American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

On one occasion, someone threw a theme party: “Come As Your Suppressed Desire.” Oppie came dressed in his ordinary suit, with a napkin draped over his arm—as if to imply that he wished merely to be a waiter. It was a pose no doubt designed to reflect a studied humility rather than any real inner longing for anonymity. As the scientific director of the most important project in the war, Oppenheimer was actually living his “suppressed” desire.

Kitty was on the verge of an emotional collapse. “Kitty had begun to break down, drinking a lot,” recalled Pat Sherr. Kitty and Robert were also having problems with their two-year-old son. Like any toddler, Peter was a handful. And according to Sherr, Kitty “was very, very impatient with him.” Sherr, a trained psychologist, thought Kitty “had absolutely no intuitive understanding of the children.” Kitty had always been mercurial. Her sister-in-law, Jackie Oppenheimer, observed that Kitty “would go off on a shopping trip for days to Albuquerque or even to the West Coast and leave the children in the hands of the maid.” Upon her return, Kitty would bring an enormous present for Peter. “She must have felt so guilty and unhappy,” said Jackie, “the poor woman.”

The strain on Robert over these incredibly intense two years was taking its toll. Physically, that toll was obvious: His coughing was incessant and his weight was down to 115 pounds, skin-and-bones for a man 5 feet 10 inches tall. His energy level never flagged, but he seemed to be literally disappearing little by little, day after day. The psychological toll was, if anything, harsher—albeit less obvious. Robert had spent a lifetime dealing with and managing his mental stresses. Nevertheless, “Tyke’s” birth and Kitty’s departure left him unusually vulnerable. “It was all very strange,” remembered Sherr. “He would come and sit and chat with me, but he wouldn’t ask to see the baby. She might as well have been God knows where, but he never asked to see her.” “Finally, one day I said, ‘Wouldn’t you like to see your daughter, she’s growing beautifully?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ ”

Alcohol flowed freely on the mesa, and as the months rolled by, some people felt oppressed by the small town’s isolation. “At first, it was lots of fun,” Hempelmann recalled, “but as things wore on and everybody got tired and tense and irritable, it wasn’t so good. Everybody was living in each other’s pockets. You’d play with the same people that you worked with. And a friend would ask you out to dinner, and you didn’t have anything else to do, but you just didn’t want to go. So they would know. If they drove by your house, they would see that your car was still there. Everybody knew everything about everybody else.”

The fifty-seven-year-old Danish physicist had been smuggled out of Copenhagen aboard a motor launch on the night of September 29, 1943. Arriving safely on the Swedish coast, he was taken to Stockholm—where German agents plotted his assassination. On October 5, British airmen sent to his rescue helped Bohr into the bomb bay of an unmarked British Mosquito bomber. When the plywood aircraft approached an altitude of 20,000 feet, the pilot instructed Bohr to don the oxygen mask built into his leather helmet. But Bohr failed to hear the instructions—he later said the helmet was too small for his large head—and soon he fainted from lack of oxygen. He nevertheless survived the air journey and upon landing in Scotland, he remarked that he had had a pleasant nap.

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, he insisted, it was imperative that the Russians be told about the existence of the bomb project, and be assured that it was no threat to them.

Bohr sharply focused Oppie’s mind on the bomb’s postwar consequences. “That is why I went to America,” Bohr later said. “They didn’t need my help in making the atom bomb.”

Bohr came “most secretly of all,” as Oppenheimer explained, to advance a political cause—the case for openness in science as well as international relations, the only hope to forestall a postwar nuclear arms race. This was a message Oppenheimer was ready to hear. For nearly two years, he had been preoccupied with complex administrative responsibilities. As the months rolled by, he was becoming less and less a theoretical physicist and more and more a science administrator. This transformation had to be intellectually stifling for him. So when Bohr showed up on the mesa speaking in deeply philosophical terms about the project’s implications for humanity, Oppenheimer felt rejuvenated.

No matter how things ultimately worked out, Bohr argued, “it is already evident that we are presented with one of the greatest triumphs of science and technique, destined deeply to influence the future of mankind.” In the very near term, “a weapon of an unparalleled power is being created which will completely change all future conditions of warfare.” That was the good news. The bad news was equally clear, and prophetic: “Unless, indeed, some agreement about the control of the use of the new active materials can be obtained in due time, any temporary advantage, however great, may be outweighed by a perpetual menace to human security.”

