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Fermi insisted on fishing for trout with worms, arguing that the condemned creatures should be offered an authentic final
“In an attempt to break out and be a reasonable man, I had to realize that my own worries about what I did were valid and were important, but that they were not the whole story, that there must be a complementary way of looking at them, because other people did not see them as I did.2146 And I needed what they saw, and needed them.”
Oppenheimer did not doubt that he would be remembered to some degree, and reviled, as the man who led the work of bringing to mankind for the first time in its history the means of its own destruction.
for reasons never satisfactorily explained by experiment, the metal migrates from place to place and can quickly contaminate large areas. “This isotope has been observed to migrate upstream against a current of air,” notes a postwar British report on polonium, “and to translocate under conditions where it would appear to be doing so of its own accord.”2169 Chemists at Los Alamos learned to look for it embedded in the walls of shipping containers when Thomas’ foils came up short.
And how many Americans will be killed in an invasion of Japan? Five hundred thousand seems to be the lowest estimate. Some say a million.2219 . . . We’re at war with Japan. We were attacked by Japan. Do you want to kill Japanese, or would you rather have Americans killed?
Whatever Groves thought of Pash’s Red-baiting, he chose him to head Alsos because he delivered the goods: “his thorough competence and great drive had made a lasting impression on me.”2252
For this reason it is possible to maintain the hope, for this reason it is right that we should dedicate ourselves to the hope, that his good works will not have ended with his death.
and the abandonment of any illusion that the Soviet government was likely soon to act in accordance with the principles to which the rest of the world held in international affairs.”
If the Japanese were prepared to eat stones, the Americans were prepared to supply them.
a course based on assumptions diametrically opposite to Oppenheimer’s profound insight that the atomic bomb was shit:
the noise persisted, Sam Allison and I went out with a flashlight and, much to our surprise, found hundreds of frogs in the act of making love in a big hole that had filled with water.”
It was a vision which was seen with more than the eye. It was seen to last forever. You would wish it would stop; altogether it lasted about two seconds.
Had astronomers been watching they could have seen it reflected from the moon, literal moonshine.
“Our first feeling was one of elation,” Weisskopf remembers, “then we realized we were tired, and then we were worried.”
It had seemed to him as if the car were jumping from curve to curve, skipping the straight stretches in between. He had asked a friend to drive, despite his strong aversion to being driven.” Stanislaw Ulam, who chose not to attend the shot, watched the buses returning: “You could tell at once they had had a strange experience. You could see it on their faces. I saw that something very grave and strong had happened to their whole outlook on the future.”2471
I hope not. But we are only termites on a planet and maybe when we bore too deeply into the planet there’ll be a reckoning—who knows?
Unconditional surrender seemed to the Japanese leadership a demand to give up its essential and historic polity, a demand that under similar circumstances Americans also might hesitate to meet even at the price of their lives:
imperial institution was tainted with militarism,
“That,” concludes Robert Oppenheimer dryly, knowing how much at that moment the world lost, “was carrying casualness rather far.”
The next day Japanese newspapers published a censored version of the Potsdam text, leaving out in particular the provision allowing disarmed military forces to return peacefully to their homes and the assurance that the Japanese would not be enslaved or destroyed.
Once Trinity proved that the atomic bomb worked, men discovered reasons to use it.
[She was] in search of a place to cremate her dead child. The burned face of the child on her back was infested with maggots. I guess she was thinking of putting her child’s bones in a battle helmet she had picked up. I feared she would have to go far to find burnable material to cremate her child.
“Such a weapon,” he told the American psychiatrist, “has the power to make everything into nothing.”
“Those scientists who invented the . . . atomic bomb,” writes a young woman who was a fourth-grade student at Hiroshima—“what did they think would happen if they dropped it?”
We were going to live. We were going to grow up to adulthood after all.
“does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign Ruler.”2728
the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.2744 Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb,
“If it had gone on any longer,” writes Yukio Mishima, “there would have been nothing to do but go mad.”
Suddenly it turned and leaped into the sky and then came flying back towards me, so that, looking up, I could see a great bare eyeball, bigger than life, hovering over my head, staring point blank at me. I was powerless to move.
