About Me
I headed the Manhattan project - a US led syndicate of scientists and physicists working in a race against time to develop an atomic bomb before the Nazis. The success of our experiments, conducted in top secrecy, culminated in the bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whilst it is argued by some modern-day revisionists to have been a violent war crime, it is widely credited as having slapped the world in the face and awakened it to a new dawn, ending the war that had taken so many millions of lives.
Of our first trial detonation in Alamogordo, New Mexico - the culmination of months of work developing a bomb so powerful as to end any pretence of war, I had this to say:
"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that one way or another."
It was my maths...my calculations...the scribblings on my board...that led to the creation of the bomb.
The magnitude of this courses through my veins.
Whilst I do not regret the decision to bomb Nagasaki and Hiroshima - for I remember Guernica, Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, Dachau, Warsaw - I am still aware of the terrifying new age that we scientists had complicitly helped set about in motion.
In my later years, of the Manhattan Project I had this to say:
"In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."
Who would have thought that physicists, scientists - the mundane wearers of white coats - should find themselves at the very epicentre of man's anguished wrestling with sin, and responsibility.
