[Peace-discuss] An instructive life

[E.Wayne Johnson]

Alice says that China is better than the USA when asked.

Alice offers no explanation for her flatly stated opinion.  (Zhongguo hao.)


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>
To: "Peace-discuss List" <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Sent: Saturday, June 12, 2010 10:58 PM
Subject: [Peace-discuss] An instructive life


[In 2005 Hinton wrote, “There are two opposing superpowers in the world 
today:
the U.S. on one side, and world public opinion on the other. The first 
thrives
on war. The second demands peace and social justice.” --CGE]

# The New York Times
June 11, 2010
Joan Hinton, Physicist Who Chose China Over Atom Bomb, Is Dead at 88
By WILLIAM GRIMES

Joan Hinton, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, which 
developed
the atom bomb, but spent most of her life as a committed Maoist working on 
dairy
farms in China, died on Tuesday in Beijing. She was 88.

The cause has not yet been determined, but she had an abdominal aneurysm, 
her
son Bill Engst said.

Ms. Hinton was recruited for the Manhattan Project in February 1944 while 
still
a graduate student in physics at the University of Wisconsin. At the secret
laboratory at Los Alamos, N.M., where she worked with Enrico Fermi, she was
assigned to a team that built two reactors for testing enriched uranium and
plutonium.

When the first atom bomb was detonated near Alamogordo, N.M., on July 16, 
1945,
she and a colleague, riding a motorcycle, dodged Army jeep patrols and hid 
near
a small hill about 25 miles from the blast point to witness the event.

“We first felt the heat on our faces, then we saw what looked like a sea of
light,” she told The South China Morning Post in 2008. “It was gradually 
sucked
into an awful purple glow that went up and up into a mushroom cloud. It 
looked
beautiful as it lit up the morning sun.”

Ms. Hinton thought that the bomb would be used for a demonstration explosion 
to
force a Japanese surrender. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 
she
became an outspoken peace activist. She sent the mayors of every major city 
in
the United States a small glass case filled with glassified desert sand and 
a
note asking whether they wanted their cities to suffer the same fate.

In 1948, alarmed at the emerging cold war, she gave up physics and left the
United States for China, then in the throes of a Communist revolution she
wholeheartedly admired. “I did not want to spend my life figuring out how to
kill people,” she told National Public Radio in 2002. “I wanted to figure 
out
how to let people have a better life, not a worse life.”

In China she met her future husband, Erwin Engst, a Cornell-trained 
dairy-cattle
expert, who went on to work on dairy farms as a breeder while she designed 
and
built machinery. During the Cultural Revolution, they were editors and
translators in Beijing.

Ms. Hinton applied her scientific talents to perfecting a continuous-flow
automatic milk pasteurizer and other machines. For the past 40 years, she 
worked
on a dairy farm and an agricultural station outside Beijing, tending a herd 
of
about 200 cows.

Joan Chase Hinton was born on Oct. 20, 1921, in Chicago. Her father, 
Sebastian
Hinton, was a patent lawyer who invented the jungle gym in 1920. Her mother,
Carmelita Chase Hinton, founded the Putney School, a progressive 
coeducational
secondary school in Putney, Vt., which Joan attended and where she excelled 
as a
skier, qualifying for the United States Olympic Team that would have 
competed in
the 1940 games had they not been canceled.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in natural science from Bennington College 
in
1942, she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, where she earned a 
doctorate
in physics in 1944.

At Los Alamos, teams were assigned to theoretical and practical work. Ms.
Hinton, assigned to practical work, piled beryllium blocks around the core 
of
the site’s first reactor and constructed electronic circuits for the 
counters.

According to Ruth H. Howes and Caroline L. Herzenberg, the authors of “Their 
Day
in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project,” she then helped design and
construct the control rods for a second reactor.

In her spare time, she played violin in a string quartet whose members 
included
the physicists Edward Teller and Otto Frisch.

After the war she studied with Mr. Fermi as a fellow at the Institute for
Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago and then left for China, where 
she
met and married Mr. Engst, who had been in the country since 1946 teaching
agriculture and dairy-herd management.

Mr. Engst died in 2003. In addition to her son Bill, of Marlboro, N.J., she 
is
survived by another son, Fred Engst of Beijing; a daughter, Karen Engst of 
Pau,
France; and four grandchildren.

During the McCarthy era, Ms. Hinton’s name surfaced as a possible spy and
spiller of nuclear secrets after she spoke at a peace conference in Beijing.
Rear Adm. Ellis M. Zacharias denounced her in a 1953 article for Real 
magazine
titled “The Atom Spy Who Got Away.”

An illustration depicted her as a furtive blonde in a trench coat, taking 
notes
as she observed a nuclear test. There was never any evidence to show that 
Ms.
Hinton passed secrets or did any work as a physicist in China.

She and her husband remained true believers in the Maoist cause.

“It would have been terrific if Mao had lived,” Ms. Hinton told The Weekend
Australian in 2008 during a trip to Japan. “Of course I was 100 percent 
behind
everything that happened in the Cultural Revolution — it was a terrific 
experience.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/12/science/12hinton.html?scp=1&sq=hinton&st=cse

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