[Peace-discuss] An instructive life

[John W.]

On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 7:34 PM, E.Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag> wrote:



> Alice says that China is better than the USA when asked.
>
> Alice offers no explanation for her flatly stated opinion.  (Zhongguo hao.)
>



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.”

Good Lord.




> ----- 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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