Paolo Bacigalupi Quotes
This observation was made when Commander-in-Chief for the 13 American Colonies, General Edward Braddock had organized a military expedition to destroy some of the forts that the French had constructed. (See {37008}.) Braddock and the other military officers thought that the force Braddock had organized what he thought would be overwhelming force that could easily accomplish the objective. But unfortunately for Braddock, Franklin was prescient, See {583428}.
Conant, a great scientist in his own right, had the confidence of the political, academic, and industrial establishment and was appointed to the Committee that was to set policy for the Manhattan Project representing President Roosevelt. Germany had been the world leader in Physics before the war. American leaders and scientists were certain that we were in a scientific race with the Germans. Even after Germany had been defeated, President Truman was told that we had beaten the Germans in the race for the bomb. Actually, although almost no one in the US government realized it then, the Germans had NO PROGRAM of nuclear weapons development at all. Hitler did not trust the Theoretical Physics and Theory of Relativity because Einstein and other Jewish scientists had been instrumental in its development. He derogatorily referred to it as “Jewish Science”. Germany bet its scientific efforts on the V2 Rockets and the Jet Airplane, both of which they were successful with but too late to have any material effect on the war. Ironically, even after most of the great German physicists were run out of Germany, there were still two of the greatest who may well have been capable of nuclear weapons development. But neither Werner Heisenberg or Otto Hahn were inclined to engage in that kind of research, and neither of them were even asked whether or not they thought it was possible. The anti-Semitic Nazis just assumed that it could not be. Truman and his associates did not find out for another year or more that there was no race. There was one OSS spy, Moe Berg, who had actually talked to Heisenberg in the midst of the war, and concluded that he not only was not working on an atomic bomb, but was not up on the latest pre-war critical research needed to develop a bomb. Hahn knew and had created the first chain reaction for which he later won the Nobel prize but he was a chemist and didn’t really understand the Physics and mathematics involved in making a weapon and was a confirmed pacifist. Ironically, his colleague, Lise Meitner who had done the physics and mathematics on that experiment was Jewish and had to flee Germany. In Denmark she gave the results to Niels Bohr, who shared them with Leo Slizard and Einstein when Bohr came to the United State and that initiated the famous letter that was sent to FDR which triggered the Manhattan Project. The German first nuclear reaction was used by the Americans because the politicians listened to the scientists, while in Germany, the politicians gave no credence to their scientists and their experiments in nuclear fission.
There were a number of world leaders who were not happy about the German Reunification. See Henry Kissinger {610355} for another.
This would be like an American President firing the congressional chaplains. However this is only one small, but telling, example of Atatuk’s secularization of the nation which had a great deal to do with Turkey becoming a modern great power—by far the strongest and most developed of the Islamic world.
Paolo Tadini Bacigalupi is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, John. W. Campbell, Compton Crook, Theodore Sturgeon, and Michael L. Printz awards, and has been nominated for the National Book Award. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction, and the environmental journal High Country News. Nonfiction essays of his have appeared in Salon.com and High Country News, and have been syndicated in newspapers, including the Idaho Statesman, the Albuquerque Journal, and the Salt Lake Tribune.