jinnah

IN RETROSPECT: A Fairytale Gone Wrong

Dec.21, 2008 Dawn
By Mazhar M. Chinoy

She requested a close friend in one of her last letters – “Go and see Jinnah and tell me how he is, he has a habit of overworking himself and now that I am not there to tease and bother him, he will be worse than ever.”

They would’ve been married for 90 years last April 19, the staid, steadfast man and the au courant, beautiful woman; he nearly a quarter of a century senior in age, and she smitten by his charm. It was an unlikely love story, and one that in all of its contrasts, was likely to fail.

Ruttie Jinnah died a heart-broken young woman nearly 80 years ago, and for many Pakistanis, a visit to her graveside still remains elusive primarily because very few know where she is, and that she is buried in an old cemetery in Mumbai. Even fewer have actually visited her final resting place to pay respects to one of the only two women ever publicly associated with the Father of the Nation.

I have visited Bombay many times but had always missed out on paying respects at her graveside. But on my last trip early this year, with little time at hand to brave the Bombay traffic and catch the plane back home, I nonetheless gambled on visiting the Shia Isna Ashari Cemetery located at Mazgaon, central Mumbai where she is eternally reposed.

I arrived at the serene graveyard and asked for the attendant who patiently led me to Ruttie’s grave through a labyrinth of tombstones and sepulchers, some of them truly ancient. An imposing structure made of aging marble that rose nearly four feet from the ground, but did not appear very well maintained testified to neglect of many years.

“Do very many people visit her grave?” I asked the attendant. “Not too many”, he answered, “Only people visiting from Pakistan or an occasional curious local.” As it transpired, apparently no relative, near or distant, visits Ruttie. Many of these are the present scions of the wealthy Wadia family, the notable Parsi industrialists. Ruttie and Jinnah’s only child Dina married into the Wadia family, and Ness, famously friends these days with the pretty Priety Zinta is none other than her great grandson.

None of that glamour was evident at Ruttie’s graveside. The marble grave, carved out in floral motifs and small ionic columns must have presented a riveting sight when it was built, and even now appeared somewhat majestic, if only because of the other old, dilapidated graves that surrounded Ruttie’s.

The inscription on the tombstone pronounced her as “Ratanbai Mahomed Ali-Jinnah. Born 20th February, 1900. Died 20th February, 1929”, which suggests that she died the same day she was born. A bit of a misnomer when most historians believe she actually passed away five days shy of her 30th birthday on February 15, 1929. This discrepancy has seemingly been a bit of a dogged debate with many believing that this was an inadvertent error while many others suggesting that this was done as an intriguing honorific suitable for a tragic, fallen angel which many believe she was. While she was buried in a Muslim graveyard, this was still as ‘Ruttie’ and not with her adopted name Mariam.

Very little is known of Rattanbai Dinshaw Petit, except that she was a beautiful and intelligent Parsi woman who married a brilliant lawyer, changed her religion for him and suffered as he went about his political business with apparently little time for her child-like adventurism and romantic interludes. With her family ostracised and Jinnah unable to provide attention, she withdrew into the surreal world of the supernatural and the metaphysical. She began to participate in seances, looking to contact the spirits of people long dead, perhaps hoping to gain some consolation in the hope of a better after-life.

Within 10 years of her marriage, she was virtually separated from Jinnah, and in 1927, moved into the fabled – and lately in news – Taj Mahal Hotel overlooking the India Gate in Bombay with little more than her personal attendant and beloved cats to keep her company. Here, she was to spend the last two years of her life. Her love for Jinnah was no less different than on the first day they met. She requested a close friend in one of her last letters – “go and see Jinnah and tell me how he is, he has a habit of overworking himself and now that I am not there to tease and bother him he will be worse than ever.”

