Painless Modern Bombs?

Werner Heisenberg
(From Wikipedia.com)

"[Werner Heisenberg and German biochemist Adolf Butenandt] had just attended a [March 1, 1943] meeting of the Academy for Aeronautics in the Air Ministry, off the Potsdamer Platz [in Berlin]. Hubert Schardin had been lecturing on the physiological effects of modern bombs, mentioning, among other things, that the sudden build-up of air pressure due to an explosion in one's immediate vicinity might lead to a relatively painless death from an embolism. Toward the end of the meeting, the alert had been sounded and all of us had made for the Ministry shelter, fitted out with camp beds and paillasses. This was our first experience of very heavy bombing. Several bombs hit the building of the Ministry, we heard the collapse of walls and ceilings, and for a time we did not know whether the corridor between our shelter and the outside world was still open.

Otto Hahn (From www.biography.com)

The lights had gone out shortly after the start of the raid, and there were occasional gleams of a flashlight. A groaning woman was brought in and tended by two medical orderlies. At first we had all been talking and even laughing, but gradually we fell silent; the only sound then was the occasional thud as yet another bomb dropped nearby. After two particularly violent bursts, with pressure waves that shook the whole shelter, I heard [German nuclear physicist] Otto Hahn pipe up in a corner: 'I bet Schardin doesn't believe in his own theories right now.' With that, the atmosphere grew just a shade less somber." (183)
--Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond

A "Super" Atom Bomb

Hydrogen Bomb (From: www.xtimeline.com)

"For Super was a bomb which might well be a thousand times as powerful as that which had razed Hiroshima to the ground. Unlike the ordinary atomic bomb it was an 'open-ended weapon,' of unrestricted range.

Such a bomb could be constructed only if the powerful natural processes taking place in the interior of the sun were successfully reproduced on earth. Quantities of energy were perpetually being released in that flaming heavenly body by the fusion of hydrogen atoms. The forces liberated were incomparably more powerful than those let loose in uranium fission...

[A group of nuclear physicists meeting at UC Berkeley, lead by Robert Oppenheimer,] indicated the possibility of a fusion of this kind, the logical next step after the fission bomb...

One of the questions to be considered was peculiarly sinister. The possibility had been mentioned at Berkeley that once the thermonuclear processes had been set in motion by the explosion of a bomb, they might affect the atmosphere and the waters of the earth. An irresistible global chain reaction might be released by the Super, which would transform the entire planet in a short time into a flaming and dying star." (265-266) --Robert Jungk, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists

Guess who?

Richard Feynman (From Wikipedia)

"The enfant terrible among the atomic scientists was the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, as young as he was gifted. To enrage the censors he instructed his wife to send him letters to Los Alamos which were torn into hundreds of small pieces. The officials charged with the checking of correspondence were obliged to fit all the fragments of this jigsaw puzzle together again. It also afforded Feynman great amusement to work out the combination numbers of the steel safes in which the most important data of research were kept. In one case he actually succeeded, after weeks of study, in opening the main file cupboard at the records center in Los Alamos while the officer in charge of it was absent for a few minutes. Feynman contented himself, in the brief period during which he had all the atomic secrets at his disposal, with placing in the safe a scrap of paper on which he had written, 'Guess who?' He was then able to feast his eyes on the horror of the security official as the latter perused the message which had found its way into the innermost sanctum of the Manhattan Project in some manner he was utterly unable to understand." (122) --Robert Jungk, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists

"I want to do something risky."

Gottingen, Germany (From tripadvisor.com)

"From these [Gottingen, Germany host families] the foreign students often learned German very quickly. They frequently even wrote articles in German for scientific periodicals during the period of their studies. In conversation, however, they made amusing mistakes. The young English astrophysicist Robertson wanted one day to check the exact weight of a letter he was going to send abroad. He burst into a shop and breathlessly asked the girl behind the counter: 'Haben Sie eine Wiege? Ich mochte etwas wagen.' ('Have you a cradle? I want to do something risky.') The girl blushed and stared at him and he hastily corrected himself. 'I beg your pardon, I meant to say haben Sie eine Waage? Ich mochte etwas wiegen.' ('Have you a pair of scales? I want to weigh something.')" (22) --Robert Jungk, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists