The Long Island Life Member Affinity Group Senior Engineer’s Meeting

The IEEE Long Island Section Life Member Affinity Group is holding a meeting and inviting retired and senior engineers and all interested parties. The meeting will be in the Jericho Public Library, 1 Merry Lane, Jericho, NY 11753. The featured speaker will be Alex Wellerstein, Assistant Professor and David & G.G. Farber Faculty Fellow in Science and Technology Studies at Stevens Institute of Technology.

Speaker(s): Alex Wellerstein,

Agenda:
Topic – The Button and the Bomb: Electrical Engineering and Nuclear Weapons

Abstract – Most accounts of nuclear weapons development and design have focused almost exclusively on the contributions of physicists. While these are indeed important, especially to the early history of nuclear weapons, this approach has tended to overlook the ways in which many of the most important and interesting developments in these weapons have come from electrical engineering. In this talk, Prof. Wellerstein will go over the once-Top Secret ways in which electrical engineering contributed to the development of nuclear weapons, and will illustrate how these contributions are actually what lie behind some of the trickier political questions relating to the use and non-use of nuclear weapons, both historically and in the present day.

Additionally, Prof. Wellerstein will outline what is known about the most recently unveiled alleged Soviet spy, Oscar Seborer, a City College electrical engineer, and his potential contributions to the Soviet atomic bomb project. Seborer worked on the Manhattan Project, the effort to build an atomic bomb, at the Clinton Engineer Works in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and then at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico.

Jericho Public Library, 1 Merry Lane, Jericho, New York, United States, 11753