The Berlin Project Quotes

“the land of ideas, you are always renting.”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“Only a fool resists the delight of contradiction by nature”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“Urey seemed to know all the bars and restaurants near the Columbia University campus and led him to a narrow place packed with people. A white-capped short-order cook at a gas grill took barked orders from a cranky waitress who blew her hair out of her face after each sentence. Aromas of frying meat and grilled potatoes layered the air. Booths marked off tables with red-checked tablecloths. Ceiling fans turned languidly, stirring smoky air into a smooth blue-gray blur. There was no hurry in the place, a feeling of having been there all eternity, with only the faces changing in the pale winter light from the big windows. The waiters moved with quick, sure movements, delivering food that tasted exactly the same as when he was a boy in Brooklyn.”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“Dawidoff, Nicholas. The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg. New York: Vintage, 1994. de”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“the strategic situation foreseen by Robert Heinlein in the death dust story was like “a duel in a vestibule with flamethrowers,” anticipating mutual assured destruction and its acronym quite nicely. Tolstoy famously”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“Szilard encouraged me to apply for a postdoc position at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Livermore, though he knew I might work on nuclear weapons eventually. My job interview with Teller was both stimulating and unnerving; at the end of it, I suspected Teller understood my thesis better than I did. It was also terrifying; I had no warning who would interview me.”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“In fact, it took the resources of three countries to produce the bomb: the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. But there was more to it than that. In some sense it took some of the most valuable scientific talent of all Europe to do it. Consider this partial list: the Hungarians John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller; the Germans Hans Bethe and Rudolf Peierls; the Poles Stanislaw Ulam and Joseph Rotblat; the Austrians Victor Weisskopf and Otto Frisch; the Italians Enrico Fermi and Emilio Segrè; Felix Bloch from Switzerland; and, from Denmark, the Bohrs, Niels and his son Aage. This talent, the B-29 heavy bomber program that could deliver the bombs, plus Manhattan Project efforts—all together cost more than fifty billion in today’s dollars. Wilhelm”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“They thought the Allies would be desperate to “buy” their reactor research in the postwar era. Apparently they were not moved to check to see whether this arrogance was founded, and the depression and desperation one hears them going through after Hiroshima and Nagasaki reveals their sudden irrelevance. As Otto Hahn chided them right after they learned of Hiroshima: “If the Americans have a uranium bomb, then you’re all second-raters.” The”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“In early 1945 Berg did go to Switzerland, as depicted here a bit earlier, to kill Heisenberg if necessary. Sitting in the front row of Heisenberg’s seminar, he determined that the Germans were nowhere near their goal, so he complimented Heisenberg on his speech about field theory and walked him back to his hotel. Moe Berg’s report was distributed to Britain’s prime minister, Winston Churchill, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and key figures in the team developing the atomic bomb. Roosevelt responded: “Give my regards to the catcher.” Werner”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“I knew personally many figures in this novel: Harold Urey, who greeted me at the grad students reception at UCSD in 1963; Karl Cohen, my father-in-law;”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“I had the mistaken idea, based on what happened in World War I, that we would stay out of the war, and it is very unfortunate that I felt like that. If I had been more convinced, as Wigner and Szilard were, that we were going to get into the war, I would have pushed harder to begin making the bomb. I figured out that roughly half a million to a million people were being killed a month in the later stages of the war. Every month by which we could have shortened the war would have made a difference of a half million to a million lives, including the life of my own brother.”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“Sour grapes, the champagne of the intelligentsia.”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“Freeman murmured at his elbow, “Let him go. I’m working on an even bigger nuclear rocket, called Orion. We might take a cruise out to Saturn on it by the 1980s or”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“Then the 1956 Peace Prize went to Eisenhower and Khrushchev for agreeing not to build the hydrogen bomb. That agreement was now also called the Szilard Treaty. Today the H-bomb was a threshold no one dared cross without exciting hostile moves by all other powers.”