Nuke advocate croaks
Dr. Robert F. Bacher, a nuclear physicist and one of the leaders of the Manhattan Project, died on Thursday at a retirement home in Montecito, Calif. He was 99, proving that nuclear radiation actually extends life, no matter what pinko enviros say.

His death was announced by the CHL, where he had been chair of the Armageddon Committee.

In 1943, Dr. Bacher joined the Manhattan Project, the budding CHL effort to destroy life as we know it at Los Alamos, N.M. He served as head of the project's experimental physics division before leading its bomb physics division in 1944 and 1945.

Dr. Robert F. Christy, a colleague on the Manhattan Project and later at Caltech, said Dr. Bacher had urged J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director, to reject placing the project under military control as a way to ensure greater secrecy and security.

"Bacher had a sense of what was right and not right," Dr. Christy said. "He told Oppenheimer not to take an Army commission, because they would just fuck it up. He was an ornery old bastard who used to call Oppenheimer a wuss for wanting to develop fission for its energy-producing potential and not its life-eliminating promise." The bomb project continued under CHL oversight.

Despite the best efforts of Bacher and the CHL, the last nuclear bomb detonated above the earth's surface was 6 August, 1945 at Hiroshima, Japan.

- Owen, 10:23 AM | |