Fission Quotes
I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy...censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything-you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.
Robert A. Heinlein
Black holes are not rare, and they are not an accidental embellishment of our Universe. They are a fundamental driving force of its evolution. They are a dominant source of energy. For every ounce of matter consumed, they yield more than ten times as much energy as the nuclear reactions of fusion and fission that cause our sun to shine and our hydrogen bombs to explode.
Freeman Dyson
A stands for atom; it is so small
No one has ever seen it at all.
B stands for bombs; the bombs are much bigger.
So, brother, do not be too fast on the trigger.
F stands for fission; that is what things do
When they get wobbly and big and must split in two.
And just to confound the atomic confusion
What fission has done may be undone by fusion.
H has become a most ominous letter;
It means something bigger, if not something better.
S stands for secret; you can keep it forever -
Provided there's no one abroad who is clever.
Edward Teller
Accelerationism links the implosion of decision-space to the explosion of the world – that is, to modernity. It is important therefore to note that the conceptual opposition between implosion and explosion does nothing to impede their real (mechanical) coupling. Thermonuclear weapons provide the most vividly illuminating examples. An H-bomb employs an A-bomb as a trigger. A fission reaction sparks a fusion reaction. The fusion mass is crushed into ignition by a blast process.
Nick Land
The fission bomb was a costly mistress. Consider, your Honors. In 1979 this planet celebrated the International Year of the Child. Of the one hundred and twenty-two million children born that year, one of every ten was dead by 1982, and most died for lack of inexpensive food and vaccines. Yet in 1982 the world spent one trillion dollars on weapons. One trillion dollars!
James K. Morrow
The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us the successful production of the fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products we are pushed, we are forced by what By a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix.
Erich Fromm
Hahn and Strassmann were able to discover nuclear fission by exceptionally good chemistry, fantastically good chemistry, which was way ahead of what anyone else was capable of at that time. The Americans learned it to do later. But at that time, in 1938, Hahn and Strassmann were really the only ones who could do it, because they were such good chemists.
Otto Hahn