Talk:Brighter than a Thousand Suns (book)

Latest comment: 4 years ago by Lexington50 in topic Controversy

Hindu passage

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The Bhagavad Gita passage that contains the book's title is not the passage that was recalled by Oppenheimer at the test blast site.Lestrade (talk) 19:46, 7 December 2009 (UTC)LestradeReply

Balance?

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The article as it stands is a bit of a hatchet job on the author. It might be warranted but ending the article with a devastating quote from General Groves--a single individual--seems a bit crude. Are there no other sources of opinion that would confirm the General's view? --70.79.82.190 (talk) 18:18, 25 January 2018 (UTC)Reply

Controversy

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This section is a hot mess. The editor cobbled together a couple of out of context quotes from an article by Mark Walker to say many years after the book's publication Jungk accused Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker and Werner Heisenberg of lying to him when he originally researched the book. It is not clear from the article exactly what Jungk said however - this issue is mentioned only in passing as the article is about the Nazis using Heisenberg to conduct public diplomacy for Germany during WWII (i.e. a completely different topic).

Walker himself suggests (pp. 342-3 of the cited article) that Weizsäcker and Heisenberg may be guilty more of employing sloppy language than of deliberately intending to mislead. In any case it's not clear from the article exactly what Jungk said, there is only a reference to it (for those interested it can be found here ---> Robert Jungk, 'Vorwort', in Mark Walker, Die Uran-maschine, Mythos, and Wirklichkeit der deutschen Atombombe, Berlin, 1990, pp. 7-10). Note Mark Walker edited the book in which Jungk revises his position as well as writing the article that contains the references to the controversy.

I was going to delete this section as (a) it's not even clear exactly what the controversy is and how Jungk revised his position, and (b) this is a highly esoteric issue that at the time Walker published his article (1992) was still controversial, but instead I tagged it as requiring attention from a subject matter expert to clean it up.

Unless it can be fixed it probably should be deleted however, since as of now it really doesn't explain anything and was clearly written by someone who only superficially read the article and then copy and pasted a couple of sentences without any real understanding of the underlying issues.

Edit: I deleted the quotes because they just created confusion and instead substituted a simple one line reference to the controversy.Lexington50 (talk) 23:10, 20 November 2019 (UTC)Reply