Tag: United States

Israel, Gaza, and Robert McNamara’s Lessons for War and Peace

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Once again the world faces death and destruction, and once again it asks questions. The horrific assaults by Hamas on October 7 last year and the widespread bombing by the Israeli government in Gaza raise old questions of morality, law, history and national identity. We have been here before, and if history is any sad reminder, we will undoubtedly be here again. That is all the more reason to grapple with these questions.

For me, a particularly instructive guide to doing this is Errol Morris’s brilliant 2003 film, “The Fog of War”, that focuses on former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s “eleven lessons” drawn from failures of the United States in the Vietnam War. Probably my favorite documentary of all time, I find both the film and the man fascinating and the lessons timeless. McNamara at 85 is sharp as a tack and appears haunted with the weight of history and his central role in sending 58,000 American soldiers to their deaths in a small, impoverished country far away which was being bombed back into the stone age. Throughout the film he fixes the viewer with an unblinking stare, eyes often tearing up and conviction coming across. McNamara happens to be the only senior government official from any major U.S. war who has taken responsibility for his actions and – what is much more important than offering a simple mea culpa and moving on – gone into great details into the mistakes he and his colleagues made and what future generations can learn from them (in stark contrast, Morris’s similar film about Donald Rumsfeld is infuriating because unlike McNamara, Rumsfeld appears completely self-deluded and totally incapable of introspection).

For me McNamara’s lessons which are drawn from both World War 2 and Vietnam are uncannily applicable to the Israel-Palestine conflict, not so much for any answers they provide but for the soul-searching questions which must be asked. Here are the eleven lessons, and while all are important I will focus on a select few because I believe they are particularly relevant to the present war. Read more »



Monday, November 27, 2023

The case for American scientific patriotism

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Hans Bethe receiving the Enrico Fermi Award – the country’s highest award in the field of nuclear science – from President John F. Kennedy in 1961. His daughter, Monica, is standing at the back. To his right is Glenn Seaborg, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

John von Neumann emigrated from Hungary in 1933 and settled in Princeton, NJ. During World War 2, he contributed a key idea to the design of the plutonium bomb at Los Alamos. After the war he became a highly sought-after government consultant and did important work kickstarting the United States’s ICBM program. He was known for his raucous parties and love of children’s toys.

Enrico Fermi emigrated from Italy in 1938 and settled first in New York and then in Chicago, IL. At Chicago he built the world’s first nuclear reactor. He then worked at Los Alamos where there was an entire division devoted to him. After the war Fermi worked on the hydrogen bomb and trained talented students at the University of Chicago, many of whom went on to become scientific leaders. After coming to America, in order to improve his understanding of colloquial American English, he read Li’l Abner comics.

Hans Bethe emigrated from Germany in 1935 and settled in Ithaca, NY, becoming a professor at Cornell University. He worked out the series of nuclear reactions that power the sun, work for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1967. During the war Bethe was the head of the theoretical physics division of the Manhattan Project. He spent the rest of his long life working extensively on arms control, advising presidents to make the best use of the nuclear genie he and his colleagues had unleashed, and advocating peaceful uses of nuclear energy. He was known for his hearty appetite and passion for stamp collecting.

Victor Weisskopf, born in Austria, emigrated from Germany in 1937 and settled in Rochester, NY. After working on the Manhattan Project, he became a professor at MIT and the first director-general of CERN, the European particle physics laboratory that discovered many new fundamental particles including the Higgs boson. He was also active in arms control. A gentle humanist, he would entertain colleagues through his rendition of Beethoven sonatas on the piano.

Von Neumann, Fermi, Bethe and Weisskopf were all American patriots. Read more »

Monday, September 26, 2022

The Great American Bigot

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Salinas, California – A tractor operator works the agricultural fields of the Salinas Valley of central California.

There are a number of videos circulating on the web that show angry white people screaming at Mexicans and Mexican-Americans to “Go back to where you came from!” It takes a special brand of stupid for, say, a Texan living in a town with a name like Llano located in Llano County to tell a Mexican or Mexican-American to “go back to where they came from.” For when you’re in Texas—a different spelling of the Spanish Tejas—in a county named Llano, which means plain or flat in Spanish, and in a town also named Llano for its flat ground, and you find yourself yelling at someone named Garcia or Gallegos to go home, you might be the one with the problem.

In a country with state names like Colorado, California, and New Mexico, and city names like Santa Fe, Amarillo, La Junta, and San Diego, it’s obvious that explorers, ranchers, store owners, priests, and law men had previous history in what is now Mexico. Our forebears were not just the ones who landed on the east coast after crossing the Atlantic, but also the ones who came up from south of the border, long before a border existed.

More than 200 years before the United States was even a gleam in the eye of one of our revolutionaries, Spaniards traveling up from what is now Mexico were exploring the southwest. In 1540, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado set off on a two-year exploration in search of the mythological seven cities of Cibola with hopes of bringing home gold and silver. Leaving the territory of present day Mexico, he traveled through what is now Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and possibly Kansas. On his trip he encountered the Grand Canyon but never found the promised gold and his trip was considered a failure. Read more »

Monday, November 29, 2021

Complementarity and the world: Niels Bohr’s message in a bottle

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Niels Bohr (Getty Images)

Werner Heisenberg was on a boat with Niels Bohr and a few friends, shortly after he discovered his famous uncertainty principle in 1927. A bedrock of quantum theory, the principle states that one cannot determine both the velocity and the position of particles like electrons with arbitrary accuracy. Heisenberg’s discovery foretold of an intrinsic opposition between these quantities; better knowledge of one necessarily meant worse knowledge of the other. Talk turned to physics, and after Bohr had described Heisenberg’s seminal insight, one of his friends quipped, “But Niels, this is not really new, you said exactly the same thing ten years ago.”

In fact, Bohr had already convinced Heisenberg that his uncertainty principle was a special case of a more general idea that Bohr had been expounding for some time – a thread of Ariadne that would guide travelers lost through the quantum world; a principle of great and general import named the principle of complementarity.

Complementarity arose naturally for Bohr after the strange discoveries of subatomic particles revealed a world that was fundamentally probabilistic. The positions of subatomic particles could not be assigned with definite certainty but only with statistical odds. This was a complete break with Newtonian classical physics where particles had a definite trajectory, a place in the world order that could be predicted with complete certainty if one had the right measurements and mathematics at hand. In 1925, working at Bohr’s theoretical physics institute in Copenhagen, Heisenberg was Bohr’s most important protégé had invented quantum theory when he was only twenty-four. Two years later came uncertainty; Heisenberg grasped that foundational truth about the physical world when Bohr was away on a skiing trip in Norway and Heisenberg was taking a walk at night in the park behind the institute. Read more »