CHAPTER 7

Nuclear Explosion

The year was 1945.

The second great world war was in its way, with its horrors caravans, tragedies and cruelties which only her, the war, has the power of unchaining.

It was dawn at August the 9th, pretty as any sunny day, with the birds singing, the youth walking towards schools, the peasants in the farms caring of the plantations, the animals and other routine tasks, the housewives connected to their domestic tasks; finally, a common day as so many others.

Eleven hundred hours marked the pointers, when something different explodes in the air at 500 meters of height, in that calm city. Soon after, a very strong wind, with a speed of 2 km per second, dispersed, destroyed and triturated all that was found at his front. An immense vacuum was formed at the center of the explosion, as a gigantic vacuum cleaner, sucking the debris to a great altitude, releasing soon after all the aspired mass which, in its way was bursting all that was found around.

The temperature went up for 9.000-centigrade degrees, burning everything to a distance of kilometers. While all that unbalance of the elements of nature uncoiled, the fragments of the "thing" dropped incandescent, provoking fires everywhere. A smoke and residues cloud reminding a total eclipse overcast the sun. After some minutes, the cloud lowered and a weedy light started to clarify the field of the carnage.

There were more than 30.000 deaths and more than 10.000 wounded seriously, besides dozens of thousands of other people sick by the action of the radioactivity. It was a horror... The trees were plucked, the whole green burned, the houses crushed, some people had their heads cut off, other with the womb torn without its viscera; all of them got nude, as their dresses were transformed in ashes. The skins of the bodies were plucked as strips; a woman was found with the womb open and her future son among the legs. At a 3 km distance from the fatidic location, people had their bodies an hour after, covered with burns bubbles. First they felt an intense pain, followed by an excessive cold.

The fragments of the bomb varied from the size of a marble to one of a soccer ball. And imagine that this terrible instrument of death, the atomic bomb, was generated in the mind of a human being, whose privileged brain, by spiritual invigilance, worked at the service of the "Darkness" in the physical plan, represented by the corrupt political forces, greedy of power, cold and insensitive to the suffering and poverty of the less favored people. But, who was the "father" of the atomic bomb, this destroyer monster? Who was that man?

In slight dabs, we will give the profile of this character so spoken at the time of the post-explosion of the bomb. He was called Jacob Robert Oppenheimer, born in 1904. Scientist since child, he lived for the science, did not worry with the political, social and economic realities. At 11 years old, already belonged to the Mineralogy's Club. After, graduated in Chemistry proceeded studying Architecture. Graduated as architect, went to study Physics in England and after in Germany. At the age of 21, he was already well known by a discovery called Pooheimer Phyllips Process, based on the collision of atomic particles. He studied Astronomy, concentrating on the "quasars", the small cosmic portions that emit light and radioactive waves of great a intensity. At the age of 25 already taught in the Technology Institute of California and at the University of Berkeley. Spooked 8 languages and dominated the Dutch in 6 weeks, only for doing a conference in Amsterdam. Learnt Sanskrit only to communicate by letters with people who knew this language.

As man was very alone, unsociable, frank, emotional and easy to fall in love. He was not given to read newspapers and magazines did not have radio and neither a telephone; his friendships were people from the University.

He was hardly injustice when the American government labeled him as communist, depriving him some rights and keeping him under policemen's ostensible vigilance; however, his intimate tragedy did not result of this political persecution and yes by the awaking of his conscience; conscience that exploded at the exact moment in which the terrible fire, in a mushroom form, went up in the sky in the first atomic experience, when he realized that he had invented the deadly instrument. He repeated then the sentence of the Consecrated Baghvad Gita, book of the Hindus: "I turned myself in death, the destroyer of the worlds".

The colleagues, insensitive, commemorated euphoric the invention with a wine cup. He did not commemorate.

Oppenheimer, from that instant, took knowledge of the more serious problem of the humanity in ours days: "it is licit to carry until the end, the knowledge, if with this millions of creatures are killed, all at once?" The Americans, at this point, started to think in the production of a super-bomb and Oppenheimer started to defend the division of the atomic secrets with other nations, in requesting ONU's Intervention and to discourage the colleagues, not to work on the production of the hydrogen bomb. He was the man, which protested most in 1950, when Truman, president of the USA, passing by the top of the Committee of Nuclear Energy ordered the production of the super-bomb.

The bomb was built by the scientist Edward Teller and in few months was ready and was detonated; however just after the Russians detonated theirs.

It was during the years of physical suffering, because he came to die of throat cancer, which Oppenheimer dedicated to the more profound studies, made the prettiest conferences, wrote the noblest things and was a master of clear and elevated ideals. He explained that the science was good and should not be feared, that science is culture and that is not necessary to isolate her, because from a great misfortune can be born a great happiness. He was already humble and became much more.

When someone a day, asked him:

- Professor, why you don't write the truth? (He referred to the injustices suffered by him).

He answered:

- I never will do it. The truth is within us, is not necessary to render her to others.

To conclude this small summary, we will add that Oppenheimer recited Dante Alighieri, author of the Divine Comedy, in Italian, read Homero in Greek, knew Bach's y heart and other geniuses, argued painting as an art critic, was a lover of the French medieval poetry and the Hindu philosophy.

This was the man defined as genius, beloved by some, hated by others and misunderstood by so many another.

 

Considerations

All the damages of the nuclear explosions, during the 2nd world war and the countless tests that even today are accomplished, rebounds on all the living beings, on the terrestrial crust and its interior, and the propagation of these radiations reaches other planets and their humanities.

Oppenheimer, in his worse nightmares, could not reach the horror of his creation; the small biography that we introduced neither intends to judge nor to acquit, as it does not competes to us, but just to show the wealth of the human complexity, the risks of the enormous talent waste, principally in treating the scientific potential.

The science has to walk with ethics, under the possibility of man in its omnipotence, hoisting the idea in being a "Partner of God".

Instead of the scientist being a pilgrim of the "absolute", will be a pilgrim of the absurdity.

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