American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

Now, I don’t know how to describe my life without using some word like ‘responsibility’ to characterize it, a word that has to do with choice and action and the tension in which choices can be resolved. I am not talking about knowledge, but about being limited by what you can do. . . . There is no meaningful responsibility without power. It may be only power over what you do yourself—but increased knowledge, increased wealth, leisure are all increasing the domain in which responsibility is conceivable.” After this soliloquy, Morgan wrote, “Oppenheimer then turned his palms up, the long, slender fingers including his listener in his conclusion. ‘You and I,’ he said, ‘neither of us is rich. But as far as responsibility goes, we are both in a position right now to alleviate the most awful agony in people at the starvation level.” This was only a different way of saying what he had learned from reading Proust forty years earlier in Corsica: that “indifference to the sufferings one causes . . . is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty.”