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Weinberg happily realized that at Berkeley, “Bohr was God and Oppie was his prophet.�
The fire bombings were no secret. Ordinary Americans read about the raids in their newspapers. Thoughtful people understood that strategic bombing of cities raised profound ethical questions. “I remember Mr. Stimson [the secretary of war] saying to me,� Oppenheimer later remarked, “that he thought it appalling that there should be no protest over the air raids which we were conducting against Japan, which in the case of Tokyo led to such extraordinarily heavy loss of life. He didn’t say that the air strikes shouldn’t be carried on, but he did think there was something wrong with a country
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What distressed Einstein about quantum theory was the notion of indeterminacy. And yet it had been his own work on relativity that had inspired some of Bohr’s insights. Oppenheimer saw this as highly ironic: “He fought with Bohr in a noble and furious way, and he fought with the theory which he had fathered but which he hated. It was not the first time that this had happened in science.�
“Robert could make grown men feel like schoolchildren,� said one friend. “He could make giants feel like cockroaches.� But Strauss was not a student; he was a powerful, thin-skinned, vengeful man easily
Eisenhower had seen the Disarmament Panel report and he found it thoughtful and wise. Highly skeptical of nuclear weapons, he told one of his key White House aides, C. D. Jackson—who had been Henry Luce’s right-hand man at Time-Life—that “atomic weapons strongly favor the side that attacks aggressively and by surprise. This the United States will never do; and let me point out that we never had any of this hysterical fear of any nation until atomic weapons appeared upon the scene.� Later in his presidency, Eisenhower would feel compelled to rebuke a panel of hawkish advisers, caustically
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