How to make America's drone panic so very much worse
Panic quickly spread. People speculated that the cause might be cosmic rays, a radio transmitter in a nearby naval base, fallout from H-bomb tests or sand-flea eggs hatching in windshields. The mayor of Seattle begged for help from the governor and the White House. Motorists began stopping police cars to add their name to the list of the affected. Scientists were called in, Geiger counters whipped out.
The mysterious windshield pits of 1954 turned out not to be the result of vandals, aliens, radioactivity or sand fleas, but were instead the domain of mass human psychology. Examinations revealed that these were mundane, long-present imperfections, everyday wear and tear. It's just that no one had bothered to notice them before, because who studies his windshield that closely?
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Scientific American
a day ago
- Scientific American
—Have Weathered Attacks Before and Won
Worth recalling in this anniversary year, one of Scientific American 's proudest moments came in a past era of attacks on science. The lesson—that speaking out for science is worth the criticism it brings—is surely worth recalling today. The year was 1950, and the 'red scare' was fully underway, alongside a nascent arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The Soviet demonstration of an atomic bomb in 1949 had galvanized calls for a bigger bomb, a hydrogen bomb, in the U.S., sparking the paranoia today best remembered for claiming the career of Manhattan Project chief J. Robert Oppenheimer. But a war on scientists not toeing the political line was in full swing then, and Scientific American was in the thick of it. On March 20, 1950, a U.S. Atomic Energy Commission agent named Alvin F. Ryan seized and burned 3,000 copies of the forthcoming April issue of Scientific American, which the commission claimed held atomic secrets. Ryan also supervised the melting of four printing plates holding a feature story in the issue, ' The Hydrogen Bomb: II,' that contained the supposedly objectionable information within one of its columns. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. 'Strict compliance with the commission's policies would mean that we could not teach physics,' said an outraged Gerard Piel, then publisher of Scientific American, in the April 1, 1950, report of the seizure on the front page of the New York Times. He threatened to take further censorship to the Supreme Court. Piel had relaunched Scientific American in 1948, with a focus on bringing the views of scientists like Bethe, thoughtfully edited, to the public. This scientists-as-writers approach came about by happenstance, Scientific American editor Gary Stix found while researching the history of the magazine. Piel found it was cheaper to pay scientists to write copy and then rewrite it, rather than hire magazine writers. The approach proved so successful, with the public then clamoring to hear the news straight from scientists, that the magazine had 100,000 readers and 133 pages of advertising by 1950. Berthe's article was just one of four published by the magazine on the H-bomb, which President Harry Truman had decided to pursue in January of 1950. Much debate, among scientists and the public, followed over whether such a weapon would make the U.S. safer or endanger humanity. The Nobel Prize–winning discoverer of how fusion in stars baked elements, Bethe, was in the latter camp. His article went through the physics of fusion and pled to 'save humanity from this ultimate disaster' by reconsidering the president's H-bomb decision, or at least pledging no first use of the weapons in warfare, a commitment still unmade, and widely debated in nuclear circles. 'Piel had made his publication an important forum for critical analysis of U.S. science policy during the coldest years of the cold war,' in exposing the Atomic Energy Commission's attack on press freedom, wrote history professor Alfred W. McCoy. To satisfy the AEC, Bethe made four 'ritual' cuts to the final version of the article and published it. Even so, U.S. security officials continued to pressure scientists and the press over the course of the red scare. The FBI searched Bethe's luggage after a European trip in 1951. ' Scientific American runs to the sort of stuff which the Soviets would like to see in a popular science journal,' claimed an AEC memorandum that same year. The U.S. tested its first H-bomb a year later, and stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance, in 1954, in a power play now seen as a political vendetta. The arms race played out through the 1960s, building stockpiles of tens of thousands of nuclear missiles on both sides until its folly, and frightening close brushes with Armageddon, lowered those numbers in an era of détente, the sort of world that Bethe had called for in his article. All the while, Scientific American stood for the importance of scientists speaking out, and providing the public, even amid the unhinged persecution of the red scare, choices for a better world. Throughout science, the lesson stood, among eminent voices ranging from Linus Pauling to Carl Sagan. Scientists led calls for test ban treaties and disarmament; they warned of nuclear winter throughout the cold war. In the magazine, former CIA official Herbert Scoville Jr. warned of the danger of a new generation of U.S. submarines as 'first-strike' weapons, that familiar warning, in 1972. Bethe himself kept speaking out, against the Reagan administration's 'Star Wars' missile defense plan as unworkable, costly and destabilizing in the 1980s (views heard today on its current 'Golden Dome' revival). Accepting the Einstein Peace Prize in 1992, he acknowledged that while scientists had not ended the cold war, they had succeeded in 'planting the idea there was an alternative to the arms race.' Their example, and that idea, remains as important as ever, especially with U.S. science facing severe cuts, and nuclear weapons a renewed flashpoint in geopolitics. Piel's statement released after the 1950 seizure—'there is a very large body of technical information in the public domain which is essential to adequate public participation in the development of national policy and on which the American people are entitled to be informed'—still stands true today at this magazine. We will continue to speak out and provide scientists with a place to make their voices heard.
