The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

Bohr got only the bare thirty minutes of his scheduled appointment, most of which Churchill had monopolized. “As he was leaving,” Aage Bohr concludes, “my father asked for permission to write Churchill, whereupon the latter answered, ‘It will be an honour for me to receive a letter from you,’ adding, ‘but not about politics!’”2011 “We did not speak the same language,” Bohr said afterward.2012 His son found him “somewhat downcast.”2013 He was angrier than that; in his seventy-second year, still stinging, he told an old friend: “It was terrible that no one over there”—England and America both—“had worked on the solution of the problems that would arise when it became possible to release nuclear energy; they were completely unprepared.”2014 And further, “It was perfectly absurd to believe that the Russians cannot do what others can. . . . There never was any secret about nuclear energy.”