Originally Posted by
MAINJAFAD
while the king of cocking up weapon designs yields was one Edward Teller!!!!
There they were, 75 years ago, trying to harness completely new technology and physics at the utter outside limits of mechanical, scientific and intellectual capability which were only partially understood and so new that only a handful of men on the planet had any knowledge of them at all...
and someone drops a throwaway line like the one above!
Teller was one of the top three or four most innovative and brilliant scientists involved in the conceptualising, building and developmant of atomic weapons and to belittle his ability like that is extraordinarily smug, even with such evident 100% knowledge from hindsight (!!). They were inventing the science as they went along. You'd be one-in-a-million if you even understood a thousandth part of it.
Given the complexity and imperfect understanding of the science it is amazing that they made so few errors, and those they did make were not so very serious.
We'd do better recognising their extraordinarily accurate genius rather than slagging them off for the odd minor mistake from imperfect understanding of a completely new science as though we were capable of doing a thousandth as much ourself without cocking up in spades.
It's a good thing we don't tend to slag off our historic aircraft designers in the same way. I mean incompetent fools like Roe, Sopwith, Mitchell or Chadwick all of whom designed lemons... Kings of cocking up designs, the lot of them. Evidently.