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Underqualified for the Overrated
Christopher Hitchens 10/10/2009 12:00:00 AM
Alfred Nobel had one odd thing in common with Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway and Marcus Garvey. He had the chance to read about his own death in the newspapers. It seems that he was so depressed by the emphasis that the obituarists laid on his pioneering work on dynamite—the WMD of its day—that he resolved at once to upgrade his real death notice by endowing an award for international peace.
Letters: October 12, 2009
10/10/2009 12:00:00 AM
Letters: October 12, 2009
10/10/2009 12:00:00 AM
‘All Options Means All Options’
Lally Weymouth 10/3/2009 12:00:00 AM
Israel has always said that a nuclear Iran poses a threat to its existence. Israel also has believed for some time that Iran is working on creating nuclear weapons and is moving closer to realizing its goal. If, for example, Russia delivers the S-300 antiaircraft system to Iran as it has agreed to do, it would make the possibility of an Israeli air attack on Iran's nuclear facilities difficult, if not impossible. NEWSWEEK's Lally Weymouth sat down with Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the U.S., to find out the Israeli reaction to the Obama administration's talks with Iran last week. Excerpts:
The Stakes? Well, Armageddon, for One.
Jon Meacham 10/3/2009 12:00:00 AM
On Nov. 2, 1945—All Souls' Day in the Catholic tradition—J. Robert Oppenheimer spoke to scientists at Los Alamos. "It is clear to me that wars have changed," he said. "It is clear to me that if these first bombs—the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki—that if these can destroy 10 square miles, then that is really quite something. It is clear to me that they are going to be very cheap if anyone wants to make them." Oppenheimer basically had it right: nuclear weapons are not particularly cheap, but the knowledge, once unleashed, could not be contained. This was a persistent concern among the scientists who made the Manhattan Project come to life, including Albert Einstein, who wrote FDR in 1939 about "extremely powerful bombs of a new type." (The Pulitzer Prize–winning book American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, is essential reading about the beginnings of the bomb.) Those present at the creation feared what has come to pass: the steady proliferation of the means of Armageddon.
Letters: October 5, 2009
10/3/2009 12:00:00 AM