Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

“There is no permanent method of exorcising atomic energy from our affairs, now that men know how it can be released,” concluded a 1952 report for President Eisenhower that Robert Oppenheimer oversaw. Said Oppenheimer, “It is hard to see how there could be any major war in which one side or another would not eventually make and use atomic bombs.”130 Even advocates of disarmament agreed. “Whatever agreements not to use H-bombs had been reached in time of peace, they would no longer be considered binding in time of war,” acknowledged Albert Einstein and British philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1955, “for, if one side manufactured the bombs and the other did not, the side that manufactured them would inevitably be victorious.”131 Today, just 25 percent of Americans say they believe nuclear weapons can be eliminated.132 When a New York Times reporter asked Oppenheimer how he felt after the bomb was tested on July 16, 1945, the father of the atomic bomb said, “Lots of boys not grown up yet will owe their life to it.”133 After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer put out word that “the atomic bomb is so terrible a weapon that war is now impossible.”