The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

Nor can you have only benevolent knowledge; the scientific method doesn’t filter for benevolence.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.

Patriotism contributed to many decisions, but a deeper motive among the physicists, by the measure of their statements, was fear—fear of German triumph, fear of a thousand-year Reich made invulnerable with atomic bombs. And deeper even than fear was fatalism.

“Morale” is here and elsewhere in the literature of air power a euphemism for the bombing of civilians.

If authority is not given to the best men in the field there does not seem to be any compelling reason to give it to the second-best men and one may give it to the third- or fourth- or fifth-best men, whichever of them appears to be the most agreeable on purely subjective grounds.

Late in life Bohr explained the starting point of his revelation in a single phrase. “We are in a completely new situation that cannot be resolved by war,” he confided to a friend.