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the leading German scientist Werner von Braun, who would lead the American space and missile programs, which were overseen by separate civilian and military agencies. Other scientists and engineers were part of an East-to-West “brain drain.” Even before the war, Jewish and other scientists fled the Nazis, who were on the rise in Ger- many. This movement of intellectual might resulted in a brain drain to Allied countries. To be sure, the Soviet Union gained its share of German scientists after the war, but the Allies, especially the United States, were the victors in the scientific migration game. Scientists Unite I n the 1950s, fear was rising among scientists of all nationalities—in the East and West—as the next generation of nuclear weapons was being developed. Thermo- nuclear weapons—or hydrogen bombs (H-bombs for short)—promised much more destruction than those dropped on Japan, and scientists began to warn their govern- ments of the dangers. On July 9, 1955, a declaration was delivered at a press conference in London. Signed by Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell, along with Max Born, Frederic Joliot-Curie, and Hideki Yukawa, among others, its warnings were bleak: “ The best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with H-bombs might possibly put an end to the human race.” The declaration led to the first of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, which would take place in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, in 1957. Computer Revolution C old War competition resulted in a number of scientific milestones, especially in computer technology. The computer was born during World War II, when both sides worked furiously to harness computing power to their war machines. Konrad Zuse, a German engineer, is considered to have built the first working programmable com- puter in 1941. The Z3 was a massive machine of mechanical relays and switches that weighed about a ton. Nazi engineers used the gigantic computer to design airplanes. British scientists and engineers also contributed to computing history at Bletchley Park, where the Colossus, the world’s first electronic digital computer, one capable of being programmed, was unveiled in 1944. Two years later, in 1946, a U.S. company unveiled a thirty-ton behemoth called ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), which was much faster and easier to program than the Colossus machines. Instead of using relays as switches, ENIAC used 18,000 vacuum tubes, similar to the tubes used in the first TV sets. Other milestones followed, and one of the next important breakthroughs happened when the computer’s programs could be stored and executed from the computer’s memory—an innovation implemented in the Manchester Mark 1, developed at Brit- ain’s University of Manchester.

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CHAPTER 1