When Ruttie finally passed away, Jinnah was there at the funeral. He was morose but not inclined to display his feelings publicly. Ruttie was buried according to Muslim rituals and the moment the body was interred provided for the first cracks in Jinnah’s armour. He broke down and wept openly – the only time Jinnah was ever seen weeping in public. The cold, unemotional politician credited with the creation of the largest Muslim state, of single-handedly withstanding the combined political might of the British and Congress was an emotive human being after all. And one that fell in love in a fairy tale affair that became a tragedy.

benazir

An Unforgettable Funeral

By Salman Siddiqui
Dec. 27, 2008 Dawn

Mufti Abdul Rahim Tahir conducted funeral prayers for Benazir Bhutto after her assassination on December 27, 2007. Talking to our reporter Salman Siddiqui in Naudero, he recalls the day one year ago when he performed her last rites.
When I reached the Bhutto residence here, the atmosphere was full of sorrow. People were pouring into the house with tears in their eyes and screaming out in sorrow. The women were sitting inside separately, segregated from the men. Benazir’s body was placed in her bedroom on the same bed where she rested each time she visited her home in Naudero during her lifetime.
 
I was informed by her family members that I would be responsible for performing the last religious rites, including bathing her body according to shariah and arranging for the kafan (the cloth in which a corpse is wrapped).
 
I briefed my two lady assistants about how to carry out the bathing of the body. They, along with some family members, including Benazir’s sister Sanam Bhutto and her paternal aunt, and one of Benazir’s friends carried out the ritual.
 
I was then told that it was Benazir’s wish that her kafan should be washed in Zamzam water, which had to be bought from the market. I informed the family members that such things cannot be bought in the market. Since the family members didn’t have an appropriate kafan, I brought my own from my house, which I had planned to use for myself after my death.
 
Later, after the bathing ritual, I was informed by Benazir’s close friend that blood was still pouring from her head wound. I told her to place some cotton under the injury.
 
As the time for the funeral approached, there was the question of whether Benazir’s face should be shown to all. I was of the opinion that her face should be shown since the political leader was widely revered by the people and everyone wanted to catch a last glimpse of her. Some people in the house wanted the same while others were opposed to the idea.
After they argued among themselves on the issue, the family members decided to consult Asif [Zardari] sahib on the issue. He, who along with the children was inside a separate room, told the family members to ask me. I told them that since she was like a mother and daughter to the people and was widely revered, her face should be shown. But then they asked me to explain what should be done according to the rules of shariah and our religion. I then told them that according to shariah, only male members of Benazir’s family, women, and children could see her face.
 
Later, at around 1 p.m. that day, Benazir’s friend sent me a message saying that blood was continuing to gush from Benazir’s head wound and asked me to do something to stop it. I had asked my women assistants to place cotton slabs under the wound three times already, but the blood continued to flow non-stop. Benazir’s friend reminded me that in her lifetime, Benazir was always very particular about cleanliness and would not have liked to be seen in this way. I told her that the best arrangements and rituals according to Islam had been carried out for cleaning Benazir’s body, so if the blood continued to flow then it was a sign that she had been accepted as a martyr. I told Benazir’s friend that this was a thing of honour, not a bad thing.
 
At around 3 p.m., the funeral procession started to leave the house. Before that, Zardari and the children stayed alone with Benazir’s body for a few minutes. In the ambulance, I was with Zardari and Bilawal as it crawled its way through the huge crowds of people towards the Garhi Khuda Buksh cemetery.
 
At the funeral prayers, I was asked by Zardari to begin the proceedings. Just as I was about to begin, I heard Zardari asking where Bilawal was. We then saw that Bilawal was still sitting beside his mother inside the ambulance in a state of shock. I went there to fetch him and brought him to stand in line for the prayers.

