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Thinking the Hiroshima bomb was a hoax
Marvin Minsky Scientist
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I don’t think it was an important part then, except that since people were going to Japan and getting killed in this period it was a great relief. And for several days after the news came out I was convinced that this was actually a… a hoax, because Hiroshima was a port city, and so I assumed that in fact somebody had equipped a barge with a few thousand tons of TNT, just as the cliché went, and they’d slipped this barge into the harbor, and then they flew a little airplane over and dropped something and set off this bomb. And so I assumed this was a great trick for fooling the Japanese into thinking we had an atomic bomb.

But Nagasaki wasn’t so accessible, so… I think many people must have wondered, why… why did we drop two bombs? Why wasn’t one enough? My first thought was that it was to convince them that it wasn’t a hoax. A few years later then, I met Oppenheimer for the first time when I was in graduate school at Princeton, and he was very hospitable… and tragic.

Marvin Minsky (1927-2016) was one of the pioneers of the field of Artificial Intelligence, founding the MIT AI lab in 1970. He also made many contributions to the fields of mathematics, cognitive psychology, robotics, optics and computational linguistics. Since the 1950s, he had been attempting to define and explain human cognition, the ideas of which can be found in his two books, The Emotion Machine and The Society of Mind. His many inventions include the first confocal scanning microscope, the first neural network simulator (SNARC) and the first LOGO 'turtle'.

Listeners: Christopher Sykes

Christopher Sykes is a London-based television producer and director who has made a number of documentary films for BBC TV, Channel 4 and PBS.

Tags: Japan, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Princeton University, J Robert Oppenheimer

Duration: 1 minute, 44 seconds

Date story recorded: 29-31 Jan 2011

Date story went live: 09 May 2011