Aug. 30, 2021 - I Don't Speak German
05:41
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| IDSG bonus episodes are a regular extra just for Patreon backers of myself or Daniel. | |
| Here's a preview of the new one. | |
| So we spent the day on Amtrak to get out there and then we went and saw some people and ate a lot of great food. | |
| There's amazing food in Albuquerque and went to some museums and such. | |
| And the one that really made me want to talk about this on the podcast was we went to the Nuclear Museum, the National Nuclear Museum in New Mexico, in Albuquerque. | |
| And let me see, the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History. | |
| New Mexico. | |
| Now, New Mexico. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Why is there? | |
| Why would there be a nuclear museum in New Mexico? | |
| Oh, I know, it's because of Roswell. | |
| They got it from the crashed UFO. | |
| It sounds as if large chunks of the American West were first decimated of their Native American populations, and then those portions that were not given away as reservations largely turned into testing grounds for US military apparatus. | |
| Yeah, it's almost as if New Mexico was the home of the nuclear project and the Manhattan Project back in the 40s. | |
| Almost. | |
| Actually, I think it was, wasn't it? | |
| It was. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, you were joking, but it was. | |
| Anyway, enough humor. | |
| Yep. | |
| And, you know, I've had long had sort of an interest in, I mean, like, if you're a science nerd and you grew up on, like, sci-fi of, like, Asimov, Heinlein, Clark, etc., all of whom, you know, were working writers talking about nuclear things in the 30s and 40s and afterwards, all of whom actually worked for, actually, like, did some testing and such for the Army during World War II. | |
| Um, and you know, something that that Clark didn't Clark was British, obviously, but, um, you know, you grew up with that kind of stuff in your, in your childhood, you get you get a natural interest in the history of nuclear energy and nuclear science and, you know, something that I've long kind of, you know, as a kid, I was the guy who like, I knew all the radioactive elements and had a history. | |
| I had read books about the atomic bomb and the way that the atomic energy was generated and created and the history of the science. | |
| Even as a young child, I had an interest in nuclear fission and fusion and the basic radioisotopes and that sort of thing. | |
| You know, I read the two part Richard Rhodes book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb and The Dark Sun, which is about the making of the hydrogen bomb when I was in my early 20s or something like that. | |
| And so I've long had this interest in this kind of material. | |
| And, you know, when we said, hey, let's go visit our friends in Albuquerque. | |
| They've been in the South for a week or for a few days. | |
| I was like, well, what can we do in Albuquerque? | |
| And the immediate thing was like, oh, the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History is there. | |
| Let's go. | |
| I mean, you know, we'll spend 10 bucks in a couple of hours and go check it out. | |
| It'll be, you know, something to do. | |
| Right. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And I was expecting this to be tilted in a certain political direction. | |
| I was unaware of the degree to which it would be tilted in a particular political direction. | |
| For instance, when you drive up to the Nuclear Museum, there is a model of an atom, and the atom is actually a beryllium atom. | |
| Um, beryllium is one of the, uh, it's a, it's a product that is used to kind of create the irradiating material that converts uranium into plutonium. | |
| There's a complicated kind of nuclear chemistry process there, but you know, so there's a, there's an atom of beryllium. | |
| Nowhere in any of the exhibits inside the museum does it explain this process. | |
| However, there is an extended bit of, you know, in-museum lore that describes exactly why we absolutely had to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. | |
| Literally, like, the beginning, like, you walk into the museum, and first of all, it is, like, staffed by volunteers. | |
| And by volunteers, I mean elderly military veterans. | |
| Yeah, literally wearing like the caps of the, you know, these are all military guys, like that's who was manning this thing. | |
| The original location for the nuclear museum was actually at the Kirtland Air Force Base back in the late 60s and then eventually it moved a couple of times and now it's now it's similar on the base but it's clearly Tilted directly in that direction towards a very hagiographic view of the U.S. | |
| military and the Cold War. | |
| But you walk in and you have like a few displays that are like sort of, you know, Marie Curie and, you know, Enrico Fermi and the kind of people who, you know, did the early kind of like scientific work about, you know, like kind of working out the structure of the atom, et cetera, et cetera. | |
| And then like literally you turn the corner and suddenly it's like the Nazis were invading Europe. | |
| They're building the bomb. | |
| They were going to get there first. | |
| The Nazis, which if you listen to this podcast, you know, I agree. | |
| The Nazis are terrible. | |
| Don't get me wrong. | |
| Yeah, but it's certainly controversial stance. | |
| There's absolutely no like the Nazis are going to get the bomb. | |
| The Nazis are going to do it. | |
| They were building it. | |
| They were going to have it. | |
| And so we just had to do it first. |
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