bhutto

Remembering Benazir Bhutto
By Irfan Husain
Dec. 27, 2008 Dawn
ALMOST everybody old enough to recall that fateful November day in Texas when JFK was gunned down recalls what he was doing when he heard the news. Similarly, I have a very clear recollection of the day Benazir Bhutto was so brutally murdered exactly a year ago today.
A few days ago, Kamran Shafi wrote movingly about the slain leader on these pages. To me, it seems amazing that a year has passed since the horrifying events in Rawalpindi’s Liaquat Bagh on Dec 27, 2007. I was in England then, having arrived a few days earlier. Just a fortnight before her death, I had met Benazir Bhutto for the last time at Asma Jehangir’s home in Lahore. There, she had been warm and gracious, and asked me to see her in Karachi.
A year after her assassination, it is perhaps possible to step back and analyse the event objectively, and see what her life and death mean for Pakistan and the wider region. The threats and the earlier assassination attempt by Islamic groups, as well as the unfriendly snarls from the establishment, were all indicators of how threatened these forces felt by her return.
But if, as Bhutto’s critics assert, she was willing to cooperate with Musharraf and his creatures, why should he and the jihadis have felt any danger from her presence in the political arena? Surely, a politician willing to accept the status quo should have represented no threat to the existing order. So why go to the lengths they did to silence her forever?The answer lies in what she represented, and not necessarily who she was. The very presence of a woman in a position of authority in a paternalistic society like Pakistan poses a perceived danger to the ‘natural’ order of things. In our country, women have a distinctly inferior position. So a hugely popular woman who is a role model for millions represents a clear danger to those who want to cling to power in the name of religious sanction.
Throughout her political career, Benazir Bhutto was criticised by opponents as being ‘western’. This is a derogatory label applied to all those who hold modern, rational views that are out of line with the retrogressive ideas that seek to make women second-class citizens, and the minorities non-persons. Bhutto was passionate about bringing about social change, and this is why the dispossessed of Pakistan supported her. And this is also why the rich hated her. Her critics say she did not achieve much, and this might well be true. But as long as she had a chance of returning to power, she was a threat to the status quo.
For the military establishment, she was simply unacceptable because she was a Bhutto and a Sindhi. Two generations of officers have been brainwashed into believing that the military debacle of 1971 was caused by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s refusal to allow the Awami League to take power, and effectively shift the centre of gravity of the country from Islamabad to Dhaka. These people conveniently forget that Gen Yahya Khan was in power as an army dictator in those days, and all decisions were taken by his coterie of dissolute generals. Whatever the historical causes of the break-up of Pakistan, the army was directly responsible for the disaster.
For religious parties, a woman in authority is anathema. A woman prime minister to them is the first step towards gender equality, something they have been fighting tooth and nail since the creation of Pakistan. Over the years, they have colluded with any politician and general to make sure that no party with social reform on its agenda comes to power. And when the PPP won the 1970 elections, they began plotting with the army and right-wing politicians to topple the government. For these religious leaders, Benazir Bhutto’s return to Pakistan at a time when the militants were rampant was bad news. After being given free rein by Musharraf for nine years, the jihadis and their sponsors did not want to face a popular leader who was against everything they stood for.
While Nawaz Sharif and the other conservative politicians are prepared to engage the Taliban and their clones in a dialogue, Benazir Bhutto recognised very clearly the danger they pose to Pakistan. For these militants, any offer of negotiations is a sign of weakness; and if they accept a truce, it is to rearm and regroup. Benazir Bhutto understood that this was a war to the end, and no negotiated settlement was possible with a foe that wanted to impose its stone-age views on the rest of us. And because they insist that they have the sanction of Islam, they refuse to compromise. Given these diametrically opposed world views, militants like Baitullah Mehsud saw her as an enemy who had to be removed from the scene.
Critics accuse Benazir Bhutto of having supported the Taliban in their infancy in the mid-1990s. It is true that General Naseerullah Babar, her interior minister at the time, did recommend that her government should help the Taliban end the ruinous civil war in Afghanistan as he thought he had some leverage with the ragtag band of Islamic students. Nobody at the time could have imagined what a dangerous and repulsive genie was being let out of the bottle. While we might disagree with her decision with the benefit of hindsight, nobody can argue that she was not squarely against everything the Taliban represent.
Although she was a deeply religious person, her beliefs did not make her presume she had the right to impose her faith on anybody else. Her education and experience had opened her mind to modern ideas and rational thought in a way many of her countrymen do not appreciate to this day. And although she was certainly fallible, and made many mistakes, she genuinely wanted the best for her country and her people.
During her lifetime and her brief stints in power, she suffered many hardships and humiliations. But she did not allow these experiences to embitter her. When many of her supporters were appalled at her willingness to forgive her bitterest foes, and take back the many traitors the PPP has spawned, she remained magnanimous to the very end. Ultimately, it was this ability to rise above the fray and forgive that set her apart from other politicians.
Sadly, the party she led so successfully is now in less capable hands. One can only hope it survives its fourth stint in power, even though it is no longer a threat to the status quo.

tsunami

Meteorite Strikes, Setting Off a Tsunami: Did It Happen Here?

