offensive terms tend to be offensive regardless of the underlying reason. When someone gets upset about it, you can't infer that it's because you struck close to home --- it could be utter indignation about the injustice of the situation, or something else entirely.
From what I can see, many of wannabe camp guards claim very loudly and aggressively to be anti fascist.
But you better not question their ideals or beliefs or you're a nazi and "it's always morally ok to kill nazis", their words, not mine.
What scares me is that it seems like actually believe these people when they say they are the anti-fascists. To me they're just goose steppers of another stripe.
I seem to remember a pretty high profile shooting which involved several antifa people attacking someone and being shot in retaliation. The trial was also very high profile and ruled in the defendant's favor that he acted in justified self defense.
Many people seem to disagree with the ruling on emotional grounds though.
Well, actually I've only witnessed one attack on a building. It was a temporary portable office at the construction site for a jail for children. So imprisoning children was the ideology ascribed to the building.
I think the view may technically be true, though of course the term "many" is very squishy. The best evidence for this is probably that (in countries with multiparty systems) you can often see surprisingly strong voter movement between the extreme parties.
That said, to think that this matters is pretty nuts. In the entire western world today, the structural environment on the extreme left is strongly opposed to the idea of campus, while on the extreme right the idea is welcomed by a critical mass.
In other words, the left polices itself. The right doesn't.
Yes. Authoritarianism is very much alive and it's very often found in the most "virtuous" of people. People who believe they are right and just are capable of anything.
The truth is people want acceptable targets they can lash out against with no consequences and feel justified in doing so.
> Kill you with what? A butter knife? The far left has crazies. The far right has crazies with guns.
History has shown time and again that when motivated it is not difficult for any side to acquire arms.
So your comparison is irrelevant in that as soon as someone wants arms they will acquire them.
Ultimately crazies are dangerous either way. It is dangerous to underestimate them or to say one crazy is better than another crazy. Comparing crazies is like saying one poison is healthier than another. Poison is poison.
100% true, but false equivalence can cause you to mis-prioritize a more pressing danger.
People on the right are worried about the crazies on the left canceling them for using the wrong pronoun.
People on every other part of the spectrum are worried about the far right literally ending our democracy. To be clear this is not hyperbole. Just watch a Trump rally these days—he has upped the rhetoric, even for him, to an alarming degree. And it’s met with the frothing cheers of his followers.
Can't speak for everyone; but that would violate essential freedoms. We're talking the wild fringes here when it comes to cold blooded murderers, it is better to tolerate a few leftist crazies.
But it is still a worry; right wing politicians get targeted and there is a lot of incitement on the left encouraging it.
Pressing danger == immediate; near at hand. I’m not talking about the grand sweep of history, the all-time leaderboard. I’m talking about the present era we’re living in.
In the future (or the past) of course it’s possible that the left wing could be (or was) more dangerous. I didn’t even think we had a truly dangerous problem with the far right in this country until Trump brought the crazy out of the shadows, and January 6th drove home the damage they were willing to do for him.
You alter priorities as conditions change. In this present era, we have a serious problem with a violent far right lead by a demagogue that has already shown a propensity for trying to overturn the results of legal elections. The far right has gone up several notches in my “we should be worried about this right now” list as a result. The more pressing danger to prioritize.
> Pressing danger == immediate; near at hand. I’m not talking about the grand sweep of history, the all-time leaderboard. I’m talking about the present era we’re living in.
For all those people in history, right wing *appeared* more dangerous years before the mass killings happened.
That led to the far left capturing power and leading to disaster.
Both extremes should be condemned irrespective of how likely we think they may act as we are all bad at predicting the future.
Again false equivalence. Both sides bad is so simplistic given what we’re facing right now.
You can’t try to tell me the left is worse like you did in your first post, and then try to insist they’re actually equally dangerous when I say the right is the bigger problem. Pick a stance.
There is a very long history of "left" bombings, going all the way to French Revolution. Did the modern left somehow lose the ability to inspire people capable of such actions?
If that's really your biggest concern, then you'd better find some bigger and better ones, because it's trivial and ridiculous.
Stop trying to blame anti-fascists for fascists acting like fascists. They do that anyway, no matter what, and they'd do it even more if there was no opposition keeping them in check. If you want to speak for yourself about why you're inspired to fascism, then just do that, but stop making excuses and carrying the water for other fascists.
Trump has energized and polarized and united the whole right of center a hell of a lot more than AntiFa. Just because he was a Democrat for longer than he was a Republican doesn't mean he's the far left's fault.
Yes you are blaming anti-fascists, and you completely missed the point.
They're not "turning" non-fascist people fascists. You are denying the agency of non-fascist people to decide whether or not to turn fascist themselves. AntiFa does not control them.
They're not suddenly becoming fascist against their will, because of somebody else forcing them to. Nobody is forcing non-fascists to make that life choice to become fascist, certainly not anti-fascists.