Bohr was forever trying to take his insights into the physical nature of the world and apply them to human relations. As the historian of science Jeremy Bernstein later wrote: “Bohr was not satisfied to limit the idea of complementarity to physics. He saw it everywhere: instinct and reason, free will, love and justice, and on and on.” He quite understandably saw it in the work at Los Alamos too. Everything about the project was fraught with contradictions. They were building a weapon of mass destruction that would defeat fascism and end all wars—but also make it possible to end all civilization. Oppenheimer quite naturally found it comforting to be told by Bohr that the contradictions in life were nevertheless all of a piece—and therefore complementary.

As a military man, Navy Captain Parsons wanted the authority in order to short-circuit the debates among his scientists. “You have pointed out,” Oppenheimer wrote him, “that you are afraid your position in the laboratory might make it necessary for you to engage in prolonged argument and discussion in order to obtain agreement upon which the progress of the work would depend. Nothing that I can put in writing can eliminate this necessity.” The scientists had to be free to argue—and Oppenheimer would arbitrate disputes only for the purpose of reaching some kind of collegial consensus. “I am not arguing that the laboratory should be so constituted,” he told Parsons. “It is in fact so constituted.”

In the spring of 1944, he wrote to a family of German refugees whose escape from Europe he had facilitated. They were utter strangers, but in 1940 he had given the Meyers family—a mother and four daughters—a sum of money to pay their expenses to the United States. Four years later, the Meyers repaid Oppenheimer and proudly informed him that they had become American citizens. He wrote back that he understood the “pride” they felt, and he thanked them for the money: “I hope it has not been a hardship for you. . . .” He then offered to return the money if they had any further need for it. (Years later, one of the Meyers daughters wrote in gratitude: “[I]n 1940 you brought us all over and we could save our lives.”) For Oppenheimer, the rescue of the Meyerses from the Nazi contagion was important in several respects. It was in the first instance a politically noncontroversial extension of his antifascist activism—and that felt good. Secondly, while a small act of generosity, it was nevertheless a profound and welcome reminder of why he was racing to build a horrific weapon.

One evening in March 1944, Rotblat experienced a “disagreeable shock.” General Groves came for dinner at the Chadwicks’ and in the course of casual banter over the dinner table, he said, “You realize of course that the main purpose of this project is to subdue the Russians.” Rotblat was shocked. He had no illusions about Stalin—the Soviet dictator had, after all, invaded his beloved Poland. But thousands of Russians were dying every day on the Eastern Front and Rotblat felt a sense of betrayal. “Until then I had thought that our work was to prevent a Nazi victory,” he later wrote, “and now I was told that the weapon we were preparing was intended for use against the people who were making extreme sacrifices for that very aim.” By the end of 1944, six months after the Allies had landed on the beaches of Normandy, it was clear that the war in Europe would soon be over. Rotblat saw no point in continuing to work on a weapon that was no longer needed to defeat the Germans.15 After saying good-bye to Oppenheimer at a going-away party, he left Los Alamos on December 8, 1944.

extremely bright man, Hall that autumn was sitting on the edge of an intellectual precipice. He was a socialist in outlook, an admirer of the Soviet Union, but not yet a formal communist, and neither was he disgruntled or unhappy with his work or his station in life. No one recruited him. But all that year he had listened to “older” scientists—in their late twenties and early thirties—talk about their fear of a postwar arms race. On one occasion, sitting at the same Fuller Lodge dinner table with Niels Bohr, he heard Bohr’s concerns for an “open world.” Prompted by his conclusion that a postwar U.S. nuclear monopoly could lead to another war, in October 1944 Hall decided to act: “. . . it seemed to me that an American monopoly was dangerous and should be prevented. I was not the only scientist to take that view.”

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...

“What will this terrible weapon do to this world? Are we doing something good, something bad? Should we not worry about how it will be applied?” Gradually, these informal discussions became formal meetings. “We tried to organize meetings in some of the lecture rooms,” Weisskopf said, “and then we ran into opposition. Oppenheimer was against that. He said that’s not our task, and this is politics, and we should not do this.” Weisskopf recalled a meeting in March 1945, attended by forty scientists, to discuss “the atomic bomb in world politics.” Oppenheimer again tried to discourage people from attending. “He thought we should not get involved in questions about the use of the bomb.

