J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes
When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.
United States Atomic Energy Commission. In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: Transcript of Hearing before Personnel Security Board, Washington, D.C., April 12, 1954, through May 6, 1954. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1954, p. 81.
This quotation is very important in helping to understand the 1950s in America with respect to nuclear weapons policy. McCormick was one the better educated, sophisticated, and influential Americans. Yet he appears to be a technological and nuclear ignoramous. Most people had not yet realized that atomic weapons were not just much larger traditional bombs. They could do terrible damage, but it would always be localized they thought. Chicago might be destroyed but the people out of range would be OK. He never got it that a dirty bomb could be dropped on Detroit and depending on which way the wind is blowing could wipe out Chicago and much of the Midwest as well. He knew nothing of the genetic effect the radiation, nor the implications for the environment of maintaining a large nuclear manufacturing industry. He and many like him did not realize that after the first bombs were created, how easy it would be for the Russians and others to also develop a nuclear arsenal. And 50,000 warheads was just a matter of effort. The implications of these things would inhibit our carrying out his and others ideological views of foreign policy. Oppenheimer and most nuclear scientists explained all this, but believing them and acting on those beliefs would have been too much of a change.
For a similar view from the eyes of an American, see Pearson {612242}.
The article showed how a nuclear bomb worked. The Government attempted to suppress the publication by getting a Federal court injunction. Day and others claimed the article was based on public sources. It was. The U. S. Court of Appeals lifted the injunction and the article was published.
J. Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Oppenheimer was the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and is among those who are credited with being the "father of the atomic bomb" for their role in the Manhattan Project, the World War II undertaking that developed the first nuclear weapons. The first atomic bomb was successfully detonated on July 16, 1945, in the Trinity test in New Mexico.
