Atom Bomb

A slight, quiet Iraqi with a will of steel named Dr. Hussein Sharistani may have helped prevent a nuclear disaster in the Middle East. Sharistani was the top scientific advisor to Iraq's nuclear energy commission in 1979 when Saddam Hussein asked him to help develop a nuclear bomb. The Toronto-trained nuclear physicist said "no" - an act equivalent to an unarmed David defying a 20-ton Goliath. He was brutally tortured, spent 12 years in prison (10 in solitary confinement) and escaped during the Gulf War bombings by means which outdo Houdini.

Complementing its exhibition of contemporary Japanese photography, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is hosting a four-week festival celebrating films of the Japanese vanguard. Experimental films are to their commercial counterparts what poetry is to prose. This weekend's selections of nine experimental shorts range from surrealist haiku like Navel and A-Bomb, in which Eiko Hosoe likens the atom bomb to a child without a navel, to Sakumi Hagiwara's Mist, a continuous take of mist lifting above the treetops.

IF "PEARL HARBOR" and its stars do not get Oscars, Hollywood is like everything today - fixed. We did nothing wrong by interning Japanese in this country to be watched. How did we know who could be trusted? If a teacher can't find which child had done something wrong, the whole classroom is punished. The United States should never be ashamed we did that. We were just being careful and protecting ourselves. Some say we were wrong for dropping the atom bomb on Japan.

Albert Einstein was reported to have said, about the atom bomb, that "everything has changed, except the way we think. " The news is full of perfect illustrations of this now that the possibility of abolishing nuclear weapons is getting serious consideration. Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger says that if we give up the nuclear option we will have to have a buildup and dependency on conventional weapons. Unless we of the peace movement nail this nonsense for what it is, effectively and quickly, the public will as usual believe whatever it hears.

The past is arranged, unopened, on the dining room table - locked in old newspaper clippings, yellowed letters from former comrades, an album of faded black-and-white photos. Al Purdy reaches for the photographs. They are of a place he saw as a young man, a place few cared to visit at the time. There he is, with a buddy standing in front of a wooden sign: Hiroshima City Hall. There he is, holding a piece of atomic rubble. There they are, the corpses of buildings, trees denuded of leaves, stubborn sticks standing in a desert of debris.

The central question in Copenhagen - why did Werner Heisenberg visit Niels Bohr at his home in the Danish city in late September 1941? - is, on the face of it, not one to send people streaming into a theater for an answer. Yet for those who welcome the challenge of a play that demands concentrated attention yet offers no definite answers to this or many other questions - indeed, one whose very premise is that certainty is impossible - Michael Frayn's drama is a stimulating, satisfying theatrical experience.

I suppose it was bound to happen: war without boundaries. War, that is, that involved everyone: old men, women, children. It was the nature of con flict: everyone was in it, more or less. There were to be no more civilians in contrast to the military, no more non-combatants. Everyone was in the same boat: fighting for the survival of the nation. But not everyone was armed or able to protect himself against attack. Civilians were helpless, relatively speaking. But they were the glue that kept the nation united during its agony.

THE MORAL IMPERATIVE TO BUILD THE BOMB I have no doubts my father was involved in a righteous cause. In a dim way, I even envy him: What could be more exhilarating than to know that the fate of the world rests on your work - and that you are fighting the good fight? Nor did my father have any doubts. "There are a lot of things to go to hell for, but working on the bomb isn't one of them," he would say, bristling, when the morality of working at Los Alamos came up. The Fascists and Nazis had stripped him of his position, driven him from his homeland.

Don't compare Okla. bombing with Hiroshima Robert S. McElvaine's "Found guilty by association: It's more common than we think" (Inquirer, May 19) illustrates the ignorance of the writer. Comparing the Hiroshima atom bomb attack with the dastardly and cowardly Oklahoma federal office bombing is not even comparing apples and oranges. I was a combat correspondent with the Fifth Marine Division during World War II. We had returned to our Hawaii rest camp following 36 days of bitter combat on Iwo Jima.

Hideko Yoshiyama was a 22-year-old clerk when the atom bomb fell on Nagasaki 46 years ago. She has been recovering ever since, hospitalized 19 times for a variety of radiation-related maladies, from breast cancer to thyroid infections. She happened to be standing in front of a large glass door when the bomb Fat Man fell on the city with the explosive blast of 22 kilotons of dynamite, triggering a fireball that sent ground temperatures over 5,000 degrees. The explosion turned the glass door to splinters and filled Yoshiyama's face and body with thousands of jagged crystals.