Oppenheimer “dominated” the discussion. His main argument essentially drew on Niels Bohr’s vision of “openness.” The war, he argued, should not end without the world knowing about this primordial new weapon. The worst outcome would be if the gadget remained a military secret. If that happened, then the next war would almost certainly be fought with atomic weapons. They had to forge ahead, he explained, to the point where the gadget could be tested. He pointed out that the new United Nations was scheduled to hold its inaugural meeting in April 1945—and that it was important that the delegates begin their deliberations on the postwar world with the knowledge that mankind had invented these weapons of mass destruction. “I thought that was a very good argument,” said Wilson. For some time now, Bohr and Oppenheimer himself had talked about how the gadget was going to change the world. The scientists knew that the gadget was going to force a redefinition of the whole notion of national sovereignty. They had faith in Franklin Roosevelt and believed that he was setting up the United Nations precisely to address this conundrum. As Wilson put it, “There would be areas in which there would be no sovereignty, the sovereignty would exist in the United Nations. It was to be the end of war as we knew it, and this was a promise that was made. That is why I could continue on that project.” Oppenheimer had prevailed, to no one’s surprise, by articulating the argument that the war could not ...

AS HARRY TRUMAN moved into the White House, the war in Europe was nearly won. But the war in the Pacific was coming to its bloodiest climax. On the evening of March 9–10, 1945, 334 B-29 aircraft dropped tons of jellied gasoline—napalm—and high explosives on Tokyo. The resulting firestorm killed an estimated 100,000 people and completely burned out 15.8 square miles of the city. The fire-bombing raids continued and by July 1945, all but five of Japan’s major cities had been razed and hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians had been killed. This was total warfare, an attack aimed at the destruction of a nation, not just its military targets. The fire bombings were no secret. Ordinary Americans read about the raids in their newspapers. Thoughtful people understood that strategic bombing of cities raised profound ethical questions. “I remember Mr. Stimson [the secretary of war] saying to me,” Oppenheimer later remarked, “that he thought it appalling that there should be no protest over the air raids which we were conducting against Japan, which in the case of Tokyo led to such extraordinarily heavy loss of life. He didn’t say that the air strikes shouldn’t be carried on, but he did think there was something wrong with a country where no one questioned that. . .

On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide, and eight days later Germany surrendered. When Emilio Segrè heard the news, his first reaction was, “We have been too late.” Like almost everyone at Los Alamos, Segrè thought that defeating Hitler was the sole justification for working on the “gadget.”

When Szilard explained that the use of the atomic bomb against Japan risked turning the Soviet Union into an atomic power, Byrnes interrupted, “General Groves tells me there is no uranium in Russia.” No, Szilard replied, the Soviet Union has plenty of uranium.

“The atomic bomb is shit,” Oppenheimer said after listening to Szilard’s arguments. “What do you mean by that?” Szilard asked. “Well,” Oppenheimer replied, “this is a weapon which has no military significance. It will make a big bang—a very big bang—but it is not a weapon which is useful in war.” At the same time, Oppie told Szilard that if the weapon was used, he thought it important that the Russians be informed of this in advance. Szilard argued that merely telling Stalin about the new weapon would not by itself prevent an arms race after the war. “Well,” Oppenheimer insisted, “don’t you think that if we tell the Russians what we intend to do and then use the bomb on Japan, the Russians will understand it?” “They’ll understand it only too well,” Szilard replied.

“the visual effect of an atomic bombing would be tremendous. It would be accompanied by a brilliant luminescence which would rise to a height of 10,000 to 20,000 feet. The neutron effect of the explosion would be dangerous to life for a radius of at least two-thirds of a mile.” “Various types of targets and the effects to be produced” were discussed, and then Secretary Stimson summarized what seemed to be a general agreement: “. . . that we could not give the Japanese any warning; that we could not concentrate on a civilian area; but that we should seek to make a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible.” Stimson said he agreed with James Conant’s suggestion “that the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.” Thus, with such delicate euphemisms, did the president of Harvard University select civilians as the target of the world’s first atomic bomb.

Though he had clearly argued for some of Bohr’s ideas about openness, in the end he had won nothing and acquiesced to everything. The Soviets would not be adequately informed about the Manhattan Project, and the bomb would be used on a Japanese city without warning.

Wilson pointed out that in just a few weeks they would be conducting a test of the bomb. Why not invite the Japanese to send a delegation of observers to witness the test? “Well,” Oppenheimer replied, “supposing it didn’t go off?” “And I turned to him, coldly,” Wilson recalled, “and said, ‘Well, we could kill ’em all.’ ” Within seconds, Wilson—a pacifist—regretted having said “such a bloodthirsty thing.”

