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America had a monopoly of atomic weapons, which President Truman and General Groves (though not the nuclear scientists, if they had been asked) expected to last for a generation or more. He and Truman foolishly believed that by a highly secret program of purchase and diplomacy, they had succeeded in controlling all the known high-grade sources of uranium. (Groves had overlooked,193 he said later, high-grade supplies of ore in East Germany, occupied by the Soviets.) That program was, in their eyes, the critical “atomic secret.” It was in that mistaken belief that Truman had sought and achieved the consent of the Senate to commit the United States, for the first time, to the defense of Western Europe by NATO. Scientists had pressed for international control of uranium supplies, research, and all enrichment and possession of fissile material for energy, predicting in 1945 that otherwise the Soviets would have a bomb in about four years. Four years later, in September 1949, U.S. intelligence flights detected evidence that the Soviets had conducted a test of a Nagasaki-type plutonium implosion bomb. (It was, in fact, a replica of the Nagasaki bomb, based on blueprints supplied by Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet spy at Los Alamos.) Truman, Groves, Congress, the American public, and our NATO allies were shocked.
The Doomsday Machine
Daniel Ellsberg
As I said above, for musicians to enter this space they have to sacrifice their dearest possession, the need to sound good. When practicing The Space, the performance is of only peripheral concern. Since it’s not always practical to sacrifice quality, the exercise is best done when one is not in performance, or “under the gun,” so to speak. But the effects of such practice can liberate a performance. Carelessness needs to be practiced! It opens channels that “carefulness” could never attract. (Fools rush in, where wise men never go .
Becoming the Instrument
Kenny Werner
make an impact. I wrote several wild, long pieces—“Thundercrack,” “Kitty’s Back,” “Rosalita”—that were the soul children of the lengthy prog pieces I’d written for Steel Mill and were arranged to leave the band and the audience exhausted and gasping for breath. Just when you thought the song was over, you’d be surprised by another section, taking the music higher. It was, in spirit, what I’d taken from the finales of the great soul revues. I’d tried to match their ferocious fervor and when you left the stage after performing one of these, you’d worked to be remembered.
Born to Run
Bruce Springsteen
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