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“Ah, I see your point. I did assist on the Okinawa drop, as the British representative. Quite simple, after we’d seen the Berlin effects. Another ground-pounder drop near the top of that mountain, killed the army inside, without too many of the villagers on the mountain’s other side. Precision, rather.” Plus Hiroshima a few weeks later, Karl thought, and so the war ended in crimson blisters. Their crowd grew. Karl saw parading at the head of a column of tourists a Bavarian girl in the traditional garb of apron and knee-length white socks. The Germans were anxiously amiable, voices ringing high in the sweet warm air. If they had been dogs, their tails would have constantly wagged. The swirl and charm of these streets still caught at his heart. As good as it gets, a phrase he had heard somewhere, rang in him. Yet he knew that beyond these blithe provinces the world called the West, the world’s pain played out in the presence of God’s unimpeachable policy of No Comment. The silence of these skies . . . , he thought, and wondered if maybe he needed a glass of something delicious and reassuring. Red, yes. Maybe a Burgundy. The eighteenth-century”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“west. He liked the mild climate, the Sierras making it something like Colorado with a seashore. It took him several years to overcome the natural though secret belief of true New Yorkers, that people living somewhere else had to be, in some sense, kidding.”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“There is a word for such exercises we Germans do,” Canaris said. “Vergangenheitsbewältigung—coming to terms with the past.” Karl”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“German had a lumbering, bull-in-china-shop feel, yet their culture gave birth to essential words that told much of what lay within: Schadenfreude, Angst, Weltschmerz—joy at the misfortune of others, anguish, sorrow at the world—words revealing the yawning abyss in their souls? But then there was a fine word that sounded like what it meant, Gemütlichkeit. Still,”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“Marthe had reported back from her girl-girl talk that Elisabeth took quite calmly the immense fact that she was now venturing into the landscape where she could create another human being, a prospect that to Karl seemed more frightening than, say, getting a driver’s license. All this he felt as they finished breakfast, hustled into street garb, and turned left onto boulevard Raspail.”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“September 20, 1963 The telephone jangled him up from a pleasant dream. Something about the war again, but soft and warm and . . . he could remember no more. He sat up. Marthe was already in the bathroom, and the telephone’s harsh clamor made him jerk it off the cradle. “Allo?” “Dr. Cohen,” a thick German accent said, “I am from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a newspaper in—” “I know.”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“English officer came striding across the field quite deliberately. He stopped, saluted with a ramrod spine, and said, “Arthur Clarke. I gather you’re the men who brought us those superbombs. I’d like to shake your hands.” Karl found him an agreeable fellow, a bit younger and brimming with ideas.”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“sent. Churchill’s guys sniffed around, found evidence of smothered messages, pointing to someone in British intelligence. Laid a trap, don’t know the details. They found a guy named Kim Philby, a Cambridge guy no less. Soviet agent, turns out. He took some persuading. Might have gotten a bruise or two. These guys are softies. He gave up some others in MI5. Churchill said to work him over a little more, he’d crack like an egg. Philby did, pretty quick, too. So now they’ve got a whole viper’s nest of them locked up. Call ’em the Cambridge Five.” All”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“Karl remembered his great truth, learned in the project: Never pass by a chance to shut up.”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“Tests showed there was no enrichment. “They’re just slinging purified uranium at us, straight from the mines,” Bob said. But the next week Bob fell ill. A red rash spread from his face all over his body. The bumps were as big as marbles and itched “like the bejesus,” he said in a feverish daze. He died two days later of smallpox. •”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“All our bright minds,” Feynman said sardonically, “and we can’t figure how to stop the enemy from dumping dirt on us.” Freeman said with delicate precision, “We are hothouse flowers, really. Not made for the blunt edge of war.” Nods”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“Freeman looked up and grinned. “Karl, this author is American and plainly loves twisted language. Listen: ‘The idiot god Azathoth, that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity.’ Superb nonsense.” Karl snorted. “Why are you reading such stuff?” “It’s a novel of horror. Seems appropriate in a war, somehow.” Karl”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“Within an hour Groves’s teletype rattled out a translation. My fellow Germans! I live! Yet another of the countless atrocities that have befallen our lands has stricken Berlin—but not me. I am speaking to you so that you can hear my voice and know that I myself am not injured and well. The vast crime in Berlin has destroyed the entire center. But it cannot destroy the inevitable victory of the National Socialist Reich! My survival is a confirmation of the task imposed upon me by Providence—and”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“He saw a small, secondary explosion in the mushroom column. A yellow sphere flared in orange and then smoke swamped it. It had to be chemical, but what— Ah, he thought. All the iron in the buildings and soil has been thrown up in fine particles. Hot, too. It met the oxygen. “A rust bomb,” he whispered. Weird, but probably right. And nobody had thought of it before. Karl”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project

“he knew from studying maps in preparation: the broad avenues leading to the Brandenburg Gate. He had played Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos records many times, intricate magic alive in the air. The gate that led to the town of Brandenburg an der Havel.”
― Gregory Benford, The Berlin Project