Oppenheimers Choice by Richard Mason

Author:Richard Mason [Mason, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-02-17T05:00:00+00:00

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CHAPTER SIX

IRREVERSIBLE CHANGE

Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War, wrote in a memorandum to Truman on September 11, 1945:

If the atomic bomb were merely another though more devastating military weapon to be assimilated into our pattern of international relations, it would be one thing. We could then follow the old custom of secrecy and nationalistic military superiority relying on international caution to prescribe the future use of the weapon as we did with gas. But I think the bomb instead constitutes merely a irst step in a new control by man over the forces of nature too revolutionary and dangerous to it into the old concepts.

More laconically, Groves noted in his memoirs that “there has never been an improvement in weapons comparable in degree and in sudden impact to the atomic bomb.”1

The feeling that the world had entered a new era in 1945 was immediate and widespread. The political implications were evident.

One country—for a time—would possess devastating military superiority. Few believed that this could last. In the 1950s there followed international debates about the Cold War balance of terror and extensive discussion, at all levels of sophistication, about the morality of nuclear weapons.2

This chapter is about the irst step into that new era, and its signiicance. How far can we be justiied in thinking that the atomic bomb represented something either unprecedented or irreversible—or perhaps unprecedented because it was irreversible? What is particularly 93

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