By KENNETH CHANG
Published: December 29, 2008 NYT

The tsunami washed over Fire Island and, to the west, waves perhaps as high as 20 feet spilled into Lower Manhattan. The furious onrush of water left sediment a foot and a half deep on the Jersey Shore, and debris cascaded far up the Hudson River.

No, there’s no need to rush to higher ground, commandeer a rowboat in Central Park or empty the closet to grab the rubber boots. This disaster occurred about 2,300 years ago, though how bad it was, or even if it was a tsunami, remains in dispute.

But several geologists have collected evidence indicating that something very big and unusual occurred in waters near the New York area around 300 B.C., give or take a century. And Dallas Abbott, a research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, is asserting that a meteorite, landing somewhere in the Atlantic, generated the tsunami.

Someone at the tip of Lower Manhattan then would probably have seen “something coming in,” Dr. Abbott said. “Then you would hear a big bang, maybe a series of bangs, something that sounded like gunfire or cannons. It would be a really, really loud noise. And then you would be knocked to the ground by the air blast. And then you would be inundated by the tsunami.”

While not nearly as severe as the tsunami that killed more than 180,000 people in South and Southeast Asia in 2004, “it would have been a bad day to end all bad days,” she said, “in all senses.”

Although American Indians had long been living in and around the area that became New York, Dr. Abbott said there was no archeological evidence of a tsunami or known legends of, say, a terrible flood. She has built her case with diamonds, very tiny ones.

At a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco earlier this month, Dr. Abbott reported finding minute carbon spheres and smaller-than-dust diamonds in sediment layers, which she said were the distinctive calling cards of a meteorite’s impact.

“I think it’s pretty convincing,” Dr. Abbott said. “We always find the impact ejecta in the tsunami layer, never outside.”

A few years ago, the geologist Steven Goodbred, then at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, was not looking for tsunamis or meteorites when he first examined sediment cores taken along the South Shore of Long Island. Dr. Goodbred was interested in the history of oysters in that area. But in the very first core, he saw a strange layer several inches thick containing fist-size gravel.

“We started joking immediately, ‘It’s a tsunami,’ ” recalled Dr. Goodbred, now a professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

Subsequent cores, taken in Great South Bay, also contained that layer, deposited about 2,300 years ago. When Dr. Goodbred presented his findings at a conference a couple of years ago, he failed to convince other scientists. They said the layer was more likely caused by a big storm, not a tsunami.

“Even if it was a storm, it was the mother of all storms,” Dr. Goodbred said, pointing out that the devastating hurricane that passed directly over Long Island in 1938 generated less than an inch of sediment.

Then Dr. Goodbred met other scientists who had found similar sediment layers nearby. Cecilia McHugh, a professor at Queens College, had seen a sediment layer a foot and a half thick at Sandy Hook in New Jersey. That, too, was laid down about 2,300 years ago. And Frank Nitsche, another research scientist at Lamont-Doherty, had discovered a layer of wood debris in sediment cores from the upstate reaches of the Hudson River.

Then Dr. Abbott joined the project and found possible evidence of a meteorite.

But the arguments of a meteor causing a New York tsunami are still regarded skeptically by many, if not most, geologists. For one, no one has found any craters.

The evidence hinges most strongly on the tiny diamonds, presumably formed by the ultra-high pressures of impact.

The carbon atoms inside some of the diamonds are lined up in a hexagonal crystal structure instead of the usual cubic crystals. The hexagonal diamonds have been found only within meteorites and at impact craters, said Allen West, a geologist who performed the diamond analysis for Dr. Abbott’s New York sediments.

