“the revulsion grew, bringing with it—even for those who believed that the end of the war justified the bombing—an intensely personal experience of the reality of evil.” After Hiroshima, most people on the mesa understandably felt at least a moment of exhilaration. But after the news from Nagasaki, Charlotte Serber observed, a palpable sense of gloom settled over the laboratory. Word soon spread that “Oppie says that the atomic bomb is so terrible a weapon that war is now impossible.” An FBI informant reported on August 9 that Oppie was a “nervous wreck.”
