“I’ll never forget that morning,” Compton later wrote in a tone of high drama. “I drove Oppenheimer from the railroad station down to the beach looking out over the peaceful lake. There I listened to his story. . . . Was there really any chance that an atomic bomb would trigger the explosion of the nitrogen in the atmosphere or the hydrogen in the ocean? . . . Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind.”