It's completely their own fault that they decided to become fascists. Got it? It is nobody's fault but their own. So stop carrying the water for fascists and putting the blame on other innocent people who oppose them.
Did somebody else force you to make your "biggest concern" carrying the water and making excuses for fascists, because you have no control over your own mind and mouth, or did you actually chose to do it yourself? Take some personal responsibility for your own beliefs. What a pathetic and misguided "biggest concern" you have, dude. Those were your own words.
So don't do fascists the favor of blaming anti-fascists and victims of fascists for the existence of fascists: they don't deserve your favors and excuses. It's 100% their own fault. Find a better biggest concern.
By your own twisted logic, Jews are responsible for anti-semitism. And that's absolute total bullshit.
No I think you missed my point.
Probably I'm just making a bad job of explaining what I mean.
But I also suspect you're been primed to be on the defensive given how many people are attacking liberal values.
My point is this:
There is a growing rhetoric on the right of center that tries to frame "the left" as this obscure force that all sort of nefarious things. They take examples out if the most fringe corners and use them to fuel their base. Like the guy that insisted to have a litter box in the workplace because he identified as a cat.
But none of that shit is a "policy of the left". None of that shit is anything you be worried about. That's my point.
There is almost nothing fueled by sincere progressive values that one should be afraid of. The left is not raping babies or whatnot.
In that sense, the only strategic mistake that people on the left of center are doing is to feed the trolls on the right.
I understand that you're framing this as "well, fuck them, _they_ are the trolls don't blame me for feeding them, I'm the victim don't blame me".
But that kind of logic works only when dealing with individuals. Our natural moral instincts are not adapted to dealing with massive societies with hundreds of million of people engaging in an information warfare of an unprecedented scale.
Every real fascist out there would be neutered if it wasn't for a number of people who have no clue about anything and are just passively going through their lives just passively following along whatever their social group is nudging them to follow.
Denying this fact and claiming that absolutely all people are 100% active political agents that are either 100% fascist or 100% anti-fascist is wishful thinking at best and a dangerous trap at worst.
If you want to make the world a better place you need to understand people and find compromises that get most people on board. If you're doing that somebody else will and some will not hesitate to leverage the lowest human instincts such as xenophobia to rally people on their side. I don't want to live in such a world
Look, stop blaming the victim for the aggressor's behavior. Women do not force men to be rapists by wearing sexy clothes.
Back to the other point: YOU said it's your BIGGEST concern. Those were YOUR words, I did not put them into your mouth. And that's an absolutely ridiculous priority. There are much bigger and more important and real concerns than your logical fallacies about blaming victims for their aggressor's behavior.
It was my biggest concern about the topic in this thread, which I thought was "how dangerous the left can be" to switch I wanted to reply basically "the left poses no danger except to itself" which honestly was never controversial (look at the subtext Life of Brian, it was always a trope of the lefts). But for some reason you have to frame the whole thing as if I was doing victim blaming.
I surely didn't mean that was my absolute biggest concern out of all concerns. Please apply the principle of charity when interpreting other people's words.
The principle of charity says that I should take what you say at face value, which I did. I didn't hold a gun to your head and force you to say "So far the biggest concern I have with the far left". Those were YOUR OWN WORDS. And what evidence do you have of your insidious armchair sociology? Absolutely none. You're just making stuff up, and it justifies blaming women for men becoming rapists as much as it justifies blaming AntiFa for people becoming fascists.
> the principle of charity or charitable interpretation requires interpreting a speaker's statements in the most rational way possible and, in the case of any argument, considering its best, strongest possible interpretation
And the other point is that you're just handwaving and dreaming up "just so" stories that explain why well dressed women cause men to become rapists just as well as they explain how AntiFa causes reasonable people to become fascists. Where is your proof? Can you cite some scientific studies, or sworn confessions of rapists and fascists? No, you can't. You're just making dangerous shit up.
we're talking about rapists now? why are you strawmanning my position?
Proof? Look at how right wing is winning elections across us and europe. A few years before they didn't win, then now they're winnin, then a few years in the future they will no longer win.
Why so? Because people change their minds!
What kind of people change their minds? Two kinds of people: a) people who have open minds and are presented with compelling evidence yadda yadda b) people who don't think much in the first place and just go with the tide.
You're holding me to unreasonable standards if you "require" of me that I present "evidence". I'm just a person sharing a personal opinion and you're tone is honestly a little rude. For some reason you decided that I really believe that I said that fascists shouldn't be blamed for being fascists and it's all fault of the left, just because I aired a personal opinion that if we don't want to see fascists win general elections we should be careful and not give those fuckers fuel to spend on undecided people. You're free to disagree but don't strawman my position.
Perhaps I'm wrong and perhaps there are indeed 51% of immovable fascists in my country who voted literal fascists who are literally doing nazi salute as of last week in a public square in the capital.
But, hey, I'm an optimist, I really hope they won the elections because they are tons of people who don't give a fuck and just got confused into voting these literal fascists. You can disagree about that!
