was my mother-in-law, Gisela Jung. She died in March 2003. A few sentences of this review have been rewritten to avoid overlap with the review of Yuri Manin’s
Mathematics and Physics
( Chapter 14 ).
II
War and Peace
7
BOMBS AND POTATOES
ON OCTOBER 16 , 1945 , General Leslie R. Groves presented J. Robert Oppenheimer with a certificate from the secretary of war, expressing the appreciation of the government for the work of the Los Alamos Laboratory. Oppenheimer responded with the following speech:
It is with appreciation and gratitude that I accept from you this scroll for the Los Alamos Laboratory, for the men and women whose work and whose hearts have made it. It is our hope that in years to come we may look at this scroll, and all that it signifies, with pride.
Today that pride must be tempered with a profound concern. If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.
The peoples of this world must unite, or they will perish. This war, that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand. Other men have spoken them, in other times, of other wars, of other weapons. They have not prevailed. There are some, misled by a false sense of human history, who holdthat they will not prevail today. It is not for us to believe that. By our works we are committed, committed to a world united, before this common peril, in law, and in humanity.
On the one side, these words of Oppenheimer. On the other side, memories of England in 1939. In 1939 in England, the younger generation was very sure that mankind must unite or perish. We had not the slightest confidence that anything worth preserving would survive the impending war against Hitler. The folk memory of England was dominated by the unendurable barbarities of World War I, and none of us could believe that World War II would be less brutal or less demoralizing. It was frequently predicted that as World War I had led to the collapse of society and the triumph of Bolshevism in Russia, so World War II would have the same effect in England.
When Neville Chamberlain declared war on Hitler in 1939, one of his first acts was to empty London hospitals of their patients. Chamberlain expected catastrophic air attacks to begin immediately; the hospitals were asked to be ready to handle 250,000 civilian casualties within the first two weeks, besides another 250,000 people who were expected to become permanently insane. These numbers were not based on fantasy; they were the estimates of military experts who extrapolated to the capability of the 1939 Luftwaffe the results achieved by much smaller forces in Spain and Ethiopia. The experts did not all agree on these numbers, but they agreed on the general order of magnitude. The public, fed by lurid newspaper and magazine articles, tended to view the approaching war in even more apocalyptic terms.
It was obvious to us young people in 1939 that war and surrender to Hitler were both unacceptable, both offering to us no substantial hope for the future. To escape from this dilemma, many of us took refuge in the gospel of Gandhi, believing that a nonviolent resistance to evil could defend our ideals without destroying them in the process.The English pacifist movement of the late 1930s has not been kindly treated by history, but it was in fact neither cowardly nor muddleheaded. We made only one mistake; none of us in those days could imagine that England would survive six years of war against Hitler, achieve most of the political objectives for which the war had been fought, suffer only one third the casualties that we had had in World War I, avoid the massive and indiscriminate use of poison gas and biological weapons, and finally emerge into a world in which our moral and humane values were largely intact.
Mathematics and Physics
( Chapter 14 ).
II
War and Peace
7
BOMBS AND POTATOES
ON OCTOBER 16 , 1945 , General Leslie R. Groves presented J. Robert Oppenheimer with a certificate from the secretary of war, expressing the appreciation of the government for the work of the Los Alamos Laboratory. Oppenheimer responded with the following speech:
It is with appreciation and gratitude that I accept from you this scroll for the Los Alamos Laboratory, for the men and women whose work and whose hearts have made it. It is our hope that in years to come we may look at this scroll, and all that it signifies, with pride.
Today that pride must be tempered with a profound concern. If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.
The peoples of this world must unite, or they will perish. This war, that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand. Other men have spoken them, in other times, of other wars, of other weapons. They have not prevailed. There are some, misled by a false sense of human history, who holdthat they will not prevail today. It is not for us to believe that. By our works we are committed, committed to a world united, before this common peril, in law, and in humanity.
On the one side, these words of Oppenheimer. On the other side, memories of England in 1939. In 1939 in England, the younger generation was very sure that mankind must unite or perish. We had not the slightest confidence that anything worth preserving would survive the impending war against Hitler. The folk memory of England was dominated by the unendurable barbarities of World War I, and none of us could believe that World War II would be less brutal or less demoralizing. It was frequently predicted that as World War I had led to the collapse of society and the triumph of Bolshevism in Russia, so World War II would have the same effect in England.
When Neville Chamberlain declared war on Hitler in 1939, one of his first acts was to empty London hospitals of their patients. Chamberlain expected catastrophic air attacks to begin immediately; the hospitals were asked to be ready to handle 250,000 civilian casualties within the first two weeks, besides another 250,000 people who were expected to become permanently insane. These numbers were not based on fantasy; they were the estimates of military experts who extrapolated to the capability of the 1939 Luftwaffe the results achieved by much smaller forces in Spain and Ethiopia. The experts did not all agree on these numbers, but they agreed on the general order of magnitude. The public, fed by lurid newspaper and magazine articles, tended to view the approaching war in even more apocalyptic terms.
It was obvious to us young people in 1939 that war and surrender to Hitler were both unacceptable, both offering to us no substantial hope for the future. To escape from this dilemma, many of us took refuge in the gospel of Gandhi, believing that a nonviolent resistance to evil could defend our ideals without destroying them in the process.The English pacifist movement of the late 1930s has not been kindly treated by history, but it was in fact neither cowardly nor muddleheaded. We made only one mistake; none of us in those days could imagine that England would survive six years of war against Hitler, achieve most of the political objectives for which the war had been fought, suffer only one third the casualties that we had had in World War I, avoid the massive and indiscriminate use of poison gas and biological weapons, and finally emerge into a world in which our moral and humane values were largely intact.
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