American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

Wilson then put up notices all over the lab announcing a public meeting to discuss “The Impact of the Gadget on Civilization.” He chose this title because earlier, at Princeton, “just before we’d come out, there’d been many sanctimonious talks about the ‘impact’ of something else, with all very scholarly kinds of discussions.” To his surprise, Oppie showed up on the appointed evening and listened to the discussion. Wilson later thought about twenty people attended, including such senior physicists as Vicki Weisskopf. The meeting was held in the same building that housed the cyclotron. “I can remember,” Wilson said, “it being very cold in our building. . . . We did have a pretty intense discussion of why it was that we were continuing to make a bomb after the war had been [virtually] won.” This may not have been the only occasion when the morality and politics of the atomic bomb were discussed. A young physicist working on implosion techniques, Louis Rosen, remembered a packed daytime colloquium held in the old theater. Oppenheimer was the speaker and, according to Rosen, the topic was “whether the country is doing the right thing in using this weapon on real live human beings.” Oppenheimer apparently argued that as scientists they had no right to a louder voice in determining the gadget’s fate than any other citizen. “He was a very eloquent and persuasive guy,” Rosen said. The chemist Joseph O. Hirschfelder recalled a similar discussion held in Los Alamos’ small wooden cha...