<div dir="ltr">Thanks for all of this, Gwern. I look forward to looking to looking it over soon!<div><br><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Nov 16, 2017 at 9:21 AM, Gwern Branwen <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:gwern@gwern.net" target="_blank">gwern@gwern.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><span class=""><br>
<br>
</span>How fun.<br>
<br>
Not that you need the suggestion, but one of my favorite books is all<br>
about this theme of warfare and competitive pressures of various kinds<br>
pushing (and corrupting) science/technology and is about the<br>
post-Manhattan Project nuclear laboratories: Carter Scholz's 2002<br>
novel _Radiance_. (I hesitate to label it 'science fiction', even<br>
though Scholz is usually considered one and his last novel was<br>
unambiguously SF, because it's so based on real events and SDI.)<br>
<br>
I have an annotated transcription & scans at<br>
<a href="https://www.gwern.net/docs/radiance/2002-scholz-radiance" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.gwern.net/docs/<wbr>radiance/2002-scholz-radiance</a> along with<br>
supporting materials, some of which are quite interesting in their own<br>
right, for example, Greg Benford's memoirs "Old Legends" (<br>
<a href="https://www.gwern.net/docs/radiance/1995-benford-oldlegends.pdf" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.gwern.net/docs/<wbr>radiance/1995-benford-<wbr>oldlegends.pdf</a> ) or<br>
Berger's "The _Astounding_ Investigation: The Manhattan Project's<br>
Confrontation with Science Fiction" (<br>
<a href="https://www.gwern.net/docs/radiance/1984-berger.djvu" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.gwern.net/docs/<wbr>radiance/1984-berger.djvu</a> ) or MacKenzie &<br>
Spinardi 1995's "Tacit Knowledge, Weapons Design, and the Uninvention<br>
of Nuclear Weapons" (<br>
<a href="https://www.gwern.net/docs/radiance/1995-mackenzie.pdf" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www.gwern.net/docs/<wbr>radiance/1995-mackenzie.pdf</a> ). Physicists<br>
or people interested in future weapons development might also find it<br>
interesting to revisit _Fourth Generation Nuclear Weapons_ (<br>
<a href="http://web.elastic.org/~fche/mirrors/www.cryptome.org/2014/06/wmd-4th-gen-quest.pdf" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://web.elastic.org/~fche/<wbr>mirrors/www.cryptome.org/2014/<wbr>06/wmd-4th-gen-quest.pdf</a><br>
), and consider the array of possible nuclear weapons - turns out<br>
there are a lot of possible nuclear weapons going beyond classic<br>
fission and fusion designs (apropos of which, 'quark fusion':<br>
<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.02547" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.<wbr>02547</a><br>
<a href="https://phys.org/news/2017-11-theoretical-quark-fusion-powerful-hydrogen.html" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://phys.org/news/2017-11-<wbr>theoretical-quark-fusion-<wbr>powerful-hydrogen.html</a><br>
).<br>
<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>
--<br>
gwern<br>
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