Nuclear Technology Quotes
Two days before Nagasaki was attacked by the second atomic bomb. Bohr was afraid of a nuclear arms race, and argued for the release of all scientific information. His suggestion went nowhere. There was a 50 year nuclear arms race.
Kahn was the leading scientist behind the Pakistan nuclear weapons program. However, he then was personally involved in not only selling nuclear secrets to other counties but to terrorists as well. He personally enriched himself while enabling nuclear proliferation in the world. The article was an expose of his dishonest and illegal activities. The Pakistan government was in a bind. Kahn was a national hero, the only Pakistani who had ever won the Nobel Prize in a Scientific Field. Convicted and then pardoned by the President, but he was put under house arrest and surveillance and banned from any activity involving technical assistance to others. Kahn’s religious bigotry towards Hindus as disclosed by his letter made him even more of an international pariah. See {586385} for other attacks on his critics.
Marshall was Army Chief of Staff at the time. Actually it was the OSS—the precursor to the CIA—that accepted the job of the assassination of Werner Heisenberg, the best physicist left in Germany after so many had escaped from the dictatorship. However, the agent who was to do the assassination made the judgment from actually talking with him and reading all his scientific papers that he was not working on an atomic bomb and really didn’t know of a lot of the critical research that was ongoing. He let the scientist live, and later investigations showed that the agent, Moe Berg, was absolutely right. Neither Heisenberg nor any other German scientists were working on atomic energy. The Germans had put all their scientific eggs in the rocket and jet plane basket.