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Yahoo
Richard Garwin, designer of the first H-bomb who also paved the way for MRI, GPS and touch-screens
Richard Garwin, who has died aged 97, was an American nuclear scientist who designed the world's first hydrogen bomb and went on to become a presidential adviser on arms control, while helping to lay the groundwork for such technology as magnetic resonance imaging, high-speed laser printers and touch-screen monitors. The Nobel prizewinner Enrico Fermi called him 'the only true genius I have ever met', but he never became a household name: a 2017 biography was subtitled 'The Most Influential Scientist You've Never Heard Of'. Edward Teller is usually credited, in an unattributed phrase, as the 'father of the sweet technology of the H-bomb'. Due to the secrecy surrounding its development, it was only in recent years that historians have become aware of Garwin's role, following the publication in 2001 of a transcript of a recording made by Teller in which, while not eschewing the credit for devising the bomb, the scientist recalled that the 'first design was made by Dick Garwin'. In 1951 Garwin, then a 23-year-old faculty member at the University of Chicago, was working during his summer holidays at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico where, building on Teller's ideas, he designed the 'Mike', an 82-ton sausage-shaped test device, after working out how to direct the radiation from the atomic device to initiate a fusion reaction in the hydrogen – what he called 'the match for the nuclear bonfire'. 'The shot was fired almost precisely according to Garwin's design,' Teller recalled, on Enewetak Atoll on November 1 1952. The power of the blast – 450 times that of Nagasaki – stunned even those who had watched previous bomb tests, with a mushroom cloud five times the height of Everest and 100 miles wide. Teller subsequently became famous for destroying the career of Robert Oppenheimer, who had run the Los Alamos lab in the Second World War, giving birth to the atomic bomb, but afterwards questioned the morality of devising an even more powerful weapon. When, amid the anti-communist paranoia of the McCarthy years, Oppenheimer had his security clearance removed by the government, Teller was the only member of the scientific community to testify against him. In fact Garwin, a board member of the Union of Concerned Scientists, had a lot of sympathy with Oppenheimer, telling an interviewer that if he could wave a magic wand to make the H- bomb go away, 'I would do that.' But as the clock could not be wound back, he believed that the best hope for human survival lay in the deterrence doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) that suggests that a nuclear attack by one superpower would result in a retaliatory nuclear strike, leading to the complete destruction of both attacker and defender. 'The capability for MAD,' Garwin said 'is not a theory, but a fact of life'. In the 1980s, when Teller convinced President Ronald Reagan to invest in a defensive shield that, he claimed, would make it probable that enough Americans would survive a nuclear conflict to ensure the US's continued existence, Garwin was vocal in his criticism of the so-called 'Star Wars' initiative as ineffective and wasteful. He saw a Soviet-American balance of weaponry and arms-control measures as the best way of avoiding nuclear Armageddon. Richard Lawrence Garwin was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 19 1928, the older of two sons of Robert Garwin and Leona, née Schwartz. His father was a high school teacher; his mother a legal secretary. From Cleveland Heights High School Garwin graduated in physics in 1947 from what is now Case Western Reserve University, followed by a master's degree and doctorate under Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago. He joined the faculty, but at Fermi's suggestion spent his summers at the Los Alamos lab, where he returned every year until 1966. For 40 years from the early 1950s Garwin was a researcher at IBM, maintaining a faculty position at Columbia University and advising presidents (excepting Reagan) from Eisenhower to Clinton on nuclear weapons and arms-control issues. As a researcher he contributed to a huge range of scientific discoveries and innovations, and in 2016, when he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama, the president recalled: 'Ever since he was a Cleveland kid tinkering with his father's movie projectors, he's never met a problem he didn't want to solve. Reconnaissance satellites, the MRI, GPS technology, the touch-screen – all bear his fingerprints. He