Tag Archives: nuclear-weapons

Will the next Jewish diaspora to America help us win another world war?

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Guess what these men have in common: Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, Hans Bethe, and Edward Teller.

Everyone knows about Einstein. He won a Nobel Prize for his work on the photoelectric effect, did revolutionary work on the relativity of time and space (all in his mind without a laboratory), fled Nazi Germany in 1933, had wild hair in his later years, and, most importantly, co-authored a letter to President Roosevelt explaining the potential for a nuclear bomb.

That letter is credited with persuading Roosevelt to launch the Manhattan Project. The ensuing nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki put an end to WWII. By avoiding a full-scale invasion, the bombs probably saved over a million Japanese, American, British, Australian and Chinese soldiers and civilians.

Einstein became a U.S. citizen in 1944, a year before the bomb was first tested at Los Alamos.

Leo Szilard was the other co-author of that letter. It was Szilard who conceptualized the notion in 1933 that incredible amounts of energy could be released in a nuclear chain reaction by splitting the uranium atom. It might have been the greatest Eureka! moment in science since the day Isaac Newton conceived of gravity when he was hit on the head with a falling apple. Szilard fled Europe in 1938 and became a U.S. citizen five years later.

Hans Bethe was a prominent physicist of the early 20th century. He fled Germany in 1935 at age 29 and became a U.S. citizen in 1941. Like Szilard, he worked on the Manhattan Project. He won the Nobel Prize in 1967 for his work on nuclear reactions over the course of a prolific career, and died in 2005 at age 98.

Edward Teller fled Germany in 1935 and became a U.S. citizen in 1941. He, too, worked on the Manhattan Project. He was later dubbed “the father of the hydrogen bomb.” (While the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs used nuclear fission, the hydrogen bomb uses fusion, which delivers much more bang for the buck. Hydrogen bombs have been successfully tested, but never used in warfare.)

OK, one thing these men obviously have in common is that they were all great physicists.

Here’s another thing, perhaps less obvious: They were all Jewish. Indeed, that’s the reason they fled pre-WWII Europe and came to the beacon of hope that is called America. (It should be noted that not all the physicists on the Manhattan project were Jewish. Project leader Robert Oppenheimer was raised in an American Jewish family but did not regard himself as Jewish. Enrico Fermi was an Italian immigrant raised in a Catholic family.)

The Nazis were pretty stupid, considering they fancied themselves clever and strategic. They drove away the greatest physicists of the day – right into the welcoming arms of their adversary.  

The result was poetic justice.

Germany’s persecution of the Jews deprived the Nazi war machine of their scientific talents. Imagine if Germany had kept the Jewish scientists at home in Germany to help them invent the bomb before America did. Those V-2 rockets they used to bombard London could have been loaded with nukes.

Fast forward a few generations. We now have some new Nazis to contend with, called radical Islam. Like the German Nazis, these neo-Nazi Islamicists fancy themselves pretty clever and pretty strategic, though at the moment the Trump-Netanyahu alliance has them on the ropes.

Here’s an interesting thought experiment. What if the radical Islamicists somehow manage to subdue what they call “the Little Satan” of Israel? Where will the Israeli physicists and other scientists go?

Not to Europe, which is a hotbed of antisemitism.

They’ll go where brilliant, hard-working people have always gone – they’ll go to America.

In America, we don’t care if they’re Jewish, Lutheran or Buddhists, and we don’t care if they’re Black, white, brown or yellow. We don’t care about who they are, we care only about what they can do.

What that next wave of Jewish immigrants can do is to help us – help humanity – win another world war, this one against radical Islam. In the meantime, they can help us cure cancer or generate limitless electricity or put a man on Mars.

Here’s the bigger point. It’s too simple to say that immigration is bad, or good. It all depends on the skill set of the immigrants. I’ll happily take another Einstein.

Hurrah for the IDF, but does Iran already have a nuke in Tel Aviv?

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This war has been distinctly one-sided so far. It’s been all Israel and no Iran.

But we won’t know for days or weeks how successful the Israeli Defense Forces were in their main objective of disabling Iran’s nuclear weapon program.

Israel says it intends to pound Iran for two weeks. If that pounding entails anything like the strikes yesterday which involved about 200 aircraft, and if Iran’s air defenses don’t improve (in fact, they are apt to deteriorate even more from the bombings) then Iran could be crippled for decades.

I’m all for it. But here are some known unknowns:

First, Iran might already have nukes. We think that’s not the case, but, as everyone now knows, that thought is only as good as our intel on the matter. When it comes to intel, remember Russiagate? Remember Hunter’s laptop? I’m betting that the Mossad has better intel operations than we do, but that bet is no sure thing.

Let’s assume the intel on Iran’s development of nukes is accurate – that they’re still weeks away from enriching uranium to bomb-level enrichment concentrations.

That doesn’t mean Iran doesn’t have a bomb. There are thousands of nukes in the world, held by bad guys that are friendly to Iran because Iran is hostile to the west. That includes North Korea, Russia, China, Pakistan and India on some days. Nothing would stop one or more of those bad guys from simply flying or trucking a nuke over to Tehran, especially if Iran paid them some real money to do so.

The explosion from a nuclear bomb is all out of proportion to its size. A bomb that fits in an ordinary truck – not even a semi – could easily take out Tel Aviv.

Ah, you say, but Iran lacks the hardware to mount this bomb-in-a-truck onto one of their thousands of ballistic missiles. So how would they deliver their bomb-in-a-truck to Tel Aviv?

In the truck.

The Ukrainians delivered truckloads of drones thousands of miles across Russia. Surely a single truck could be smuggled into Israel and parked in a storage unit in Tel Aviv.  

Nukes are most destructive if they are detonated a few hundred feet above the ground. So, this bomb-in-a-truck detonated in a storage facility in Tel Aviv would be only, say, 30% as destructive as it could have been if detonated a few hundred feet in the air.

It could still easily take out Tel Aviv.

Ever since I was an aerospace engineer for Boeing, I’ve been puzzled by the inordinate interest in bomb delivery vehicles. Cruise missiles can deliver a warhead across a thousand miles of complicated terrain by flying a few feet off the ground – under radar detection. That’s marvelous, I thought, but why don’t we just rent a U-Haul?

I assume (though I was never privy to such information even when I had a security clearance from Boeing) that we did indeed rent U-Hauls, and so did the Soviets. I assume that we had nukes tucked into strategic locations across the Soviet Union, and they similarly had nukes tucked into strategic locations across the U.S. I assume that Russia took over control of those nukes when the Soviet Union fell, as they took over the rest of the Soviet Union’s nukes. I assume that China, similarly, has nukes residing in the U.S.

It would be military malpractice not to. I’m afraid that the answer to the question I asked myself at Boeing – why don’t we just rent a U-Haul? – is, “Because Boeing doesn’t make U-Hauls.”

The million-dollar question is, does Iran have a nuke – or access to the detonator of a nuke – in Tel Aviv? We’ll probably know one way or another within days.

In a life prior to law school, Glenn Beaton was an aerospace engineer for Boeing.