But unless researchers find a crater in the ocean floor, an Indian legend telling of a day of fire and water or many more thick sediment deposits, convincing other scientists of what they believe happened 2,300 years ago will continue to be an uphill battle.

crabs

To Find Way Home, Some Crabs Find It’s All in the Stride

By HENRY FOUNTAIN
Published: December 29, 2008 NYT
Most animals have the ability to return home from a foraging trip, even if home is nowhere in sight. They do this at least partly through path integration — using information about direction and distance to return to a starting point. (Sailors and others refer to this as dead reckoning.)

But how animals measure distance is largely a mystery. The honeybee has been shown to use the flow of the passing landscape across its field of vision. Some other animals may be able to gauge linear acceleration and use that to determine distance.

Now Michael L. Walls and John E. Layne of the University of Cincinnati provide direct evidence of yet another method. In a report in Current Biology, they show that the fiddler crab Uca pugilator uses its stride to gauge distance.

The researchers devised an experiment in which they put a slippery sheet of acetate in the path of a crab heading toward its burrow. Crabs took the same number of steps as if they were on a normal surface, but since they made no progress with some of the steps they ended up short of their burrow. Since the crabs were not moving, Dr. Layne said, this shows that they were using leg movements as a cue to gauge distance, rather than acceleration or the movement of the landscape across their vision.

The researchers found that this stride integration was quite flexible. With both slipping crabs and those that encountered no slippery patches, they found that the number of strides depended both on the distance to the burrow and the length of the stride, which could vary. “Our theory after doing this is that they don’t count steps at all,” Dr. Layne said. “They just add them up no matter how big or small they are.”

He added that the crab’s behavior must involve neuronal signals either to or from the legs.

soviet

Soviets Stole Bomb Idea From U.S., Book Says

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: December 29, 2008 NYT
A defining moment of the cold war came in 1955 when Moscow detonated its first hydrogen bomb — a weapon roughly a thousand times more powerful than atom bombs and ideal for obliterating large cities.
The bomb ended the American monopoly and posed a lethal danger. So Washington dealt far more gingerly with Moscow, beginning a tense era dominated by fear of mutual annihilation.

Now, a new book says Moscow acquired the secret of the hydrogen bomb not from its own scientists but from an atomic spy at the Los Alamos weapons lab in New Mexico. Historians call its case sketchy but worthy of investigation, saying the book, “The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation,” by Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman, adds to a growing number of riddles about who invented the Soviet H-bomb a half century ago.

“It’s quite intriguing,” Robert S. Norris, a nuclear historian, said of the book. “We’ve learned a lot about atomic spies. Now, we find out that a spy may be at the center of the H-bomb story, too.”

A surprising clue the authors cite is disagreement among Russian nuclear scientists over who deserves credit for the advance as well as some claims that espionage played a role. The book details this Russian clash and questions the popular idea that Andrei D. Sakharov, who later became known as a campaigner for human rights, independently devised the Soviet hydrogen bomb.

The book does not name the suspected spy but says he was born in the United States, grew up in a foreign country, fell in with communist sympathizers during the depression, and worked at Los Alamos during World War II. Afterward, it says, he became “deeply involved” in the American effort to develop the H-bomb.

The book says that Mr. Stillman, a physicist who worked at Los Alamos from 1965 to 2000 and served for more than a decade as the lab’s director of intelligence, took his suspicions in the 1990s to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But the F.B.I. inquiry, the book says, was “botched beyond recognition” and went nowhere. The alleged spy, the book adds, is now dead.

The F.B.I., often accused of disarray in cases of atomic spying, declined to comment.

Historians and nuclear scientists call the book’s claim provocative if vague and seemingly circumstantial. They add that its suspect is unlikely to be the last put forward to account for the Soviet breakthrough.

“It’s a fascinating puzzle,” said David Holloway, author of “Stalin and the Bomb” and a military historian at Stanford University. “Mystery is too strong a word. But exactly how the Soviet physicists hit on the idea remains unclear.”

Harold M. Agnew, who worked on the world’s first H-bomb and eventually became director of Los Alamos, said the Soviets probably had had numerous spies divulging the secret. “We were always surprised,” he said, “at how quickly they moved ahead.”

The new book is due out in January from Zenith Press. A main focus is how spies spread nuclear secrets around the globe.

