Q: What is significant about the development of strategic bombing towards
the end of the war, and more specifically the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki? Why do those events change the rest of the history of the twentieth
century?
RR: Well, at a high philosophic level, 1945 marked a turning point in human
history. For the first time, the human race had developed the means to destroy
itself. On a slightly lower level, one could say the nation state could no
longer freely choose to go to war to aggrandize its power or to settle
disputes. Science had handed the nation state a poisoned apple, if you will,
the poisoned apple being the ability to have an essentially infinite amount of
explosive power. Even a small country could have such terrible power. When
you have an infinite amount of explosives, you can't have a contest that's
decidable. The other side as much destructive force to destroy you as you have
to destroy it. So the end result is a stalemate. And in a way, the last 50
years have simply been a playing out of that end game, of that particular chess
game.
Q: When the news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki comes back to the United States,
it signifies the end of the war. There's celebration and a sense of
accomplishment too, among the scientists at Los Alamos. But then very quickly
a more somber note takes hold.
RR: It had been a long and terrible war. And the idea that two bombs destroying
two cities could bring deliverance from that horror was an immense relief to
everyone. We had tens of thousands of soldiers massing on Okinawa to invade
Japan. We had taken terrible casualties at Okinawa, and we were clear that we
would take even more terrible casualties as the Japanese ferociously defended
their homelands. So these bombs seemed like a terrible shock, a slap in the
face to wake up the enemy to the fact of their defeat, because they had lost
the war but they wouldn't stop fighting. And it was a terrible frustration,
and it caused great anger. I think people shouldn't forget where those bombs
were in that history, because it's easy now to say we shouldn't have bombed
those cities. But it was deliverance for tens and thousands of young American
men who were prepared to die to finish this war.
Nevertheless, when the news came back to Los Alamos and Chicago and the other
places where the Manhattan Project scientists were working. There was
inevitably a sense of horror. They hadn't been on the front lines. They
weren't hardened to the fact of killing. And the realization that there, as
one of them said, our beautiful physics, which had seemed like such an almost
religious science commitment before the war, should have been put into the
deepest and darkest part of human existence, really horrified them.
Oppenheimer in particular was, as he said later when he was asked if he had
recriminations, personal feelings about the atomic bombing, he said,
"Terribly." And he did.
So they were faced with the hope on the one hand, as they had dreamed all
along, and as they had rationalized this work of making weapons of mass
destruction, they had the hope that this would mean the end of war forever, or
at least of world scale war. And in that, they were right. It did. But at
the same time, it was a terrible thing to have signed one's name to.
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