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. - The poster's hush-hush tone said it all: "What you see here, what you do here, what you hear here, when you leave here, let it stay here. " Here in the rolling hills of eastern Tennessee, America built one of three secret cities that developed the atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading to Japan's surrender on Aug. 14, 1945, and bringing an end to World War II. The city, now called Oak Ridge, once was home to 75,000 people, yet it did not appear on any map. Visitors could get into the town only through gated entrances.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - Goalkeepers seem to enjoy a new soccer ball about as much as they enjoy defending a penalty kick. A new ball is always too light, too unpredictable, the wrong color, and what was the problem with the old one, anyway? This summer's latest edition - the Jabulani, created by Adidas for the 2010 FIFA World Cup - has recently been called all sorts of bad names by the stars preparing to use it. The most contemptuous review came from Brazilian goalkeeper Julio Cesar, who told the press: "It's terrible, horrible.

Harrison Ford may be 65, but not to worry - it's clear in "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" that his stuntman is only 25. In the first few minutes alone, Indy dodges a thousand bullets, swings from the rafters via his famous rawhide whip, and outruns the shock wave from an atom bomb. The year is 1957, the bomb is a military test in New Mexico, and none of this is by happenstance. Steven Spielberg has come to praise Indiana Jones and also to bury him, and so he positions Indy's swan song in the mid-1950s - the moment when the United States made the pivot from a nation that built its mythology around a heroic past to a nation whose atomic age imagination was fixed on the future.

Francis E. Low, 85, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist and provost whose life included work on the atomic bomb, a passion for music, and a stint as an Army mule driver, died of heart failure yesterday at the Quadrangle, a retirement community in Haverford. As provost from 1980 to 1985, Dr. Low established a viable role for the humanities at MIT, his daughter Margaret Low Smith said. He encouraged liberal arts courses for the engineering, mathematics and science students, she said, and believed physicists could also be philosophers.

Rumors are swirling about who will be tapped by week's end as Iraq's interim prime minister. Early this week, the leading candidate was said to be Hussain Shahristani. He's a top nuclear scientist who refused Saddam's order to make an atomic bomb in 1979. He paid for his courage by spending more than a decade in Abu Ghraib prison. I have known Shahristani since 1994 and have been in recent phone and e-mail contact. A man of his unblemished integrity and lack of political ambition just might be able to hold Iraq together until elections in 2004.

All through World War II, the Allies saw themselves in a desperate race with Nazi Germany to develop the atom bomb, but after the war it was learned that German scientists had not even managed to sustain a nuclear reaction, something the Allies had done as early as 1943. Why was Germany, so advanced in rocket and jet plane technology, so far behind in developing the mightiest weapon of all? That is the question that lies at the heart of Copenhagen, the erudite, eloquent, perceptively human play by Michael Frayn.

Fly off a tiny dot of an island into the vast darkness of the Pacific in a huge airplane loaded with bombs, find another dot in Japan indicating an oil refinery, drop the bombs on it, and find your way back to that tiny island after a 12- to 14-hour flight. That's what his country demanded of Peter M. Sarraiocco, then 23 and fresh out of two years at Rutgers University. No big deal. That was the kind of challenge thrown at many of his college classmates during World War II. Some men were barely out of high school when they stormed beaches in the Pacific and in North Africa under withering machine-gun and cannon fire.

The central question in Copenhagen - why did Werner Heisenberg visit Niels Bohr at his home in the Danish city in late September 1941? - is, on the face of it, not one to send people streaming into a theater for an answer. Yet for those who welcome the challenge of a play that demands concentrated attention yet offers no definite answers to this or many other questions - indeed, one whose very premise is that certainty is impossible - Michael Frayn's drama is a stimulating, satisfying theatrical experience.

UNTIL TUESDAY, ALL was antiseptic in the temper tantrum against terrorism. Based on the cheering at football stadiums and auto races following President Bush's announcement of air strikes in Afghanistan, Americans were successfully fed the illusion that our tantrum would break only the glass and china of the Taliban. An Associated Press story about the American weaponry being used in Afghanistan said, "evidence suggests that the Pentagon's new generation of satellite-guided bombs has succeeded in hitting targets with a high degree of precision.

IF "PEARL HARBOR" and its stars do not get Oscars, Hollywood is like everything today - fixed. We did nothing wrong by interning Japanese in this country to be watched. How did we know who could be trusted? If a teacher can't find which child had done something wrong, the whole classroom is punished. The United States should never be ashamed we did that. We were just being careful and protecting ourselves. Some say we were wrong for dropping the atom bomb on Japan.