Science Memes

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141

Mass Destruction (mander.xyz)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 5 months ago (3 children)

I mean, Oppenheimer at least seemed to regret what he did. Teller on the other hand was completely remorseless and unhinged.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 5 months ago (1 children)

we should build the bomb to prove the concept, we dont know how bad itll be once we drop it

“yeah but what if we make it 100x more powerful”

[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

100x (1.5Mt range) was done and is still fielded (1.2Mt, B83), but teller wanted to make 1000000x bigger one (10 gigaton range). it was based on a flawed understanding of several things in thermonuclear weapons but teller never let it go. the bit that worked was done by somebody else (stanisław ulam)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

Youre right of course, I was more getting at how teller wanted to skip the first entirely and go for the “super”

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

teller also wanted to make it a salted bomb but this is nonsense and not how neutrons work at these energies

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

and also stole credit, and clinged to his ideas after being proven wrong because these were his ideas

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I don't know. If you know better and you still do it, isn't that worse?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

He was an incredibly smart man, and I'm sure this kept him up at night. If you haven't, I would suggest going to listen/watch some interviews with him and you might get some insight as to where his mind was at.

One thing that really stuck with me was one thing he said "Failure is an inevitability of sucess".