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March 04, 2005
Richard Rhodes and the 21st Century
While cleaning up the kitchen this evening, I caught the last bit of a documentary on the History Channel about the making of the atomic bomb. Among the people interviewed was the peerless Richard Rhodes, author of the classic The Making of the Atomic Bomb. In the concluding moments of the show, which naturally focused on the legacy of the bomb and the fate of Robert Oppenheimer, Rhodes noted that over the 100 years previous to 1945, the annual death rate from warfare had increased at an exponential rate. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Rhodes said, the rate of deaths dropped to around one million per year, and has stayed essentially at that rate since.
I couldn’t help but wonder, as I loaded the dishwasher, what the shape of that graph will look like for the next twenty years. Even though the Soviets were oppressive murderous thugs, they still had a basis of reasonableness (read self-preservation).
Let us hope that, given the regimes in Iran and North Korea, Rhodes's graph has not been artificially suppressed for sixty years.
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Tracked on March 5, 2005 08:15 PM
