The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

“Knowledge,” Niels Bohr once noted, “is itself the basis for civilization.” You cannot have the one without the other; the one depends upon the other. Nor can you have only benevolent knowledge; the scientific method doesn’t filter for benevolence. Knowledge has consequences, not always intended, not always comfortable, not always welcome.

“It is a profound and necessary truth,” Robert Oppenheimer would say, “that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”

Bohr proposed once that the goal of science is not universal truth. Rather, he argued, the modest but relentless goal of science is “the gradual removal of prejudices.” The discovery that the earth revolves around the sun has gradually removed the prejudice that the earth is the center of the universe. The discovery of microbes is gradually removing the prejudice that disease is a punishment from God. The discovery of evolution is gradually removing the prejudice that Homo sapiens is a separate and special creation.

“Every great and deep difficulty bears within itself its own solution,” Niels Bohr

If science has become the orthodoxy of the West, individuals are nevertheless still free to take it or leave it, in whole or in part; believers in astrology, Marxism and virgin birth abound. But “no one can become a scientist unless he presumes that the scientific doctrine and method are fundamentally sound and that their ultimate premises can be unquestioningly accepted.”101

Only wholeness leads to clarity, And truth lies in the abyss.

He needed what we all need for sanity: he needed love and work.

“Ich bin Feuer und Flamme dafür” Einstein told his guest as he put him on the bus: “I am fire and flame for it.”

“As long as I am convinced, as I am, that there are values worth more to me than my own life, I cannot in sincerity argue that it is wrong to run the risk of death or to inflict death if necessary in the defense of those values.”

Fritz Houtermans and I had met in Berlin, but in London [before the war] I saw a lot more of that impressive eagle of a man, half Jewish as well as a Communist who had narrowly escaped the Gestapo. His father had been a Dutchman, but he was very proud of his mother’s Jewish origin and liable to counter anti-semitic remarks by retorting “When your ancestors were still living in the trees mine were already forging cheques!” He was full of brilliant ideas.

Openness would accomplish more than forestalling an arms race. As it did in science, it would reveal error and expose abuse. Men performed in secrecy, behind closed doors and guarded borders and silenced printing presses, what they were ashamed or afraid to reveal to the world.

Within any community it is only possible for the citizens to strive together for common welfare on the basis of public knowledge of the general conditions of the country.

“An open world where each nation can assert itself solely by the extent to which it can contribute to the common culture and is able to help others with experience and resources must be the goal to put above everything else.”2032 And most generally and profoundly: “The very fact that knowledge is itself the basis for civilization points directly to openness as the way to overcome the present crisis.”

What will people of the future think of us? Will they say, as Roger Williams said of some of the Massachusetts Indians, that we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that we resigned our humanity? They will have the right. C. P. Snow

I see that as human beings we have two great ecstatic impulses in us. One is to participate in life, which ends in the giving of life. The other is to avoid death, which ends tragically in the giving of death. Life and death are in our gift, we can activate life and activate death. Gil Elliot

The reputation of the United States for fair play and humanitarianism is the world’s biggest asset for peace in the coming decades.