Thanks

Ayn Rand did not write a "conventional myth" and was not "at odds with the facts". She took the threat of the atomic bomb very seriously, explained very carefully in a long letter to the producer her own views on how a movie on the subject must be approached, and was researching the facts of the history in interviews with those who produced the bomb until the project stopped when she was about a third of the way through the script.

All searches for the article at The Nation website have the same 'page not found' error. I don't have a copy and haven't seen it either, but there is another snarling and distorting article from April in the same the far left, Marxist The Nation at http://www.thenation.com/blog/174057/when-harry-truman-censored-most-important-hollywood-epic-ever-made.

Ayn Rand did not "glorify" the atomic bomb. She feared it as a threat to "wipe out mankind" in the hands of statists. She took it very seriously and explained at great length in a letter to the producer what she thought would be necessary in a film about the development and use of the first atomic bomb. You can read first hand her letter and notes on her script in David Harriman's Journals of Ayn Rand, Chapter 9 pp 311-344, which the currently active article in The Nation omitted.

She wrote only about a third of the script for the movie, called Top Secret, before the project was sold to MGM, which had already been working on its own movie version. Ayn Rand's partial script is not in the book and I have never seen it. MGM apparently continued the project with its own competing script but the movie was never released.

The Soviets declared war on Japan at the last minute to cash in on the spoils. The US had already destroyed the economy and war manufacturing on the Japanese main island through a combination of fire bombing and crucial mining and blockades that continued beyond the two nuclear bombs right up through the last week before the surrender.

The conventional fire bombing, including Tokyo, did more damage continued right up to the end than even the two nuclear bombs, but at the expense of much greater American losses. Were it not for the bombing, especially the nuclear explosions at the end, that forced the surrender an enormous amphibious assault would have been required and was planned against the island, which would have entailed massive American losses. The Soviets did none of this.

A good history of the air war against Japan is Kenneth Werrell's Blankets of Fire: U.S. Bombers over Japan during World War II.

Heisenberg stayed in Germany because he was a German nationalist even though he didn't like Hitler. He didn't believe they could build a working bomb but wanted to develop it as far as possible for Germany's scientific prestige after the war and as a negotiating tool, thinking that it would not be far enough along to be useful to Hitler -- and knowing that he didn't dare not make some progress because Hitler wanted it even though he realized it would not be immediately available.

Hitler aside, Heisenberg was desperately trying to get an in-place nuclear reaction going even as the Allies were swarming over the landscape towards him. At the last minute he abandoned the failed project and bicycled a large distance to his summer home where he waited on the front porch arrogantly expecting to be treated as a prestigious scientist aloof from German war when officers arrived.

There are many books about Heisenberg's role, some trying to make a case for Heisenberg either sabotaging the bomb effort or the opposite of leading its development for the war, but a very good and straightforward personal and scientific biography is Cassidy's Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg.

Cassidy covers Heisenberg's entire life and career, not just the atomic bomb controversy. One interesting parts describes how he bungled the original formulation of the uncertainty inequality while arguing from an optics "thought experiment" analogy with microscopes, which Bohr had to correct because of Heisenberg's inadequate background in basic physics -- especially the optics of the resolving power of microscopes despite his intelligence.

And it describes how Heisenberg's tenacity successfully developed the matrix formulation of quantum mechanics, as a generalization of the discrete spectrum of the over-simplified "Bohr atom", with tedious algebraic calculations that Born and Jordan converted into the proper general matrix form -- Heisenberg hadn't known about matrix algebra either. It was later shown to be equivalent to Schodinger's continuum formulation.

John David Lewis' book,'Nothing Less Than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History'

has a chapter(seven - 'Gifts From Heaven': The American Victory over Japan, AD 1945 p.237) that changed my perspective on the propaganda that declared the use of the two nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki immoral,etc.

The argument that those two bombs were supremely MORAL because they broke the will of the Japanese to continue supporting their leadership's war efforts, and in the process saved countless American and Japanese lives.

I mostly agree with a live and let live philosophy, a MAJOR EXCEPTION is when islumic clowns want to destroy my civilisation because a psychopathic pedophile, 1400 years ago, had a need for personality worship.

I believe in killing in self-defense and as a LAST RESORT.

When threatened by psychotic islumic clowns that START WITH KILLING others because they will not blindly follow a madman's delusions, I say "sew their miserable corpses into pigskin shrouds and drop them onto mecca during the hajj as a warning regarding their fate if they want to cause trouble."

I think eventually, if we're going to get in space, we'll have to. If nothing else, for the research.
I don't think it'll be government driven as much as commercial. Someone like Musk or Space X, may well drive it.

well, jdg, I want to apologize, intensely. -- j

p.s. my browser window is always full-screen,
because I want to f o c u s on you.
.

I find the practice intensely annoying, and a waste of space. Besides, it's unnecessary -- if you want to read a narrower column of text, just narrow your browser window.

I wish the mods would change the posting software so it removes the line breaks.

Depends whom you call "we". China has announced plans to put a colony there, and I think they will if nobody beats them to it.

I would much rather see money-making activity in space, and except for solar power satellites that will probably need to involve travel to the outer solar system. Factories could be put in Earth orbit and probably will be, but once cheap transport is in place it will make more sense to get their raw materials from the asteroid belt than any large planet or moon surface (and the moon doesn't seem to have much except sand, anyway).

That is correct, and according to the article cited, the Russian declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria and then Sahkalin island is what prompted the Japanese surrender, not the two atomic bombs.

I do agree with Rands ultimate assessment. We should take the same view in regards with the development of the internet. Gore nor government had anything remotely to do with it. My best friend worked in the testing of the original computer to computer communications with the Army in 1973.

I'm intentionally hitting "enter" when I get to the approx.
width of a newspaper column, to make it easier on the
eyes and so that you don't wag your head "no" when
reading. . I'm using a homebrew pc with windows 7
running (truth be told) firefox. -- j
.

In North America, from the elite and from resistors like us.
But there are other countries where dumbing down is not a priority, and competition is intense, and they could very well be the leaders.

when you take into consideration that the population of the usa and i suspect the world in general is being dumb down where will the people come from that will make the flying machines that will take people to the moon or where ever.?

I look forward to your book -- should be great!!! -- j
.

What did you post this with John? Every now and again your posts wind up formatted into half or less of the screen width. This one being and example.

one of the reasons I signed on at k25 and, later, y12
was because of the unique history there. . they were
built in 43, five years before I was born.
"Dutch" Van Kirk, the Enola Gay navigator visited
us at y12 in about 03 or 04, and I asked him about
the supply line of atomic bombs behind the first two.
from what I had read, there was a significant gap
before more would be ready, and he confirmed
that -- weeks. . Little Boy had used up so much
235 that it would be awhile before that much would
be ready again, and Fat Man was supplied with Pu
from Hanford, Washington, where the reactors
were working at maximum -- but could beat the
production of 235 to the punch, if required. . it
sounded like the strategic bet was that two would
do the job. . it was fortunate that they did. -- j
.

Probably no.
I am constantly amazed when someone presents more of Rand's thoughts and always find her thoughts incredibly accurate.