Intel Today

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

Robert Oppenheimer

“I don’t want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again.”

US President Truman (About Oppenheimer to Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson)

Julius Robert Oppenheimer (April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Oppenheimer was the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and is among those who are credited with being the “father of the atomic bomb” for their role in the Manhattan Project, the World War II undertaking that developed the first nuclear weapons used in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The ‘Los Alamos Primer’ is perhaps the most important single document of the 20th Century. Yet, it is a rather simple document that could have been written by many others “elsewhere”, and possibly several years earlier. Thus, the History of this world could have been drastically different. In this post, I  discus the second  section of the  document. Follow us on Twitter: @INTEL_TODAY Continue reading →

“On Edward Teller’s blackboard at Los Alamos,  I once saw a list of weapons— ideas for weapons — with their abilities and properties displayed. For the last one on the list, the largest, the method of delivery was listed as “Backyard”. Since that particular design would probably kill everyone on Earth, there was no use carting it elsewhere.”

Robert Serber

Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Einstein warned that the Germans were researching an atomic bomb and suggested that the United States do the same. Oppenheimer was the leading scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The ‘Los Alamos Primer’ is perhaps the most important single document of the 20th Century. Yet, it is a rather simple document that could have been written by many others “elsewhere”, and possibly several years earlier. Thus, the History of this world could have been drastically different. In this post, I  discus the first — and shortest —  section of the entire document. Follow us on Twitter: @INTEL_TODAY Continue reading →