When you come right down to it the reason that we did this job is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values…
It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spread of knowledge, and are willing to take the consequences.
The denning trust in the value of knowledge that Oppenheimer ascribes here to science echoes Bohr's succinct formulation of the value of openness: “The very fact that knowledge is itself the basis of civilization points directly to openness as the way to overcome the present crisis.” Long before them Thomas Jefferson, secure in his understanding of the core principles of democracy, professed a similar conviction. “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves,” he wrote late in life; “and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise that control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.”
Oppenheimer went on to examine the political changes he believed the new weapons challenged mankind to explore:
But I think the advent of the atomic bomb and the facts which will get around that they are not too hard to make, that they will be universal if people wish to make them universal, that they will not constitute a real drain on the economy of any strong nation, and that their power of destruction will grow and is already incomparably greater than that of any other weapon — I think these things create a new situation, so new that there is some danger, even some danger in believing, that what we have is a new argument for arrangements, for hopes, that existed before this development took place. By that I mean that much as I like to hear advocates of a world federation, or advocates of a United Nations organization, who have been talking of these things for years — much as I like to hear them say that here is a new argument, I think that they are in part missing the point, because the point is not that atomic weapons constitute a new argument. There have always been good arguments. The point is that atomic weapons constitute also a field, a new field, and a new opportunity for realizing preconditions. I think when people talk of the fact that this is not only a great peril, but a great hope, this is what they should mean…[: ] the simple fact that in this field, because it is a threat, because it is a peril… there exists a possibility of realizing, of beginning to realize, those changes which are needed if there is to be any peace.
Those are very far-reaching changes. They are changes in the relations between nations, not only in spirit, not only in law, but also in conception and feeling. I don't know which of these is prior; they must all work together, and only the gradual interaction of one or the other can make a reality. I don't agree with those who say the first step is to have a structure of international law. I don't agree with those who say the only thing is to have friendly feelings. All of these things will be involved. I think it is true to say that atomic weapons are a peril which affects everyone in the world, and in that sense a completely common problem, as common a problem as it was for the Allies to defeat the Nazis.
Solving that common problem, he continued, could serve as “a pilot plant for a new type of international collaboration”:
I speak of it as a pilot plant because it is quite clear that the control of atomic weapons cannot be in itself the unique end of such operation. The only unique end can be a world that is united, and a world in which war will not occur.
Half a century of circumscribed and often cynical negotiations for arms control has not altered Oppenheimer's essential point, which was Bohr's hopeful vision first of the complementarity of the bomb.
Next he discussed what Bohr would have called the necessity of renunciation. Oppenheimer offered an American analogy:
The one point I want to hammer home is what an enormous change in spirit is involved. There are things which we hold very dear, and I think rightly hold very dear; I would say that the word democracy perhaps stood for some of them as well as any other word. There are many parts of the world in which there is no democracy. There are other things which we hold dear, and which we rightly should. And when I speak of a new spirit in international affairs I mean that even to these deepest of things which we cherish, and for which Americans have been willing to die — and certainly most of us would be willing to die — even in those deepest things, we realize that there is something more profound than that; namely, the common bond with other men everywhere. It is only if you do that that this makes sense; because if you approach the problem and say, “We know what is right and we would like to use the atomic bomb to persuade you to agree with us,” then you are in a very weak position…
I want to express the utmost sympathy with the people who have to grapple with this problem and in the strongest terms to urge you not to underestimate its difficulty. I can think of an analogy…: in the days in the first half of the nineteenth century there were many people, mostly in the North, but some in the South, who thought that there was no evil on earth more degrading than human slavery, and nothing that they would more willingly devote their lives to than its eradication. Always when I was young I wondered why it was that when Lincoln was President he did not declare that the war against the South, when it broke out, was a war that slavery should be abolished, that this was the central point, the rallying point, of that war. Lincoln was severely criticized by many of the Abolitionists as you know, by many then called radicals, because he seemed to be waging a war which did not hit the thing that was most important. But Lincoln realized, and I have only in the last months come to appreciate the depth and wisdom of it, that beyond the issue of slavery was the issue of the community of the people of this country, and the issue of the Union… In order to preserve the Union Lincoln had to subordinate the immediate problem of the eradication of slavery — and trust- and I think if he had had his way it would have gone so — to the conflict of these ideas in a united people to eradicate it.
For such understanding Oppenheimer celebrated Bohr, “who was here so much during the difficult days, who had many discussions with us, and who helped us reach the conclusion [that a universal renunciation of the use of force] was not only a desirable solution, but that it was the unique solution, that there were no other alternatives.”
Little more in Oppenheimer's talk that stormy night carries weight down the years: practical matters of legislation, counsel to his fellow scientists to accept responsibility for the consequences of their work. In closing he delivered a final burst of realism about a timetable for change:
I'm not sure that the greatest opportunities for progress do not lie somewhat further in the future than I had for a long time thought…
The plain fact is that in the actual world, and with the actual people in it, it has taken time, and it may take longer, to understand what this is all about. And I'm not sure, as I have said before, that in other lands it won't take longer than it does in this country.
These basic questions engaged men in 1945; they engage us still, as if the clock had stopped while only the machinery of armament with terrible and terribly more terrible weapons has kept on running.
Edward Teller returned to Los Alamos in April 1946 to chair a secret conference. Its purpose, according to a subsequent report, was “to review work that has been done on the Super for completeness and accuracy and to make suggestions concerning further work that would be needed in this field if actual construction and test of the Super were planned.” John von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam and Norris Bradbury attended the conference, as did Emil Konopinski, John Manley, Philip Morrison, Canadian theoretician J. Carson Mark and a crowd of other participants. One whose presence would vitally affect U.S. nuclear weapons policy later was Klaus Fuchs.
The Super conference examined only one design for a thermonuclear weapon, the design Teller and his group had developed during the war, the so-called classical Super, with an estimated explosive force of 10 million tons
