Gadgets and copycats

Nagasaki 9Aug45

"Fat Man"

US B-29 Superfortress Bockscar and crew

The atomic bomb "Fat Man" was dropped on Nagasaki 9Aug45 by the US B-29 Superfortress Bockscar [pictured with crew below]. It was modeled on "the gadget", the very first experimental atomic bomb detonated just a month before at the so-called "Trinity test"* in Socorro, New Mexico. The mushroom cloud resulting from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki [above] rose 18 km (11 mi, 60,000 ft) into the air from the hypocenter. 80,000 were killed, half on the first day.



"Joe-1"

So porous was the security at the Manhatten Project where all the intense work was done to accomplish the deed, that the first Soviet bomb, RDS-1 (a.k.a. "Joe-1" in reference to Stalin) was almost a direct copy, even in its external shape, of the US-developed Fat Man bomb. It was test-exploded a mere 4 years after the Nagasaki drop in Aug49.



Theodore Hall (1925-99), one of several physicists working at the time on the Manhattan Project eventually fessed up some 50 years later to divulging critical intelligence to the Soviets. He believed strongly (along with others, some caught much earlier, and executed for their deemed treachery) that an American monopoly on nuclear weapons was dangerous. He explained it this way in 1998, just before he died:

"I decided to give atomic secrets to the Russians because it seemed to me that it was important that there should be no monopoly, which could turn one nation into a menace and turn it loose on the world as ... as Nazi Germany developed. There seemed to be only one answer to what one should do. The right thing to do was to act to break the American monopoly".

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*  This rare photo was taken at ground zero of the Trinity test site, after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and some time after the actual test. Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the atomic bomb, appears at the center in a light colored hat:

The ruins of the noblest man

This only known photograph* of Chopin (1810-49) at age 39 taken by Bisson in 1849 clearly reveals the ravages of the degenerative stages of tuberculosis which took his life only a few months later. Despite the carefully posed positioning, it is quite apparent his face is bloated from the inflammatory effects of his illness, and his whole countenance is rather pathetic and tragically sad. It used to be thought that this celebrated daguerreotype was taken in the summer of 1849, in the  Paris offices of Chopin’s publisher Maurice Schlesinger, and that date appears in many of the major iconographies of Chopin. We now know it to have been taken by Bisson in his atelier at 65 rue Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois toward the end of 1847, not long after Chopin’s break with George Sand. During Chopin’s lifetime it belonged to Schlesinger’s private collection and subsequently to the firm of Breitkopf and Härtel in Leipzig. It was later acquired by the Chopin National Institute in Warsaw. The original daguerreotype was destroyed during World War II. What we have today is a photograph of that daguerreotype made sometime before 1939.

Pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870), a music contemporary, provided a precise description of him in better days:

"He was of slim frame, middle height [apparently 100lbs/5'7"]; fragile but wonderfully flexible limbs, delicately formed hands, very small feet, an oval, softly outlined head, a pale transparent complexion, long silken hair of a light chestnut color, parted on one side, tender brown eyes, intelligent rather than dreamy, a finely-curved aquiline nose, a sweet subtle smile, graceful and varied gestures."  

Curiously, the death mask below, inflammation clearly vitiated in mortal suspension, ironically provides perhaps a more realistic semblance of what the man must have looked like in Paris high society at the pinnacle of his fame as a strange, wonderful composer and musician for the piano, capturing a delicacy and a certain sublime aristocratic bearing that people of his day certainly witnessed, an essence of which pervades his works for which he is very much exalted today as indeed he was in his own time.

"Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever lived in the tide of time".

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHjHzX79sdc&feature=related

*NOTE: Apparently this is a 2nd Chopin photograph (c.1847), sourced at the Fryderyk Chopin Society, Warsaw. I cannot vouch for its verity.

A grief observed ...

Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hopes that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.

  ... C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)