Where's my parade?

Never was so much owed by so many to so few.
        -- Winston Churchill

Manhattan Project lore has it the codename "Fat Man" was chosen for the plutonium bomb because if an enemy agent happened across the moniker s/he would assume it was a reference to Winston Churchill. It was a simpler time back then, the pre-PC era, when you could call a head of state fat -- not "portly," not "big boned," but straight-up fat -- and they would shrug it off with a stiff upper lip (and we're talking name-calling in official U.S. spycraft, not from some blog monkey who these days writes worse things about heads of state before the morning call to Cheetos).

The Robert Baratheon of his day, Churchill was. Powdered sug-aaaar!

So it is we are granted license to also impugn Mr. Churchill's arithmetic. The "many" he is referring to in the the above quotation is the WW-II population of Great Britain, whose livelihoods if not very lives would have been put to the sword by the Nazis if given the opportunity. The "few" are the pilots of the Royal Air Force, who threw back Hitler's planned invasion by denying him air superiority. The Wikipedia page on the Battle of Britain states the RAF fielded 2,936 pilots in the conflict. At that time, the population of the British Isles was about 48 million (source: www.parliment.uk). This gives a so many to so few ratio of 16,348 or 16.3 kilothanks, to use the modern parlance.

Is this truly the apex of concentrated gratitude? Was there some other time in history when more was owed to fewer?

Yes there was.

And it's owed to my people.

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Some say Einstein deserves credit (or blame) for inventing the atomic bomb. True, his fateful letter to Roosevelt galvanized the effort. Einstein signed that letter but he did not write it; that was the work of Leo Szilard. And although Einstein uncovered the mass-energy conversion that lies at the heart of all nuclear weapons, it appears he didn't recognize it as such. Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht! Einsteinexclaimed when someone pointed out the violent possibilities contained in E = mc^2. I never thought of that!

Not to mention it took a literal army of smart people to turn Einstein's equation into a working weapon. Recruiting technical talent for the Manhattan Project emptied physics and engineering departments across the country. However, go far enough up the organizational chart and you eventually find names to which we can attach specific contributions. Critical contributions. We might even say unique contributions given the tight timetable wartime progress demanded. Reasonable persons might disagree, but I identify seven scientists who made contributions nobody else could (as told by Richard Rhodes in The Making of the Atomic Bomb):

Ernest Lawrence
Glenn Seaborg
Seth Neddermeyer
George Kistiakowsky
Hans Bethe
Robert Oppenheimer

Ernest Lawrence invented the cyclotron that revealed critical features of the nucleus, his breakthrough inspired by a needle of an idea found in the haystack of obscure engineering journals he obsessively combed through on weekends. Fermi was the first to demonstrate a large-scale chain reaction, famously building an unshielded uranium reactor on the squash courts of the University of Chicago (and getting stomach cancer for his troubles). Glenn Seaborg named plutonium and invented the chemical processes needed to isolate and purify it. Seth Neddermeyer envisioned the implosion hydrodynamics that made Fat Man possible. George Kistiakowsky designed the explosive lenses that made implosion work, his trial-and-error approach in the absence of a usable theory consuming more than 20,000 of the components. Bethe contributed a gaggle of technical solutions including design of the initiator, details of which remain classified to this day. And Oppenheimer's leadership was universally credited for the success of the project by everyone who worked on it.

Footnote: Fanboys will jump on my head for not including Richard Feynman here. While he was certainly one of the smartest cats on the planet, accounts of the Manhattan Project (outside of Feynman's) don't have much to say about his specific contributions.

Pick any one person on that list and remove them from the Manhattan Project. The atomic bomb doesn't work or isn't finished by August 1945. The bombs are not dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan does not surrender. Instead, Operation Olympic goes forward and 100,000 Americans die in the invasion. Multiply that by two or three post-war generations who would not have been born because their father or grandfather lies face downward on Honshu. Today, you have millions of Americans who literally owe their lives to one person. One scientist. One of my people.

Sorry, Mr. Churchill. This is the moment when so many owed so much to so few.

Footnote: Debate rages to this day on the morality of dropping the atomic bombs. LabKitty shan't join the fray here, other than to point out the likely alternative -- a massive allied invasion -- would have killed countless more civilians than the two bombings. The Japanese leadership was not going to capitulate. The United States was not going to relent (as R.F. Laird deftly observed, the defining characteristic of the American psyche is revenge ). Japanese civilians paid the price. Whether you're incinerated by the flash of Fat Man or at the end of a flame thrower seems to me a quibble over semantics.

The first physics war, WW-II has been called. But not the last. In the interim the contribution of scientists and engineers to America's arsenal has been multiplied a thousand-fold. Without our people there's no bombs, nuclear or otherwise. No missiles cruise, falcon, harm, harpoon, hellfire, maverick, patriot, peacekeeper, phoenix, redeye, shrike, sidewinder, sparrow, stinger, tartar, terrier, tomahawk, trident, or otherwise. No approach radar, guidance radar, surveillance, instrument tracking, mortar finding, early warning, or course directing radar. There's no AWACS, no FLIR or DRTS or GPS. No TACFIRE, no REMBASS, no pave paws. No aircraft with names beginning in F or B or U or small arms beginning in M. No ships named after presidents. There's no submarines at all. There's no armor to put on humvees or humvees to put armor on. No chip lights for helicopters or helicopters to put them in. Without our people there's no laser rangefinders or night-vision goggles. No kevlar, no epipens, no morphine. No rockets red glare. No bombs bursting in air. Without our people American sons and daughters go to war with nothing but sticks and stones

On the 4th of July, this gospel day of days, the celebration of all things patriotic, is there one ceremony, one service, one statue for us? No, there is not. As far as America is concerned, scientists and engineers are invisible. Optional. Disposable. Any schmuck on the street can work a Laplace transform, right? Real talent is for things like athletics or cooking or making Facebook. Why study engineering when there mountains of cash to be had as a lawyer or a politician?

Robert Oppenheimer was an American hero until McCarthy sicced Lewis Strauss on him. Taken down by a banker. A banker . Could there be a more apt metaphor for science in 21st century America? The payline for basic research is the lowest it's been since its inception. The country is facing unprecedented technical challenges, and we're turning out backs on the problem solvers. Now, the stupids steer the ship. A congressman can call science lies from the pit of hell and not be laughed off the public stage. A congressman can dismiss a thousand peer-reviewed papers on climate change by waving a Bible and be cheered to reelection, as if Leviticus had something to say about Navier-Stokes equations. There was a time when NASA was the pinnacle of pride for both Congress and the Republic. Now they have to go beg the Russians for a lift. JFK must be spinning in his grave.

The only people Congress treats worse than American scientists are American veterans.

So this holiday weekend, amidst the fireworks and the cookouts, before you return to work on Monday to find your funding is cut again, or your local school board is offended by facts again, or some fathead senator is sticking it to the NIH on CSPAN or the NSF at some townhall full of crazies , when yet another load-bearing member of what our people built is getting the wrecking ball, ask yourself one question.

Where's my parade?