• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2377 0

understanding that the devil was not so tame. It might mean something, after all, to sell him one’s soul. Oppenheimer knew, partly from introspection, that the scientists had immediately begun to question their own motives. “It’s a terrible thing that we made,” Robert Wilson had said to Feynman, surprising him and pricking his ebullient bubble. Others were beginning to agree. Oppenheimer reminded them of what they were reminding themselves: that two years earlier a Nazi bomb had seemed possible and that the American victory had seemed far from inevitable. He acknowledged that these justifications had faded. Some people, he said, might have been driven by a less high-minded motivation, no more than curiosity and a sense of adventure, and he surprised some of them by saying, “and rightly so.” He said it again: “And rightly so.” Feynman had left Los Alamos several days before, so he did not hear, nor did he need to hear, Oppy’s reminder of their shared credo, a credo now being welded to the most painful act of self-justification they had ever had to perform:

When you come right down to it the reason that we did this job is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world… . It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spread of knowledge, and are willing to take the consequences.

Thus spoke a bringer of fire.

The relations between Americans and their scientists had changed. It became an instant truism that science meant power. Science as an institution—“organized science”—ranked second only to the military as a guarantor of what was being called national security. President Harry S Truman told the Congress that fall that America’s role in the world would depend directly on research coordinated by universities, industrial companies, and the government: “The events of the past few years are both proof and prophecy of what science can do.” In short order the government established an Atomic Energy Commission, an Office of Naval Research, and a National Science Foundation. Permanent national laboratories with no precedent in the prewar world arose at Los Alamos; at Oak Ridge; at Argonne, south of Chicago; at Berkeley; and at Brookhaven, Long Island, on a six-thousand-acre former army site. Money flowed copiously. Before the war the government had paid for only a sixth of all scientific research. By the war’s end the proportions had flipped: only a sixth was financed by all nongovernment sources combined. The government and the public gained a new sense of proprietorship over the whole scientific enterprise. As physicists began to speak out about world government and the international control of nuclear arms, so an army of clerics, foundation heads, and congressmen now made the mission and the morality of science a part of their lecture-circuit repertoire.

On the whole, the popular press lionized Oppenheimer and his colleagues. To have worked on the bomb gave a scientist a stature matched only by the Nobel Prize. By comparison it was nothing to have created radar at the MIT Radiation Laboratory, though by a plausible calculus radar had done more to win the war. The word physicist itself finally came into vogue. Einstein was now understood to be a physicist, not a mathematician. Even nonnuclear physicists acquired prestige by association. Soon Wilson, Feynman’s recruiter, would look back wistfully to “the quiet times when physics was a pleasant, intellectual subject, not unlike the study of Medieval French in its popular interest.” The atomic scientists felt the guilt that flowed from the sudden deaths of at least one hundred thousand residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; meanwhile the scientists