Oppenheimer’s anguish was real and deep. He felt a personal responsibility for the consequences of his work at Los Alamos. Every day the newspaper headlines gave him evidence that the world might once again be on the road to war. “Every American knows that if there is another major war,” he wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on June 1, 1946, “atomic weapons will be used. . . .” This meant, he argued, that the real task at hand was the elimination of war itself. “We know this because in the last war, the two nations which we like to think are the most enlightened and humane in the
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