The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

Most of those with whom I talked came to Los Alamos. One of the most tough-minded, I. I. Rabi, did not. His reasons are revealing. He continued developing radar at the Radiation Laboratory at MIT. “Oppenheimer wanted me to be the associate director,” he told an interviewer many years later. “I thought it over and turned him down. I said, ‘I’m very serious about this war. We could lose it with insufficient radar.’ ”1757 The Columbia physicist thought radar more immediately important to the defense of his country than the distant prospect of an atomic bomb. Nor did he choose to work full time, he told Oppenheimer, to make “the culmination of three centuries of physics” a weapon of mass destruction.1758 Oppenheimer responded that he would take “a different stand” if he thought the atomic bomb would serve as such a culmination. “To me it is primarily the development in time of war of a military weapon of some consequence.”1759 Either Oppenheimer had not yet thought his way through to a more millenarian view of the new weapon’s implications or he chose to avoid discussing those implications with Rabi.