In recent years, the ranks of known Soviet spies in the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb have swollen to a half dozen or so, and more are expected to be named. But so far, accounts of the ensuing project at Los Alamos to build the hydrogen bomb have documented no major episodes of atomic spying.

Hydrogen bombs, unlike their atomic cousins, are unlimited in size. American scientists who sought to devise one in the 1940s and early 1950s thus called their dream weapon “the Super.”

The successful architects were Edward Teller and Stanislaw M. Ulam. Their 1951 breakthrough, known as “radiation implosion,” called for putting an atom bomb at one end of a metal casing and hydrogen fuel at the other. The flash of the exploding atom bomb was to flood the case’s interior with enough radiation to compress and ignite the hydrogen fuel, releasing huge bursts of energy through nuclear fusion.

In late 1952, the first test of their idea caused the Pacific island of Elugelab to vanish. The explosion was 700 times more powerful than the blast that leveled Hiroshima.

Moscow had nothing comparable until 1955. It then made an arsenal of H-bombs that in time dwarfed Washington’s. It also detonated the world’s largest bomb — a behemoth more than 3,000 times as powerful as the Hiroshima blast.

Over the decades, scholars identified Klaus Fuchs as one possible source of H-bomb intelligence. The Soviet spy in the Manhattan project left Los Alamos in 1946, gave Moscow H-bomb ideas, and was arrested in 1950. But most scholars judge his tips as too early, too sketchy and too erroneous to have provided much assistance.

The authors of “The Nuclear Express” said in interviews that their interest in the issue stirred after the cold war as former Soviet nuclear scientists told of their hidden labors. Mr. Reed, a former designer of H-bombs at the Livermore weapons laboratory in California and a former secretary of the Air Force — met a number of the Russians scientists at Livermore in March 1997.

He said the meetings had proved eye opening. The Russian scientists described how Dr. Sakharov never took full credit for the hydrogen advance. And Lev P. Feoktistov, a member of the founding H-bomb team, suggested that espionage unrelated to Fuchs played a role.

In his 1999 book, “Nukes Are Not Forever,” he reiterated that claim. “I cannot escape the feeling,” Dr. Feoktistov wrote, “that we were extended a helping hand once in a while, although quite inconspicuously.”

For instance, he said the Soviet team had been given an unfamiliar bomb sketch that he subsequently identified as having been the work of Ulam, the American H-bomb pioneer. The sketch showed a design that antedated the breakthrough of radiation implosion.

Amid the revelations after the cold war, Mr. Stillman, at Los Alamos, zeroed in on a candidate spy. In an interview, he said his suspicions had been aroused for a number of reasons, including the man’s great apparent wealth.

Mr. Stillman said the F.B.I. inquiry fell apart in the 1990s as the bureau’s Santa Fe office became entangled in the case of a modern alleged spy at Los Alamos — Wen Ho Lee. In time, all but one of the charges against Dr. Lee were dropped after a judge found significant flaws in the government’s case. The episode is seen as having raised the federal bar on new claims of atomic spying.

When Mr. Reed and Mr. Stillman began to collaborate on their book, they judged that they had complementary pieces of the H-bomb puzzle.

In the book, they say they declined to name the Los Alamos suspect because he is now dead and “can neither defend his family name nor refute our arguments.” The actual identity does not matter, the books adds. “His fingerprints are what count.”

Reactions to the claim range from strong interest, to outrage, to curiosity about the identity of the alleged spy. For years, most Russian scientists and officials have insisted that the Soviet invention was completely independent of the United States, with the exception of preliminary intelligence from Klaus Fuchs.

Gennady Gorelik, a Russian historian of science now at Boston University and a Sakharov biographer, dismissed the idea that the Soviets had received the secret from newly disclosed espionage. “NO, THEY DID NOT,” he wrote in an e-mail message.

Priscilla McMillan, an atom historian at Harvard and author of “The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” said her weighing of old and new evidence had come down on Dr. Sakharov’s side as the main inventor. “It’s a tantalizing subject,” she said. “But I wouldn’t preclude that his version is pretty much correct.”

