Bunin, Nazhivin, and Ideological Demonization

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Ivan Bunin was a Russian man of letters who experienced the Russian revolution firsthand, and published his impressions in the book, “Cursed Days.” As the title would imply, he didn’t like what he saw. For example, he objected to a phenomenon we would, nowadays, refer to as ideological demonization. He describes it very accurately in connection with ad hominem attacks on one Nazhivin, a poet villified by the Bolsheviks and their hangers on in the midst of the Russian Civil War:

“Because of his book, though, Nazhivin is beginning to be persecuted in a malicious, coarse, and most obscene type of way.
“Why?
“For the simple reason that he dared to say things that violated the credo of the left.
“It would seem that one could simply say to Nazhivin: ‘In our view you have made a mistake because of this or that.’
“One could express himself even more strongly and say, ‘It is not good that you have said this or that.’ – if the person really deserves such a remark.
“But when reviewers begin mocking this outstanding Russian person and writer, when they start slandering him with all kinds of cliches, as leftists are often wont to do, …I …hardly the newest person in this literature…decisively protest their actions and hope that my views will be shared by many of my colleague writers.
“I repeat: One may or may not agree with Nazhivin. One may argue with him, refute him… but to rebuke him in an indecent way, to rush off in a frenzy and seek to silence a great Russian individual and writer – such actions are not ‘liberal,’ nor should they be tolerated or allowed.”

Sound familiar? It should. Ninety years later, the sort of ideological demonization Bunin refers to has not disappeared. Far from it! One can spend days hopping from blog to blog, website to website, “news” channel to “news” channel, and never encounter a serious argument against this or that political point of view that doesn’t amount to a melange of ad hominem attacks, snarky remarks, and name calling, accompanied by the striking of virtuous poses from the “moral high ground.”

This phenomenon has long been a trademark of the ideological left in the US, but is now increasingly affecting the right, so that mutual villification has become the rule. One rarely finds cool, detached, objective arguments on any ideologically loaded topic. Instead, one hears a recitation of the reasons ones opponent is a villain, accompanied by much moralistic preening. The truth suffers. How refreshing it would be to find, if only once in a great while, an attack on an opponent’s arguments rather than his or her character. What a pleasant surprise it would be to find some ideologically loaded topic discussed on its merits, without the implication that anyone holding an opposing point of view must not only be wrong, but necessarily suffer from some kind of a moral deficit as well.

The shallowness necessarily associated with this form of “debate” eventually becomes oppressive. One reflects that none of these furious zealots would be remotely capable of explaining, based on first principles, why one action is good and another evil, and recalls a remark once uttered by Nietzsche: “Virtuous indignation is a crutch for the intellectually crippled.”

Quote for the day: Michael Faraday

“Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the laws of nature.”

“Fusion Energy” and the National Ignition Facility (NIF)

Oh-oh! Here’s something that’s bound to give the fission guys over at Atomic Insights heartburn. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is in the news again, and even made the lead story on the Foxnews website this morning! It seems the dark side at DOE is finally, belatedly, getting some respect from Secretary Chu, not to mention the Governator and a host of other worthies. Odd, isn’t it, that, in these days of rampant global warming, the Secretary of Energy should have taken so little interest in this potential source of unlimited, pollution free energy? What, say you? Well, yes, perhaps I do exaggerate.

In fact, the NIF is, and always has been, intended as an above ground facility for nuclear weapons experiments. As such, it is probably justified, as it will give us access to extreme physical conditions relevant to nuclear weapons that, at least until the French Megajoule laser (LMJ) comes on line, cannot be reproduced at any other facility. It is important that we have such facilities because, among other things, they constitute one more argument against the resumption of nuclear testing, a step that we would be very ill-advised to take.

Why, then, one might ask, do NIF Director Ed Moses’ comments to Fox about the new facility relate almost exclusively to potential energy applications? Well, among other things, because clean energy is a rather more fashionable cause than nuclear weapons technology these days. I’m loathe to criticize Ed, who, in spite of what some might term objectionable personal quirks, did a brilliant job of pulling the NIF Project back from the brink of disaster and completing it within the budget and time constraints he was given when he took it over. However, he may be overselling the energy angle.

Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) has always been a “dual use” technology, and there are many highly capable scientists throughout the world who still believe that it is the ultimate answer to our future energy needs. I am dubious, but still have a great deal of respect for the old knights, now growing increasingly long in the tooth, who continue riding towards that El Dorado. May they one day make me eat crow!

But all that is beside the point. The Federal Advisory Committees that recommended proceeding with the NIF, and the federal officials who secured funding for the project, never considered justifying it as other than a weapons project. From the beginning it was projected that about 15% of the available time on the facility would be devoted to non-weapons related experiments, not only devoted to energy applications, but to laboratory astrophysics, high energy density plasma physics, etc. Other than that, the NIF will be used entirely for weapon physics and weapon effect experiments. In other words, when Ed tells us that, “”It would change how we look at global warming. It would change pollution. It would change all of those things. This is a small investment for that great payback,” he is indulging in a bit of hyperbole.

In the first place, I will be surprised if the NIF ever achieves ignition, at least using the currently envisioned indirect drive approach. It will be necessary to compress the fuel material to extremely high density, keeping it as “cold” as possible in the process, and then ignite it by coaxing a series of spherical shock waves to heat up a small spot in the center by getting them all to converge on that spot at exactly the same time. Again, if they can do it, I will cheerfully eat crow. If they do, though, getting useful energy out will hardly be just around the corner. It will first be necessary to overcome a host of daunting engineering challenges, such as breeding enough tritium, one of the necessary fuel materials, to keep the reactor going.

Well, be that as it may, the NIF has been a long time coming – much longer than anyone expected in the beginning. Now that the facility is finally on line, the least we can do is wish the NIF staff at Livermore success in finally reaching the ignition goal that has eluded our grasp for so long.