Jeremy Bernstein

Marc Dubin expresses his shock that the US State Department was looking at plans for a first-strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. I spent some time in the summer of 1957 at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica. There were departments devoted to Russian history and others to hydrogen bombs. There was Herman Kahn informing us that even if we suffered a few megadeaths we would come out OK in the...

Thomas Jones repeats the story that Robert Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita after witnessing the first successful nuclear weapons test in New Mexico: ‘I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.’ I once had the chance to ask his brother, Frank, who was standing next to him at the time, what Oppie’s actual words were. Frank’s recollection was that he said: ‘I guess it worked.’

‘In relativity,’ John Banville writes, ‘there is no before and after’ (LRB, 14 July). That is not so. If you could reverse the two by changing the reference system you could murder your grandmother, which would have some remarkable consequences.

Steven Shapin refers to the isotopes Uranium-235 and Plutonium-239 as ‘fissionable’ (LRB, 26 September). This is true, but all the isotopes of uranium and plutonium are fissionable. If the nuclei are hit by a neutron above a certain energy threshold they will split. However, U-235 and Pu-239 are ‘fissile’. A neutron of any energy will split them. This is the crucial point since fission produces...

That Rosa Luxemburg chose the name ‘Junius’ for the pamphlet she wrote in 1916 and published in Switzerland shows that she had a knowledge of 18th-century Britain. The ‘Junius Letters’ attacking the establishment were published between January 1769 and January 1772 in the Public Advertiser. The pamphlets stopped when Sir Philip Francis, who was almost certainly their author, went out to India....