He also ridiculed a “high officer of the Air Defense Command” for saying, only a few months ago, that “it was our policy to attempt to protect our striking force, but not really our policy to attempt to protect this country, for that is so big a job that it would interfere with our retaliatory capabilities.” Oppenheimer concluded that such “follies can occur only when even the men who know the facts can find no one to talk about them, when the facts are too secret for discussion, and thus for thought.”
