'Atomic Energy' Book Signed by Einstein, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Enola Gay Crew

https://www.rrauction.com/auctions/lot-detail/347934706696090-manhattan-project-atomic-bomb-signed-book-with-einstein-oppenheimer-bohr-enola-gay-crew-nobel-prize-winners-and-nuclear-researchers

by geox • 3 years ago

101 111 3 years ago

rrauction.com

irrational3• 3 years ago

That’s quite something. Anyone have any idea how all these people came to sign this one book?

davidjhall• 3 years ago

At the bottom, it says the book belonged to an amateur historian who went around collecting all the autographs. Cant imagine how easy/hard it would've been to get all if them.

jamal-kumar18• 3 years ago

I found a piece of trinitite cleaning out my friend's grandma's place after she passed away. It's labelled 1942 NEW MEXICO TRINITY, she apparently was involved in the manhattan project somehow. We didn't know whether it was dangerous or not so we invested in a geiger counter to make sure we didn't just discover a superfund site in a pill bottle in the medicine cabinet. It's fine.

I cannot for the life of me find a professional jeweler with the balls to wrap it. They all get mad at me like I'm trying to poison them when there's really more radioactive particles being emitted from bananas.

mikestew• 3 years ago

Is it irresponsible to just not tell the jeweler what it is? You’ve already confirmed that it’s not radioactive.

jamal-kumar18• 3 years ago

They won't hear me out, tried a few times. People don't know a damn thing about this stuff they just assume you're insane for even touching it

Keep in mind these are the same people who are afraid of microwave ovens

Hell even we were a little freaked out of it enough to go hit a scientific supply shop before realizing it's well past its half-life

petee• 3 years ago

Not sure exactly what the OP means by "wrap it", but if you are asking a jeweler to grind it then yes, it would be irresponsible not to mention, even if you thought it was clean. Ingesting/breathing has the potential to be dangerous.

Hunter Scott has a fun article where his friend helped him test his sample in a lab -- https://www.hscott.net/analyzing-trinitite-a-radioactive-pie...

rqtwteye2• 3 years ago

It’s pretty unethical to withhold information from people who wouldn’t do the work if they had this information .

perihelions5• 3 years ago

I'd be concerned if that process involves anything like grinding or cutting to shape. Particularly with alpha-emitter nuclides, things that otherwise are harmless and inert might become less so when there's inhalable dust involved.

mikewarot3• 3 years ago

You're not sure it's safe, unless you've got an Alpha particle detector, which you didn't mention. Also, the internals of it might be an alpha emitter, and only get exposed on grinding.

I wouldn't do anything that might abrade it. I'd say the jewelers are right.

jamal-kumar18• 3 years ago

I literally got one of those and mentioned this

flanbiscuit• 3 years ago

they mentioned using a Geiger counter, does that count?

seems like it can: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3228631/

loa_in_• 3 years ago

Grinding such materials produces airborne particulate that lingers for days.

rqtwteye2• 3 years ago

I wonder where the 1942 comes from. At that time nobody knew that there would a test named Trinity and trinitite was also 3 years away.

jamal-kumar18• 3 years ago

Again she worked on it, at least tangenitally. I think I remember her husband did too

I'm probably remembering numbers wrong though

alanbernstein• 3 years ago

Maybe labeled years later with the date referring to the year she started working there.

Aurornis2• 3 years ago

It's labelled 1942 NEW MEXICO TRINITY, she apparently was involved in the manhattan project somehow.

Tritinite souvenirs were popular until the government made it illegal to collect it.

Someone from that era possessing a piece doesn’t mean they were part of the Manhattan Project.

jamal-kumar18• 3 years ago

I'm going by what I was told and photos I saw...

