This post is hardly of a broad, sweeping, or intentionally provocative nature at all! Just more news. Good luck getting 13 comments on today's post, Ed!
The Manhattan Project has been so thoroughly documented in a library shelve's worth of history books that, yeah, I think it's safe to say that the genie's out of the bottle on this one. A nuke is actually fairly easy to put together–it's the ingredients (well, *ingredient*) that're really, really, really, really–and thank God there are so many "really"s–hard to come by. But even there, every third-year physics major knows how to make them. It's simply not that tricky. Just time-consuming and hellaciously expensive and you really can't do it in secret in the age of satellite imagery. Which is plenty good for us. But for Bush to frame this as a matter of ignorance rather than inopportunity is just…well, I suppose I'd call it hubristic, in the sense that he thinks we can control what other people can learn/know. Which is like thinking that we can control the weather. But I'm sure that he thinks we can do that, too, which is why he's still not sure why Katrina happened.
Ed says:
This really is a terrible form of negative reinforcement – people only comment when I say things that are poorly thought out and belligerent.
Matthew says:
This post is hardly of a broad, sweeping, or intentionally provocative nature at all! Just more news. Good luck getting 13 comments on today's post, Ed!
JDryden says:
The Manhattan Project has been so thoroughly documented in a library shelve's worth of history books that, yeah, I think it's safe to say that the genie's out of the bottle on this one. A nuke is actually fairly easy to put together–it's the ingredients (well, *ingredient*) that're really, really, really, really–and thank God there are so many "really"s–hard to come by. But even there, every third-year physics major knows how to make them. It's simply not that tricky. Just time-consuming and hellaciously expensive and you really can't do it in secret in the age of satellite imagery. Which is plenty good for us. But for Bush to frame this as a matter of ignorance rather than inopportunity is just…well, I suppose I'd call it hubristic, in the sense that he thinks we can control what other people can learn/know. Which is like thinking that we can control the weather. But I'm sure that he thinks we can do that, too, which is why he's still not sure why Katrina happened.
Ed says:
This really is a terrible form of negative reinforcement – people only comment when I say things that are poorly thought out and belligerent.
More of that to come, I guess. Huzzah!