In Denmark, he had simply walked up to the palace door and knocked if he wished to see the king. And he did pretty much the same thing in Washington, D.C., where he visited Lord Halifax, the British ambassador, and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, an intimate of President Roosevelt’s. His message to these men was clear: The making of the atomic bomb was a foregone conclusion, but it was not too soon to consider what would happen after its development. His deepest fear was that its invention would inspire a deadly nuclear arms race between the West and the Soviet Union. To prevent this,
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