Why don't nuclear physicists reign supreme over everyone with nuclear arsenals?
There are maybe a few thousand men on this planet who know how to really do some fun stuff with atoms. Why don’t these small groups of men play along cheerfully until they are given everything they need to create weapons that would make us all slaves to their wills? Benevolence? Scientists are incorruptible? Are the braniacs too weak? If they’re so darn nice why do they hand over their work to the guy’s with the itchy trigger fingers?
Observing members:
0
Composing members:
0
17 Answers
Maybe they do and haven’t gotten around to letting us in on it yet.
This from the guy who wants to use farts for energy! ;-)
It takes a huge number of people with different skills to make a nuclear weapon, the physicists can’t do it alone. The Manhattan Project employed over 130,000 people to build the first A-bombs.
So the ones who can wrangle whole populations (AKA national leaders) are the ones with The Button.
Most nuclear physicists know theory rather than application because they have no access to the expensive resources involved with the study.
Personally, I haven’t seen a good mad scientist flick in a while. I should get writing.
yeah, but out in the NM desert. 130,000 people didn’t have the button… One small clik, of the quite bright.
Because they don’t make the bombs. They just figure out how to make them.
Yall are right, the physicists could never figure out complicated stuff like bomb making.
Google is working on this right now, I heard.
lol
Maybe physicists are temperamentally unsuited to be Lex Luthor.
Leslie Groves had army intelligence and the FBI constantly monitoring the key people involved with the project, even Oppenheimer.
The Soviet project was under the direct oversight of Lavrentiy Beria. Enough said.
Brains count for a lot. But authority can always throw you in a basement cell and threaten to decorate one wall of it with yours if you don’t do as you’re told.
It’s really not so terribly hard…...except for getting a hold of weapons grade plutonium. You know how strict governments can be with that kind of stuff.
It takes lots of money and considerable effort to refine a fissionable mass of plutonium. Not only this but you need some sort of neutron emitter and enough high explosives to collapse the mass sufficiently quickly onto the emitter. A lot of the fission process is dependent on aeroacoustic, nuclear, chemical, and structural phenomenon. Most of these phenomenon are separated into pretty different fields of expertise.
All of these materials are highly regulated…...very highly.
-
I may have just used enough keywords in this post to have the CIA, FBI, NSA or any combination of the three knocking on my door tomorrow.
We and the physicists are already slaves to another master. The central bank.
Nuclear Physicist nerds are really bad negotiators too.
Nuclear physicists cannot do this on their own. You need experienced engineers as well. And money.
Answer this question 
This question is in the General Section. Responses must be helpful and on-topic.
Composing members:
0
