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.2023 He had already grasped that fundamental point when he arrived at Los Alamos in 1943 and told Oppenheimer that nothing like Hitler’s attempt to enslave Europe would ever happen again. “First of all,” Oppenheimer confirms, “[Bohr] was clear that if it worked, this development was going to bring an enormous change in the situation of the world, in the whole situation of war and the tolerability of war.”2024
