A Quaker by ancestry, Wilson was a pacifist when the European war erupted: “So it was quite a change for me to find in fact that I would be working on this horrible project.” But, like everyone else he knew at Los Alamos, Wilson feared above all the prospect of the Nazis’ winning the war with an atomic weapon. And while privately he still hoped that they might someday prove that an atomic bomb was not possible, he was eager to build it if it could be built.
