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Comment by smaddox | Hacker News Reader

Wow... How is this not more well known? It's not like von Neumann doesn't have plenty of other important contributions to his name.

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It is far from settled whether the GP’s interpretation is in fact what actually happened. I highly recommend The Innovators by Walter Isaacson. Among other things, it covers this “controversy” in great detail.

History is not science. There will never be absolute certainty because human language is always open to interpretation. Even when the evidence is clear, the historiography that relates to that evidence is, again, open to interpretation. The interpretation of terms and situations changes over time, and facts can later be interpreted differently (even maliciously). Not even witness statements in a court case, of which there were several in the present case with hundreds of pages of legal reporting, are immune to interpretation. So yes, I can't prove to you that it happened that way because all of my sources are open to interpretation. There are enough other events in history that are considered sufficiently certain, and yet continue to be disputed by certain people for various motives. Some states even consider it necessary to criminalize the questioning of certain historical facts for this reason.

Have a look the oral history interview with J. Presper Eckert, it's a long lasting controversy: https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107275

PDF: https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107275/oh...

The oral history of the person claiming credit was stolen from him is not a reliable source.

Mind that he repeatedly refers to Julian Biglow of the IAS as a (neutral) witness. There have been plenty of law suits regarding this… Probably, the same also applies to any commentary and/or writing by von Neumann.

Lawsuits? Unless you're talking personal suits, the only one I know of, Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, did not go well for Eckert or Mauchly, personally or professionally, especially Mauchly.

My (moral) problems with von Neumann are of entirely different nature, namely his persistent advocacy for a "preemptive" nuclear first strike, before the USSR could roll out a thermonuclear bomb in production. Which might be regarded as attempted, cold-blooded genocide. So, not my personal hero.

I don't think there is any doubt that a "preemptive" nuclear first strike by the US would have morally and legally been regarded as genocide.

The last time we had a debate on HN on this topic a number of people seemed to think it would have been a good idea - which I found genuinely disturbing. Hopefully I was just being trolled.

On the other hand, there is still no universal agreement on the morality of the wartime bombing campaigns that lead to high numbers of civilian casualties.

I'm always reminded of the lines from Daniel Ellsberg in the describing his experiences in the early 1960s:

"The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts.

I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to."

https://apjjf.org/-Daniel-Ellsberg/3222/article.html

Edit: The staggering thing about the estimate of 600 million dead was that this was known to be an underestimate as the US didn't take the thermal effects of nuclear weapons into account during planning as they were regarded as too unpredictable. Actual 'real' estimates would be over a billion dead....

Genocide is about destruction of a people not simply large numbers of deaths. The Holocaust is the model people assume, but China’s current genocide of the Uyghur is genocide based on intent even without large scale slaughter.

Now you might be overestimating the US nuclear arsenal at the time, remember he died in 1957. At the time a nuclear exchange could have killed a lot of people, but only on the scale of a major bombing campaign not glassing the country.

As such, assuming US attacked and occupied Russia after an early nuclear exchange, it would have been war but not fit the definition of genocide because the intent to destroy a people simply wasn’t there.

PS: One of the less well known examples, the US forcibly sending American Indian children to boarding schools to be Americanized actually fits the UN definition of genocide. That’s the heart of the issue, the intent to destroy a people or culture rather than say conquest or even retaliation.

In 1961 the Pentagon's own estimates gave the expected casualties at 600 million plus when it had ~20K weapons. In 1950 the US had ~2500 weapons so scaling that back proportionally still looks like 10s of millions dead.

Edit: I suspect maximum lethality of the US stockpile would have been during the 1960s when they still used large numbers of very large and dirty weapons.

1961 the US had ICBM’s and large numbers of vastly more powerful Hydrogen bombs and very accurate targeting methods. In 1950 the US was still limited to long range bombers, many or even most of which would get shot down and so they would have concentrated on the most critical military targets.

Thus, even 10 million dead in 1950 seems very high unless they simply tried to maximize civilian casualties which it’s self would reasonably qualify as genocide. And again Russia lost ~27 million people in WWII and it isn’t considered a genocide of Russia so numbers alone while horrific don’t qualify.

I agree that a "preventative" war in 1950 would have been a very different thing from 1961. However, von Neumann was active as a political adviser to very close to his death and I was unaware that he had rejected the idea of such an attack - there were certainly others who favoured such a thing well into the 1960s.

Sure, though my understanding was this was specifically about an attack before Russia started mass production of atomic bombs. First strike after that point would likely have been vastly more costly on both sides. He was very much aware of the idea, which is why he’s credited in the name and acronym MAD.

In the end the world avoided a large scale nuclear exchange, but when faced with a seemingly like war between two nuclear armed superpowers I can understand the argument.

"The second world war over, von Neumann accepted a string of commercial consultancies. But he was increasingly drawn into the defence establishment. An earnest advocate of the development of the H-Bomb, he later described himself as "violently anti-communist, and a good deal more militaristic than most". After his death, Life magazine reported that he had said in 1950: "If you say why not bomb them [the Russians] tomorrow, I say why not bomb them today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?"

Though frequently quoted as evidence that von Neumann favoured a first strike "preventive war" against the Soviet Union, this is a weak reed on which to build such a claim. It seems more likely it was characteristic - though tasteless and bloodthirsty - banter designed to emphasise his hawkishness. ...

Von Neumann was not an unthinking militarist: he believed that the world's only chance of avoiding destructive conflict was world government, but - since he could not see any practical way of achieving this - he was determined to defend his adopted country with as much armed might as possible. "

http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~hwolkowi//neumann1.html

Unlike Teller, von Neumann is not renowned for what you describe as "persistent advocacy" of nuclear first strike. AFAIK, von Neumann was not especially politically active in promoting US gov't aggression of any kind, again, unlike Teller.

As I understand it, there had been about two months during the Eisenhower presidency, where a group tried to urged the administration towards a first strike. And, again, as I understand it, von Neumann played a prominent role in this. At least, this is what I was referring to. (Compare Eisenhower's remarks on the military industrial complex in this context.)

There was already a law suite in 1962 (Bell Telephone Laboratories vs. Sperry Rand) where the court upheld the validity of the ENIAC patent. There was another case in 1964 where Shaw, Sharpless and Burks required that their names would be added as inventors to the patent, which was not successful.

Most people who have a lot of things named after then wanted to have a lot of things named after them. Consider: why is more named after von Neumann then Erdos?

Compared https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Joh... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Pau...

Seems more or less a tie to me. [0] Especially compared to this chap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Car...

[0] Actually, it's not a tie: If you add the entries on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conjectures_by_Paul_Er... you get a clear winner.

There's a large number of things named after Euler as well -- so many that sometimes things are named after the first person to prove them after Euler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Leo...

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