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Dr. Manhattan: Super-Powers and the Superpowers is an essay by Milton Glass regarding the existence of Doctor Manhattan and the threat he poses in the Cold War.

History[]

Milton Glass, who hired Jon Osterman to work at Gila Flats, writes about how he doesn't believe that Doctor Manhattan is going to end wars; he thinks he is going to "end worlds." Glass' analysis states that Manhattan's role in the Cold War and his presence alone has actually escalated the arms race and made the world less safe than before. Even if the Soviet Union sent several nuclear warheads to the United States at once, for example, Manhattan wouldn't be able to stop them all. Parts of the United States would be destroyed, and the United States would unleash nuclear warheads on Russia in return. Both countries would suffer excruciating losses and most of the Northern Hemisphere would be lost to nuclear fallout. Although Glass knew Osterman before he became Doctor Manhattan, he, like many others, views the blue "superman" as being more than human; he sees him as both a weapon and a god. Therefore Manhattan's mere presence isn't something to be admired but rather something to be deeply feared.

Trivia[]

  • The cover of Milton Glass' book references Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing Le proporzioni del corpo umano secondo Vitruvio, or The proportions of the human body according to Vitruvius. Often shortened to Vitruvian Man or L'uomo vitruviano, this pen-and-ink work was made around 1490 and was based on the work of the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius, who systematized the measurements and symmetries of the human figure as the fundamental basis for architectural proportions.
  • Glass points out that the new model of the universe suggested by quantum physics resembles the concepts found in Taoism and other forms of mysticism. Two popular books promoting this view are Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics: An Explorations of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (1975) and Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (1979). The root of this resemblance is the complementarity discovered by physicist Niels Bohr and inherent in the theories of supersymmetry, which is similar to the Yin and Yang concepts at the heart of Taoism. So-called "new age" philosophers have made much of this resemblance, but Eastern mysticism has not in itself produced any new insights in physics.
  • The debate about the trade-off between space exploration and caring for the poor and starving of the world has raged since the earliest days of America's space program, but government spending on space exploration by the United States has historically been relatively limited. At its inception in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's budget represented 0.1% of that year's total federal budget. Spending on NASA peaked in 1966 at 4.41% of the federal budget, and then steadily declined to less than 1% in 1975--- a level at which it has remained since. Yet the American public seems to believe that the agency's budget is much larger than it is: A 1997 poll reported that the average estimate given for NASA's share of the federal budget was 20%. There is surely no easy answer as to whether NASA's current costs are justified, but this much is clear: Taking the relatively small amount of money spent on space exploration and adding it to the efforts already being made to eradicate poverty, disease, or hunger in the U.S. would simply not make a material difference, and doing so would also eliminate the scientific and ecological benefits that mankind has harvested from this exploration. John F. Kennedy, shortly after he was elected president, foresaw that the goal of the American space program had to be far greater than just landing a man on the moon; in a speech before a joint session of Congress delivered on May 25, 1961, he said that we should instead explore "to the very end of the solar itself...No one can predict with certainty what the ultimate meaning will be of mastery of space."
  • According the Glass, to understand the Russian attitude to the possibility of a third world war one must first understand their attitude to the second. In 1939, the Soviet Union signed a secret non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, and the leaders of the rival states colluded with each other to divide the smaller countries of Eastern Europe between them. However, on June 22, 1941, the Russians were betrayed by Adolf Hitler's government when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. While Joseph Stalin did expect such an attack to come eventually, he mistakenly thought that Hitler would wait until Great Britain had fallen to German forces. Caught by surprise, Russian forces were badly overrun in the initial offensive; Soviet troops suffered 750,000 causalities in the first three weeks of the invasion alone. By the end of 1941, Russian casualties had mounted to almost 4.5 million, and three million Soviet troops had been captured (two million of those died by early 1942). The battle for Leningrad was especially costly, with the Russians losing more than a million soldiers and more than a million civilians, many of whom died from starvation. Historians estimate that, in total, the Soviet Union lost more than 26 million people to the war, 16 million of whom were civilians.
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