Книга только для ознакомления
. The opportunity to avoid
the arms race was lost, and very quickly.
Two years later, in 1948, Oppenheimer seemed to have reached another stage in
his thinking, saying, "In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor,
no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is
a knowledge they cannot lose."
In 1949, the Soviets exploded an atom bomb. By 1955, both the US and the
Soviet Union had tested hydrogen bombs suitable for delivery by aircraft. And so
the nuclear arms race began.
Nearly 20 years ago, in the documentaryThe Day After Trinity, Freeman Dyson
summarized the scientific attitudes that brought us to the nuclear precipice:
"I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come
to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that
fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a
million tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of
illimitable power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles - this,
what you might call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see
what they can do with their minds."8
Now, as then, we are creators of new technologies and stars of the imagined
future, driven - this time by great financial rewards and global competition -
despite the clear dangers, hardly evaluating what it may be like to try to live in a
world that is the realistic outcome of what we are creating and imagining
|
