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<div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 7:34 PM, E.Wayne Johnson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ewj@pigs.ag">ewj@pigs.ag</a>></span> wrote:</div>
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<blockquote style="BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; PADDING-LEFT: 1ex" class="gmail_quote">Alice says that China is better than the USA when asked.<br><br>Alice offers no explanation for her flatly stated opinion. (Zhongguo hao.) </blockquote>
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<div>I found the article merely interesting until I got to the final sentence: "Of course I was 100 percent behind everything that happened in the Cultural Revolution — it was a terrific experience.”</div>
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<div>Good Lord.</div>
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<div class="im">----- Original Message ----- From: "C. G. Estabrook" <<a href="mailto:galliher@illinois.edu" target="_blank">galliher@illinois.edu</a>><br>To: "Peace-discuss List" <<a href="mailto:peace-discuss@lists.chambana.net" target="_blank">peace-discuss@lists.chambana.net</a>><br>
</div>Sent: Saturday, June 12, 2010 10:58 PM<br>Subject: [Peace-discuss] An instructive life
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<div class="h5"><br><br><br>[In 2005 Hinton wrote, “There are two opposing superpowers in the world today:<br>the U.S. on one side, and world public opinion on the other. The first thrives<br>on war. The second demands peace and social justice.” --CGE]<br>
<br># The New York Times<br>June 11, 2010<br>Joan Hinton, Physicist Who Chose China Over Atom Bomb, Is Dead at 88<br>By WILLIAM GRIMES<br><br>Joan Hinton, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed<br>
the atom bomb, but spent most of her life as a committed Maoist working on dairy<br>farms in China, died on Tuesday in Beijing. She was 88.<br><br>The cause has not yet been determined, but she had an abdominal aneurysm, her<br>
son Bill Engst said.<br><br>Ms. Hinton was recruited for the Manhattan Project in February 1944 while still<br>a graduate student in physics at the University of Wisconsin. At the secret<br>laboratory at Los Alamos, N.M., where she worked with Enrico Fermi, she was<br>
assigned to a team that built two reactors for testing enriched uranium and<br>plutonium.<br><br>When the first atom bomb was detonated near Alamogordo, N.M., on July 16, 1945,<br>she and a colleague, riding a motorcycle, dodged Army jeep patrols and hid near<br>
a small hill about 25 miles from the blast point to witness the event.<br><br>“We first felt the heat on our faces, then we saw what looked like a sea of<br>light,” she told The South China Morning Post in 2008. “It was gradually sucked<br>
into an awful purple glow that went up and up into a mushroom cloud. It looked<br>beautiful as it lit up the morning sun.”<br><br>Ms. Hinton thought that the bomb would be used for a demonstration explosion to<br>force a Japanese surrender. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she<br>
became an outspoken peace activist. She sent the mayors of every major city in<br>the United States a small glass case filled with glassified desert sand and a<br>note asking whether they wanted their cities to suffer the same fate.<br>
<br>In 1948, alarmed at the emerging cold war, she gave up physics and left the<br>United States for China, then in the throes of a Communist revolution she<br>wholeheartedly admired. “I did not want to spend my life figuring out how to<br>
kill people,” she told National Public Radio in 2002. “I wanted to figure out<br>how to let people have a better life, not a worse life.”<br><br>In China she met her future husband, Erwin Engst, a Cornell-trained dairy-cattle<br>
expert, who went on to work on dairy farms as a breeder while she designed and<br>built machinery. During the Cultural Revolution, they were editors and<br>translators in Beijing.<br><br>Ms. Hinton applied her scientific talents to perfecting a continuous-flow<br>
automatic milk pasteurizer and other machines. For the past 40 years, she worked<br>on a dairy farm and an agricultural station outside Beijing, tending a herd of<br>about 200 cows.<br><br>Joan Chase Hinton was born on Oct. 20, 1921, in Chicago. Her father, Sebastian<br>
Hinton, was a patent lawyer who invented the jungle gym in 1920. Her mother,<br>Carmelita Chase Hinton, founded the Putney School, a progressive coeducational<br>secondary school in Putney, Vt., which Joan attended and where she excelled as a<br>
skier, qualifying for the United States Olympic Team that would have competed in<br>the 1940 games had they not been canceled.<br><br>After earning a bachelor’s degree in natural science from Bennington College in<br>1942, she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, where she earned a doctorate<br>
in physics in 1944.<br><br>At Los Alamos, teams were assigned to theoretical and practical work. Ms.<br>Hinton, assigned to practical work, piled beryllium blocks around the core of<br>the site’s first reactor and constructed electronic circuits for the counters.<br>
<br>According to Ruth H. Howes and Caroline L. Herzenberg, the authors of “Their Day<br>in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project,” she then helped design and<br>construct the control rods for a second reactor.<br><br>In her spare time, she played violin in a string quartet whose members included<br>
the physicists Edward Teller and Otto Frisch.<br><br>After the war she studied with Mr. Fermi as a fellow at the Institute for<br>Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago and then left for China, where she<br>met and married Mr. Engst, who had been in the country since 1946 teaching<br>
agriculture and dairy-herd management.<br><br>Mr. Engst died in 2003. In addition to her son Bill, of Marlboro, N.J., she is<br>survived by another son, Fred Engst of Beijing; a daughter, Karen Engst of Pau,<br>France; and four grandchildren.<br>
<br>During the McCarthy era, Ms. Hinton’s name surfaced as a possible spy and<br>spiller of nuclear secrets after she spoke at a peace conference in Beijing.<br>Rear Adm. Ellis M. Zacharias denounced her in a 1953 article for Real magazine<br>
titled “The Atom Spy Who Got Away.”<br><br>An illustration depicted her as a furtive blonde in a trench coat, taking notes<br>as she observed a nuclear test. There was never any evidence to show that Ms.<br>Hinton passed secrets or did any work as a physicist in China.<br>
<br>She and her husband remained true believers in the Maoist cause.<br><br>“It would have been terrific if Mao had lived,” Ms. Hinton told The Weekend<br>Australian in 2008 during a trip to Japan. “Of course I was 100 percent behind<br>
everything that happened in the Cultural Revolution — it was a terrific experience.”<br><br><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/12/science/12hinton.html?scp=1&sq=hinton&st=cse" target="_blank">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/12/science/12hinton.html?scp=1&sq=hinton&st=cse</a><br>
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