The panel members recommended, first, that prior to the use of the bomb, Washington should inform Britain, Russia, France and China of the existence of atomic weapons and “welcome suggestions as to how we can cooperate in making this development contribute to improved international relations.” Secondly, the panel reported that there was no unanimity among their scientific colleagues on the initial use of these weapons. Some of the men who were building them proposed a demonstration of the “gadget” as an alternative. “Those who advocate a purely technical demonstration would wish to outlaw the use of atomic weapons, and have feared that if we use the weapons now our position in future negotiations will be prejudiced.”

There was much that Oppenheimer did not know. As he later recalled, “We didn’t know beans about the military situation in Japan. We didn’t know whether they could be caused to surrender by other means or whether the invasion was really inevitable. But in the backs of our minds was the notion that the invasion was inevitable because we had been told that.” Among other things, he was unaware that military intelligence in Washington had intercepted and decoded messages from Japan indicating that the Japanese government understood the war was lost and was seeking acceptable surrender terms.

According to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, when he was informed of the existence of the bomb at the Potsdam Conference in July, he told Stimson he thought an atomic bombing was unnecessary because “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

No one can be certain of Oppenheimer’s reaction had he learned that on the eve of the Hiroshima bombing, the president knew the Japanese were “looking for peace,” and that the military use of atomic bombs on cities was an option rather than a necessity for ending the war in August. But we do know that after the war he came to believe that he had been misled, and that this knowledge served as a constant reminder that it was henceforth his obligation to be skeptical of what he was told by government officials.

Bainbridge finally selected a desert site sixty miles northwest of Alamogordo. The Spanish had called the area the Jornada del Muerto—the “Journey of Death.” Here the Army staked out an area eighteen by twenty-four miles in size, evicted a few ranchers by eminent domain and began building a field laboratory and hardened bunkers from which to observe the first explosion of an atomic bomb. Oppenheimer dubbed the test site “Trinity”—though years later, he wasn’t quite sure why he chose such a name. He remembered vaguely having in mind a John Donne poem that opens with the line “Batter my heart, three-person’d God . . .” But this suggests that he may also have once again been drawing from the Bhagavad-Gita; Hinduism, after all, has its trinity in Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer.

Oppie recited for Bush a stanza from the Gita that he had translated from the Sanskrit: In battle, in forest, at the precipice in the mountains On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows, In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame, The good deeds a man has done before defend him.

Bob Serber was also twenty miles away, lying face down and holding a piece of welder’s glass to his eyes. “Of course,” he wrote later, “just at the moment my arm got tired and I lowered the glass for a second, the bomb went off. I was completely blinded by the flash.” When his vision returned thirty seconds later, he saw a bright violet column rising to 20,000 or 30,000 feet. “I could feel the heat on my face a full twenty miles away.”

“All of a sudden, the night turned into day, and it was tremendously bright, the chill turned into warmth; the fireball gradually turned from white to yellow to red as it grew in size and climbed into the sky; after about five seconds the darkness returned but with the sky and the air filled with a purple glow, just as though we were surrounded by an aurora borealis. . . . We stood there in awe as the blast wave picked up chunks of dirt from the desert soil and soon passed us by.”

“But I think the most terrifying thing,” Frank recalled, “was this really brilliant purple cloud, black with radioactive dust, that hung there, and you had no feeling of whether it would go up or would drift towards you.”

As the countdown reached the two-minute mark, he muttered, “Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart.”

In a 1965 NBC television documentary, he remembered: “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” One of Robert’s friends, Abraham Pais, once suggested that the quote sounded like one of Oppie’s “priestly exaggerations.”

Oppenheimer knew the names of the Japanese cities on the list of potential targets—and the knowledge was clearly sobering. “Robert got very still and ruminative, during that two-week period,” Wilson recalled, “partly because he knew what was about to happen, and partly because he knew what it meant.” One day soon after the Trinity test, Oppenheimer startled Wilson with a sad, even morose remark. “He was beginning to feel very down,” Wilson said. “I didn’t know of other people who were quite in the mood he was in, but he used to come from his house walking over to the Technical Area, and I used to come from the nurses’ quarters and somewhere along the way we often bumped into each other. That morning, he’s puffing on his pipe and he’s saying, ‘Those poor little people, those poor little people’—referring to the Japanese.” He said it with an air of resignation. And deadly knowledge.

