1700) We scientists are clever - too clever - are you not satisfied? Is four square miles in one bomb not enough? Men are still thinking. Just tell us how big you want it.

Richard Feynman
personal note, undated
quoted by James Gleick in
Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992)
quoted by Richard Rhodes in
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995)

1701) I don't think we ought to use this thing [the atomic bomb] unless we absolutely have to. It is a terrible thing to order the use of something like that [...] that is so terribly destructive, destructive beyond anything we gave ever had. You have got to understand that this isn't a military weapon [...] It is used to wipe out woman and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses. So we have got to treat this differently from rifles and cannon and ordinary things like that.

Harry S. Truman
in a meeting with Atomic Energy Commission
commissioners and defense officials (7/21/1948)
quoted by David E. Lilienthal,
first chairman of the AEC, in
The Atomic Energy Years, 1945-1950 (1964)
quoted by Richard Rhodes in
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995)

1702) [Q]uite contrary to the way I thought things were [...] you don't do staff work and then make a decision. You make a decision and then do staff work.

John H. Manley
physicist, secretary to the General Advisory Committee
to the Atomic Energy Commission
quoted in the transcript of a videotaped conference,
"The H-bomb decision," held at Princeton University
quoted by Richard Rhodes in
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995)

1703) [Science is] the gradual removal of prejudices.

Neils Bohr
Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (1958)
quoted by Richard Rhodes in
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995)

1704) Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful.

Robert Oppenheimer
quoted by Richard Rhodes in
Looking for America (1979)
quoted by Richard Rhodes in
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995)

1705) Fundamentally, and in the long run, the problem which is posed by the release of atomic energy is a problem of the ability of the human race to govern itself without war. There is no permanent method of excising atomic energy from our affairs, now that men know that it can be released. Even if some reasonably complete international control of atomic energy should be established, knowledge would persist, and it is hard to see how there could be any major war in which one side or another would not eventually use and make atomic bombs. In this respect the problem of armaments was permanently and drastically altered in 1945.

Robert Oppenheimer, et al.
conclusion of a 1952 panel on disarmament,
quoted by McGeorge Bundy in
"Early Thoughts on Controlling the Nuclear Arms Race"
International Security (Fall 1982)
quoted by Richard Rhodes in
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995)

1706) I was indignant. Here was a man [Robert Oppenheimer] who had done so greatly for his country. A wonderful representative. He was forgiven the atomic bomb. Crowds followed him. He was a man of peace. And they destroyed this man. A small, mean group. There were scientists among them. One reason for doing it might be envy. Another might be personal dislike. A thirst, a genuine fear of communism. He was an aesthete. I don't think he was a security risk. I do think he walked along the edge of a precipice. He didn't pay enough attention to the outward symbols. He was a very American person of a certain kind. A certain kind of intellectual, aesthetic person of the upper middle classes. [...] [In 1955] we had this [international] conference on the peaceful uses of atomic energy. And [AEC Chairman] Lewis Strauss asked me, whom should we have for president of this conference? And I said, I guess we killed Cock Robin.

I.I. Rabi
physicist, on the destruction of Robert Oppenheimer
interviewed by Bill Moyers in
A Walk Through the Twentieth Century
quoted by Richard Rhodes in
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995)

1707) Edward Teller became the Richard Nixon of American science - dark, brooding, indefatigable.

Richard Rhodes
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995)

1708) If real political leaders understood from one end of the Cold War to the other that even one hydrogen bomb was sufficient deterrence, why did they allow the arms race to devour the wealth of the nation while it increased the risk of an accidental Armageddon? In 1982, political scientist Miroslav Nincic examined the economics of the arms race and discovered that it was hardly a race at all; US and Soviet levels of defense spending were only weakly coupled at best. Far more influential on the US side were such domestic political phenomena as competition among the military services, coalitions of scientific and industrial organizations promoting new technologies, the pressure of "defense" as a political issue and defense spending to prime the economic pump, particularly in election years. Similar patterns obtained along somewhat different lines for the Soviet command economy. "The arms race," Nincic summarized, "is embedded in circumstances proper to the domestic political and economic systems of the superpowers in addition to dynamics inherent in the interaction between the two nations. [...] Strategic doctrines are designed, in large part, to justify the weaponry that the arms race has imposed on both the United States and the Soviet Union."

Richard Rhodes
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995)
quoting Miroslav Nincic
The Arms Race (1982)

1709) By one estimate that properly counts delivery systems as well as weapons, [the arms race] cost the United States $4 trillion - roughly the US national debt in 1994. Soviet costs were comparable and were decisive in the decline of the Soviet economy that triggered the USSR's collapse. Cold warriors have argued from that fact that spending the Soviet Union into bankruptcy itself justifies the arms race. Their argument overlooks the inconvenient reality that the expense of the arms race contributed to US decline as well, decline evident in an oppressive national debt, in decaying infrastructure and social and educational neglect. The potlach theory of the arms race also overlooks the unconscionable risk both superpowers took of omnicidal war.

Richard Rhodes
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995)