The Doomsday Bomb

The Manhattan Project sounded like an innocuous venture, but in fact it was the code name for the top secret development of the first atomic bombs during World War II at Los Alamos, New Mexico. In August 1945 American B-29 bombers dropped atomic bombs in Japan on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wiping out most of these cities and killing more than a hundred thousand people. Physicists like Fermi, Oppenheimer and Einstein saw the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as acts of necessary evil. They believed the blasts would shorten the war and save lives by making an American invasion unnecessary. The design of weapons of mass destruction involves existential moral scruples and fundamental ethical dilemmas. However, scientists such as von Neumann and Teller, held the view that the pursuit of truth knows no boundaries and it rescinds moral or ethical considerations. This authoritative vision of the relentless march of scientific research extends also to the military project of developing extremely powerful weapons of mass destruction that could blow the world to bits. Now, the main reason that so far this sort of ultimate doomsday bomb does not exist is not because of the lack of will to develop it but because such a weapon at present appears to be a technical impossibility. This is the good news. Unfortunately, the bed news is that we already have enough nuclear bombs to destroy all life on Planet Earth many times over.