On the evening of August 6, 1945, just before dinner, Major Rittner, the British military intelligence officer in charge of Farm Hall, quietly took Otto Hahn aside and told him that the Americans had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. “Hahn was completely shattered by the news,” wrote Rittner: He felt personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, as it was his original discovery which had made the bomb possible. He told me that he had originally contemplated suicide when he realized the terrible potentialities of his discovery. … With the help of considerable
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Damn