Why are Americans always so quick to cast shade? This is the comments section, I'm not about to write an essay about all the details here.

cookie_monsta• 3 years ago

As a data point, did you try to get any of them to wrap bananas?

jamal-kumar18• 3 years ago

That would be an interesting thing to do actually. Since the banana just goes bad and squishy what you'd be left with is a cool banana-shaped wireframe to hang from the ceiling in a tropical bungalow

I might actually do this

perihelions5• 3 years ago

- "Enola Gay Crew"

Gross. Wiping out one hundred thousand human lives with a press of a button isn't something to make trophy memorabilia out of.

Dig1t• 3 years ago

It might be if your father, brother, uncle, etc died in the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Not saying I agree, but you'd probably have a different attitude if the war personally affected you.

LeifCarrotson• 3 years ago

I don't agree either. Now that technology allows individual actions to spread further, people need to learn to shut up and multiply.

The attack on Pearl Harbor killed 2335 American military personnel and 68 civilians. The Little Boy bomb dropped by the Enola Gay crew on Hiroshima killed 90-140,000 Japanese, mostly civilians. The whole Asia Pacific war consumed nearly 25 million people. Or consider the ratio resulting from the terrorist attacks 22 years and 7 days ago. Those planes killed 2,977 American victims (plus 19 hijackers), then the US went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq and caused 4.5-4.7 million deaths [1].

"You attack me, I attack you" works as foreign policy (or is at least justifiable) when your most devastating weapon is your own fists and teeth, or even as sophisticated as a stick with a rock tied to the end. To swing that stick again and again and again, for days, ending one thousand, two thousand, ten thousand times as many lives as were lost in the initial strike... That will not bring back a father, a brother, or an uncle. You might understand how a broken man might want to do that, but that can't be called justice. When your weapon is as small as Little Boy, or today as big as a network of ICBMs, and instead of standing face to face with your enemy and watching that human suffer you're pulling a bomb release from 30,000 feet or clicking a button from the other side of the world, that gut feeling of a desire for revenge, an attitude of "I want to cause pain" is not reliable.

[1] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2023/IndirectDeat...

picture• 3 years ago

Do you also blame the ones who refined the metal that went into making the plane and bombs and the electronics within? What about the rivets and bolts and hinges that were part of the bomb release mechanism? The crew of Enola Gay were as much a cog in the machine as anyone else. If they refused the order to deploy the weapons, other people will. Everyone contributes to history, including your grandparents or great grandparents who quite definitely participated in the economy. Even the idea of deploying nuclear weapons were justified with the idea that it will save more American and Japanese lives should a ground operation be conducted. Blaming anything or anyone for events of history is short sighted.

ada19813• 3 years ago

“ Blaming anything or anyone for events of history is short sighted.”

Surely you don’t mean that no one is responsible for anything that has happened?

carlosjobim3• 3 years ago

Every single person is responsible for their own voluntary actions. There is no sophistry and no amount of lies stacked on each other that can take away that responsibility.

leoh• 3 years ago

Do you also blame the ones who refined the metal that went into making the plane and bombs and the electronics within?

Yes. We live in a perverted world. There are harmful activities such as murder which most of us condone. It is a tragedy that there are enough of us that would disavow the manufacture of munitions.

jedberg3• 3 years ago

Or did they save 1,000,000 lives with the press of a button?

The situation is far too complicated and nuanced to be a black and white call of "gross".

marsa3• 3 years ago

imagine Russia using the same justification for dropping one on a Ukrainian city and suddenly all complexity and nuance is gone

it's morally indefensible in all cases

mitthrowaway26• 3 years ago

I had a similar reaction, although I cannot blame the crew for following orders. It does seem to change the nuance of the meaning of the signatures, though.

perihelions5• 3 years ago

They're auctioning the signatures of the pilots as war memorabilia. I think that part's beyond any defense. Even if you kill someone for a legitimate reason (I'm side-stepping that), it's not moral to glorify the killing, and monetize the killing, in this way. It's just ghoulish!

mikewarot3• 3 years ago

You can blame people for "just following orders", if they were unlawful. That was the point of the Nuremburg trials[1]. Here's the some of the evidence used in those trials.[2]

Had the bombs not been used, it was estimated that there would have been a million soldiers wounded, and who knows how many civilians. Based on the information available to them, the crew of the Enola Gay had no reason to believe their orders unlawful.