John Earl Haynes, a Library of Congress historian and an authority on atomic spying, said the book’s authors might have found a new spy at Los Alamos but he doubted their identification of him as a K.G.B. asset. If the spy existed, he added, he might have been controlled by the G.R.U, a military intelligence agency.

Richard L. Garwin, a top nuclear physicist who helped invent the American H-bomb and has advised Washington for decades, echoed Dr. Agnew in saying he found quite reasonable the idea that Moscow had espionage tips from Los Alamos about radiation implosion.

“It is difficult to believe that U.S. security was so good that the Russians could not have picked up the term,” he said in an interview.

Dr. Norris, author of “Racing for the Bomb,” an account of the Manhattan Project, said solving the H-bomb riddle awaited more candor from Moscow.

“The only way of clearing this up is for the intelligence services, the successors to the K.G.B. and the G.R.U., to claim their share of the credit,” he said. But he added that such openness could undermine Russian pride in its nuclear achievements during the cold war.

“It cuts both ways,” he said. “It would really be a blow to the self image of the Russian scientists, who believe to this day that they invented it independently.”

Oliver Twist

In Reality, Oliver’s Diet Wasn’t Truly Dickensian

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
Published: December 29, 2008, NYT
“Please, sir, I want some more.”
The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. He gazed in stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds, and then clung for support to the copper. The assistants were paralyzed with wonder; the boys with fear.

“What!” said the master at length, in a faint voice.

“Please, sir,” replied Oliver, “I want some more.”

The master aimed a blow at Oliver’s head with the ladle; pinioned him in his arm; and shrieked aloud for the beadle.

It may be one of the most recognizable scenes in all of English literature, known not only to those who have read Dickens’s “Oliver Twist,” but also to all who have seen the Broadway musical or any of dozens of plays, films and television productions derived from the novel. Six melancholic one-syllable words to summon all we know and feel about stark deprivation: “Please, sir, I want some more.”

But what if we coldly ask whether Oliver really needed any more — that is, was the Victorian workhouse diet sufficient for a 9-year-old boy? A group of British researchers — two dietitians, a pediatrician and a historian — asked just that question in a study published online Dec. 17 in The British Medical Journal.

They found that going on the Oliver Twist diet would guarantee radical weight loss and rapid descent into illness. Oliver’s workhouse, Dickens writes, “contracted with the water-works to lay on an unlimited supply of water; and with a corn-factor to supply periodically small quantities of oatmeal; and issued three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays.”

Based on this description, the researchers assumed that Oliver would have been given three pints of gruel a day. Using a recipe taken from a 17th-century English cookbook, they found that a diet of watery gruel — estimated at slightly more than 400 calories a day — would not only have been inadequate for growth in a 9-year-old boy, but also would almost surely have led to nutritional diseases like anemia, scurvy, rickets and beriberi.

But “Oliver Twist” is fiction. An 1843 text, Dr. Jonathan Pereira’s “Treatise on Food and Diet With Observations on the Dietetical Regimen,” set out six recommended workhouse diets. None of the regimens could be considered sumptuous, but the researchers found that each was probably adequate to normal nutritional needs.

The gruel, unlike Oliver’s, was substantial, each pint containing 1.25 ounces of the “best Berwick oatmeal.” This, along with modest servings of bread, potatoes, meat and cheese, provided 1,600 to 1,700 calories a day, compared with the 1,800 to 2,200 now recommended for a 9-year-old, and with a balance of protein, fat and carbohydrates that at least approximates today’s recommended intake. Dull and monotonous, to be sure, but adequate.

The diets were recommendations, not legally binding. But, “in all likelihood, the majority of workhouses would have done their best to serve a diet that lived up to the recommendations,” said Jonathan Reinarz, director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Birmingham and a co-author of the study.

He added that there were more than 3,700 workhouses with considerable variation, that deprivation was often used to control behavior, and that food could be adulterated by suppliers or stolen by staff.

“So there are many variables,” he said, “and Dickens could have been writing about a particular case.”

But in general, the historical and scientific facts speak loudly. While the accommodations were spartan and the food far from mouth-watering, in a real Victorian workhouse, Oliver would probably not have had to ask for more. He would have had just about enough.