Shortly after the Trinity test, he had been relieved to hear from Vannevar Bush that the Interim Committee had unanimously accepted his recommendation that the Russians be clearly informed of the bomb and its impending use against Japan. He assumed that such forthright discussions were taking place at that very moment in Potsdam, where President Truman was meeting with Churchill and Stalin. He was later appalled to learn what actually happened at that final Big Three conference. Instead of an open and frank discussion of the nature of the weapon, Truman coyly confined himself to a cryptic reference: “On July 24,” Truman wrote in his memoirs, “I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The Russian premier showed no special interest. All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese.’ ” This fell far short of what Oppenheimer had expected. As the historian Alice Kimball Smith later wrote, “what actually occurred at Potsdam was a sheer travesty.

Frank Oppenheimer was standing in the hallway right outside his brother’s office when he heard the news. His first reaction was “Thank God, it wasn’t a dud.” But within seconds, he recalled, “One suddenly got this horror of all the people that had been killed.”

“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.”

“Dear Opje, You are probably the most famous man in the world today. . . .” Oppie replied on August 27 with a three-page handwritten letter. Chevalier later described it as filled with the “affection and the informal intimacy that had always existed between us.” Regarding the bomb, Oppie wrote Chevalier: “the thing had to be done, Haakon. It had to be brought to an open public fruition at a time when all over the world men craved peace as never before, were committed as never before both to technology as a way of life and thought and to the idea that no man is an island.” But he was by no means comfortable with this defense. “Circumstances are heavy with misgiving, and far, far more difficult than they should be, had we power to re-make the world to be as we think it.”

“Virtually everyone in the street for nearly a mile around was instantly and seriously burned by the heat of the bomb,” Morrison said. “The hot flash burned suddenly and strangely. They [the Japanese] told us of people who wore striped clothing upon whom the skin was burned in stripes. . . . There were many who thought themselves lucky, who crawled out of the ruins of their homes only slightly injured. But they died anyway. They died days or weeks later from the radium-like rays emitted in great numbers at the moment of the explosion.”

Serber described how in Nagasaki he noticed that the sides of all the telephone poles facing the explosion were charred. He followed a line of such charred poles out beyond two miles from ground zero. “At one point,” Serber recounted, “I saw a horse grazing. On one side all its hair was burnt off, the other side was perfectly normal.” When Serber somewhat flippantly remarked that the horse nevertheless seemed to be “happily grazing,” Oppenheimer “scolded me for giving the impression that the bomb was a benevolent weapon.”

Morrison himself wrote her of his hope that “people of intelligence and goodwill everywhere can understand and share our sense of crisis.” Having helped to build the weapon, Morrison and many other like-minded physicists now believed the only wise course of action left was to place international controls over all things nuclear. “The scientists know,” Miss Warner wrote approvingly in her Christmas letter of 1945, “that they cannot go back to the laboratories leaving atomic energy in the hands of the armed forces or the statesmen.”

Manhattan Project had achieved exactly what Rabi had feared it would achieve—it had made a weapon of mass destruction “the culmination of three centuries of physics.” And in doing so, he thought, the project had impoverished physics, and not just in a metaphysical sense; and soon he began to disparage it as a scientific achievement. “We took this tree with a lot of ripe fruit on it,” Oppenheimer told a Senate committee in late 1945, “and shook it hard and out came radar and atomic bombs. [The] whole [wartime] spirit was one of frantic and rather ruthless exploitation of the known.” The war had “a notable effect on physics,” he said. “It practically stopped it.” He soon came to believe that during the war we “perhaps witnessed a more total cessation of true professional activity in the field of physics, even in its training, than [in] any other country.” But the war also had focused attention on science. As Victor Weisskopf later wrote: “The war had made it obvious by the most cruel of all arguments, that science is of the most immediate and direct importance to everybody. This had changed the character of physics.”

“I Feel I Have Blood on My Hands” If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER October 16, 1945

“Modern Prometheans have raided Mount Olympus again and have brought back for man the very thunderbolts of Zeus.”

The Hiroshima bomb, he said, was used “against an essentially defeated enemy. . . . it is a weapon for aggressors, and the elements of surprise and of terror are as intrinsic to it as are the fissionable nuclei.”

Cherniss, indeed, thought his friend perhaps spoke too well for his own good. “The ability to speak in public like that is a poison—it’s very dangerous for the person who has it.” Such a talent might lead a man to think his velvet tongue was an effective political armor.

“Today that pride must be tempered with a profound concern. If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.”