even patented a mussel washer for shellfish: that, I haven't used. The other stuff I have.' In 1991 Garwin chaired a conference to discuss solutions to staunching the Kuwaiti oil leaks during the first Gulf War. He advised the Obama government on dealing with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. From 1993 to 2001 he chaired the State Department's Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board. His belief in the vital importance of nuclear balance led him to oppose any policy that might upset that balance. In 2007, in evidence to the British Commons Defence Select Committee, he described Prime Minister Tony Blair's claim that work must start soon on replacing the ageing Vanguard-class subs of Britain's nuclear submarine fleet as 'highly premature''. The subs' working life could be extended to 45 years or more, he argued, putting off the need for a replacement into the late 2030s or beyond. In 2021 he was one of 700 signatories to an open letter to President Biden, asking him to pledge that the US would never be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict and calling for curbs on his role as sole authority in ordering the use of nuclear weapons – as 'an important safeguard against a possible future president who is unstable or who orders a reckless attack'. The plea fell on deaf ears. In 1947 Richard Garwin married Lois Levy. She died in 2018, and he is survived by two sons and a daughter. Richard Garwin, born April 19 1928, died May 13 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
NDTV
21-05-2025
- NDTV
He Made World's First Hydrogen Bomb But Kept It A Secret For 50 Years
Richard L Garwin, the creator of America's hydrogen bomb, died on May 13 at his home in Scarsdale, New York. He was 97. Over the course of his seven-decade career, Mr Garwin laid the groundwork for insights into the structure of the universe. He also helped in the development of several medical and computer marvels. But his contribution to the one invention that changed the course of history remained a secret for almost 50 years. At the age of 23, he designed the world's first hydrogen bomb. Mr Garwin, who was then a professor at the University of Chicago and just a summer consultant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, used physicist Edward Teller and mathematician Stanislaw Ulam's concepts to design the hydrogen bomb in 1951-1952. The experimental device, code-named Ivy Mike, was successfully tested on the Marshall Islands on November 1, 1952. Mr Garwin's contribution to the creation of the first hydrogen bomb was a well-kept secret for decades. Outside a select group of government, military, and intelligence officials, no one knew about his role in the experiment due to the secrecy surrounding the project. Edward Teller, whose name had long been associated with the bomb, first credited Mr Garwin in a 1981 taped statement, acknowledging his crucial role in the invention. "The shot was fired almost precisely according to Garwin's design," Mr Teller said, as per The NY Times. The recording was lost to history for 22 years. The late acknowledgement received little attention, and Mr Garwin remained unknown to the public for a long time. In an interview with Esquire magazine in 1984, Mr Garwin opened up about getting little to no recognition for his work on the hydrogen bomb. He said, "I never felt that building the hydrogen bomb was the most important thing in the world, or even in my life at the time." This changed in April 2001 when George A Keyworth II, Mr Teller's friend, provided the transcript of the tape recording to The New York Times. Even though Teller had earlier recognised the young physicist's contribution, such references were lost in specialised writings and meetings. Suddenly, fifty years after the event, Mr Garwin gained wide public recognition as the creator of the H-bomb. Meanwhile, after his success on the hydrogen bomb project, Mr Garwin accepted a job at the International Business Machines Corporation, where he worked for four decades, until his retirement. In between this, Mr Garwin remained a government consultant, offering advice on matters pertaining to national defence. The physicist was an adviser to several American Presidents, such as Dwight D Eisenhower, John F Kennedy, Lyndon B Johnson, Richard M Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Richard L Garwin's many honours include the 2002 National Medal of Science, the nation's highest award for accomplishments in science and engineering, given by US President George W Bush and the 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award, given by President Barack Obama.