Perhaps you can try to convince me that >51% percent of countrymen are literal fascists and there is just no hope talking to them and making a case that there are better ways to live on this planet. Or perhaps that's true in your country but not in mine? Who knows. I hope it's not the case though. Have a good day
The far left are just as problematic as the far right, but the clear and present danger we are facing now is not from the far left - it wasn't them who stormed the Capitol.
Edit: perhaps someone can explain to me the clear and present danger from the far left?
>The far left are just as problematic as the far right
No, they aren't. It is virtually impossible for the far left to become as problematic as the far right, because the right wing in the US intersects with the vast cultural and financial power of the gun lobby and conservative Christianity, whereas the left is primarily composed of minority groups systemically oppressed and disenfranchised by the system. Unless you can drape your message in the iconography of the flag and the cross you can't have real power in American politics. That's baked in, down to the electoral college, which is designed to give rural American (more likely to be right-leaning) votes more power than urban (more likely to be left-leaning) votes so as to preserve the status quo, which is white, Conservative, capitalist and Christian.
Every left-wing movement in the US has been infiltrated, undermined and eventually crushed by the right. Occupy no longer exists. BLM no longer exists. Go back to the 60s - MLK, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, Weather Underground. Bernie, the closest thing the US has to a mainstream socialist, was quickly swept aside by his own, supposedly "leftist" party, meanwhile Trump is still the frontrunner to win in 2024 and QAnon is still a viable political and cultural movement. Native Americans protesting pipelines get beaten, white Americans showing up to the White House with guns and Nazi flags get welcomed in. Show me an anti-war protest in the US that mattered. Vietnam, Iraq, Israel, Americans protesting in the millions, all definitionally "leftist." none of it mattered.
I mean, I wish the far left were just as problematic. At least then we would live in a somewhat equitable society where all political points of view had equal weight, an actual marketplace of ideas. But we don't, and really the only place the left is allowed to exist without facing the violence of the state is online, where it does far more harm to itself with endless infighting, purity spirals and factionism than to the system it opposes.
Not by the "alt-right baddies" per se, but the history of infiltration against "subversive" groups by American law enforcement and intelligence - in particular against black activist groups - is long and well documented. When it comes to leftist activism in the US I assume COINTELPRO by default.
Similar effort against right-wing groups is more limited and politically difficult because such groups would be considered militias protected by the Second Amendment. It's much easier to get away with suppressing left-wing speech than right-wing violence in the US.
Whether or not that’s true, I think it does support the claim that the far left is not as dangerous as far right groups of similar popularity - the latter appear to endure for much longer and have much more political impact.
Several here have mentioned Richard Rhodes and his book, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb". Although Rhodes was a very good author and his research was quite thorough within the bounds of the documentation then available to the public, his book is now unfortunately well behind the latest archival findings. Credit where credit is due: he was one of the barest handful or Western writers to give any kind of proper credit to WWII Japanese nuclear science. But he missed both the German effort and the overall Axis cooperation on WMD's by a wide margin simply because he did not have access to the original wartime documents that were finally declassified at the 50 year mark past the end of the conflict, that is in 1995. Suzuki's disclosures were crucially important to a proper understanding of what was really going on during the war: a frantic race among all of the major powers to weaponize the atom and develop both practicaly weapons and the means of delivering them on target.
By far the best and most thorough investigation into the WWII German nuclear weapons program is "Forgotten Creators" by former MIT and US Navy scientist Dr. Todd Rider. The author spent nearly a decade digging through public and private archives and libraries and many hundreds of original WWII papers that had never seen the light of day since the end of the conflict were published for the first time (this was in 2019). The book is more properly a survey of the totality of German science since the 19th century, but a significant portion---around 1,000 pages---deals specifically with the German nuclear effort.
You can download it here: https://riderinstitute.org/revolutionary-innovation/ There are also links to several video presentations the author made in 2022 to various entities such as the Smithsonian and the Hidden History Podcast with D. Ray Smith, the former lead historian at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
For the Japanese program---which was directly linked to the German version by late in the war if not all the way through---Robert K. Wilcox's book, "Japan's Secret War" is the best resource. The third and final edition of this work also appeared in 2019. It contains some of the findings of a former USAF, CIA, and DIA intelligence officer named Dwight Rider (perhaps a distant cousin of the "Forgotten Creators" author) who had more than 13,000 NARA documents in his possession at the time of his death, all of them having to do with the WWII Japanese atomic bomb. Around 400 original wartime papers are cited in "Secret War".
Did you know that Einstein was strikingly muscular, and at one point in his life had been deeply religious, until deciding that much of religion was "lies"?
There is also a frightening history of World War I, of Jews in Europe, and biographies all the scientists involved in the US nuclear effort. Totally amazing.
I also read "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb", and "Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust". The latter is deeply, profoundly, sickeningly graphic, and contains more information than you ever knew existed.