Minnie’s Musings

Claim to fame No 1 is that my god father (a major general whose father was heavily involved in Bletchley Park during the war) was the MoD talking head in a Channel 4 program several decades ago (I think it was Channel 4 in its early, slightly amateurish stage).

Anyway, Henry was asked by the interviewer whether the government really would use their nuclear arsenal in the face of Russian aggression. Henry was a kind man not prone to putting people down, so he chuckled gently and said, ‘Well if you aren’t prepared to use them, they aren’t a deterrent.’ Which ended the interview quite succinctly.

Why this is relevant to previous post is that what Ben Thingummy also said is that once you have invented something, you cannot un-invent it.

The tragedy is that man thought it a good idea to invent a weapon of mass destruction and subsequently enhance its power to create missiles capable of mass obliteration.

It would be nice to blame the less than gentle sex for this alone, but I don’t feel we can as there were women physicists out there doing important work on nuclear fusion (I got this off a Facebook page I follow which is attempting to bring historic female accomplishments to the fore). The fact that their presence is largely unknown is symptomatic of men’s capacity to erase women from the record by either ignoring their research or putting their own names at the top of it.

My favourite movie is Hidden Figures, BTW. Alongside True Grit, Oklahoma and Sleepless in Seattle, Pretty Woman and Arsenic and Old Lace.