"During World War II, 1,506,000 Purple Heart medals were manufactured, many in anticipation of the estimated casualties resulting from the planned Allied invasion of Japan. By the end of the war, even accounting for medals lost, stolen, or wasted, nearly 500,000 remained." [3]

[1] https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/topics/nuremberg-trial...

[2] https://www.c-span.org/video/?400657-1/nazi-concentration-pr...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Heart

burkaman• 3 years ago

I wouldn't really call this a trophy. They are historically significant people no matter how you feel about them, and this is a pretty tasteful way to represent that significance - just a simple signature in a topical book from their time.

I also think it's a bit strange to single out the crew. They are not any more responsible (and arguably less responsible) than the physicists and bureaucrats represented here who designed and built the bomb explicitly for the purpose of dropping it on Japan.

nvy• 3 years ago

It might not be a happy thing to own but it's certainly historic.

mbg721• 3 years ago

You'll never guess what Rosie the Riveter was putting rivets into...

iancmceachern• 3 years ago

My grandfather was at Pearl Harbor. He was a submariner through the war, purple heart recipient, a hero.

His war memorabilia which I have from him are among the most valuable possessions I own.

It's not because of all the horrific things they could represent. It's because of the beautiful things they represent. The triumph over evil.

It was awful, a truly awful thing to do (Hirshima and Nagasaki).

But let's not forget the greater context. The US actively tried to stay out of the war, deliberately, for as long as possible and had their hand forced.

I say it every December 7th, but now I'm saying it on Sept. 18th.

Remember Pearl Harbor.

Remember my Grandfather.

This book is similar. It's not for all the negative things that we remember it. It's for the positive things we've done since, despite it.

Octokiddie• 3 years ago

The title fits into a broad pattern of misdirected attention about atomic weapons. The cover story is always "energy" but the underlying truth is all about weapons. It's the same for every country, too, it seems.

jedberg3• 3 years ago

It's because the two are very intertwined. The same technology that allows bombs also allows for creating a lot of energy for powering homes and businesses.

The technology for storing and securing spent nuclear materials from the making of the bombs is the same technology for storing the waste from making energy for homes.

jordanpg• 3 years ago

Surely this is worth more than 22k?

mbb70• 3 years ago

The bidding will continue for several more days. The site lists an 'estimate' price at > $100,000

sambazi3• 3 years ago

go bid :D

civilitty• 3 years ago

It's currently in pre-bidding and the real auction hasn’t even started yet. These numbers are purely aspirational (for the bidders) because more than a dozen bids at this point indicates that it will be a very competitive live auction and none of these prebids will mean anything. The closing price will be 10-100x of prebids once the professional brokers and dealers get involved on behalf of their clients.

ralphc• 3 years ago

TIL that Vannevar Bush, known around these circles for his "As We May Think" essay, was also a "key figure in establishing the Manhattan Project".

pcl• 3 years ago

He was also a big figure in MIT's WWII history. If you're interested in such things, check out "Tuxedo Park". The main focus of the book is Alfred Loomis, but quite a lot of the other characters of the era make appearances.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Tuxedo-Park/Jennet-Co...

walnutclosefarm2• 3 years ago

I'm not a collector, but I'm tempted to bid on this book. It's remarkable to imagine the effort the original owner had to put in, over a couple of decades, to collect all those signatures, and it really is a who's who of the Manhattan project, and of course, of the bombing itself.

nilslindemann• 3 years ago

Enola Gay Crew seems a bit misplaced here.

credit_guy• 3 years ago

What an embarrassment of riches, when you claim that 14 Nobel laureates have signed the book, when it was actually 15 (they missed listing Hans Bethe as a Nobel prize winner).

'Atomic Energy' Book Signed by Einstein, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Enola Gay Crew

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