Nova, 703. A is for Adam, B is for a bomb. WGBH-TV, Boston.
This program was produced by WGBH Boston, which is solely responsible for its content.
Major funding for Nova is provided by this station and by other public television stations.
Additional funding is provided by grants from TRW and the National Science Foundation.
A stands for atom. It is so small, no one has ever seen it at all.
B stands for bombs. The bombs are much bigger. So, brother, do not be too fast on the trigger.
1954, and the U.S. prepared to set off a nuclear explosion that would dwarf the atomic blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the category of small firecrackers.
The hydrogen bomb unleashing the terrible powers of the sun lay in waiting for the final seconds of the countdown.
The atomic explosion had registered a force exceeding 10 million tons of TNT, 500 times the magnitude of the Hiroshima bomb.
Its ominous cloud rose to a record height of better than 20 miles above the Earth's surface.
Billions of particles of painful death and suffering swirled about within that horrible mushroom.
Dr. Edward Teller has been called the father of the hydrogen bomb.
He is said to have been a model for the character Dr. Strangelove.
Dr. Teller is also acclaimed as a scientific genius, a man of immense charm, humor, intelligence, and energy.
Edward Teller is the man most singly responsible for developing the hydrogen bomb for our country.
The hydrogen bombs stockpiled in the world today have the equivalent force to annihilate three million individual cities the size of Hiroshima.
For Dr. Edward Teller, such nuclear force is the means to preserve peace.
Age has become a most ominous letter.
It means something bigger, if not something better.
I think Edward Teller is an outstanding scientist.
Today, just as he was in the 30s, there are very few people in the world who have a record of contributions as long and with as high quality as Teller.
To the extent of the knowledge that I have, I would say that he is the most dangerous scientist in the country and the one that is doing the most harm to future generations of human beings.
He was always, I felt, I remember when I first met him, he was doing science for fun rather than for glory, and that was what attracted me to him in the first place.
He can be warm, considerate, humorous, and thoughtful.
If I didn't disagree with him on so many profound issues, I would be enormously fond of him.
1908, Edward Teller is born in Budapest into a bourgeois Jewish family.
This is the era of Einstein, Freud, Kafka, and Rasputin.
Teller is six when the First World War erupts.
In four long years, 10 million people are killed.
One hydrogen bomb could achieve this end in a fraction of a second.
After the turmoil of the war and the aftermath of Hungarian communism and fascism, Teller emerges as a brilliant science student and goes to study in Germany, then the center of modern physics.
In Munich, his right foot is severed in a street accident.
Recovering, he gets his PhD at Leipzig in 1928, working with Heisenberg, who will later attempt to develop the atomic bomb for Hitler.
Virtually oblivious to the surrounding political chaos, Teller enjoys the company of the greatest physicists of the time.
In 1933, and Hitler is invited to take power.
Edward Teller, both avoiding the Nazis and pursuing his scientific career, leaves Germany.
In 1935, newly married and enticed by a full professorship, he arrives in America, rubbing shoulders with many refugee scientists from Europe.
Teller, still in his twenties, has an international scientific reputation, friends, and security.
He can equate America with the good life.
In 1939, as war threatens, German scientists split the atom.
The implication, an atomic bomb of immeasurable destructive force, might be devised for Europe's latest maniac.
In America, in response to the danger, Albert Einstein is approached by Leo Szilard and other scientists to warn Roosevelt of the atomic threat and urge him to develop the atomic bomb.
I entered history as Szilard's chauffeur, trying to find Einstein at the northern tip of Long Island.
Einstein received us in slippers, gave Szilard and his chauffeur some tea, read the letter, and signed it.
But now war engulfs Europe, and Teller is reflecting on his position when...
For the first and only time, I heard Roosevelt speak. He talked about the responsibility of the scientists.
If the scientists in the free world will not help make weapons, then freedom will cease to exist.
I felt that Roosevelt was speaking to me.
I knew that he saw a letter recommending the development of atomic explosives.
The speech was only 20 minutes long. It seemed much longer to me.
At the end of it, my mind was made up, and I never changed my mind since.
In 1940, atomic research starts at Columbia University.
Here, Enrico Fermi invokes a terrible vision in Teller's mind.
Beyond the proposed atomic fission bomb, a cataclysmically more destructive hydrogen fusion bomb.
F stands for fission. That is what things do when they get wobbly and big and must split in two.
And just to compound the atomic confusion, what fission has done may be undone by fusion.
The concept of the hydrogen fusion bomb will grow into an obsession for Teller and drive him to bitter conflict.
The beginning, though, seemed innocent enough.
Next Sunday, we went for a walk, the Fermis and the Tellers.
And I explained to Enrico why a hydrogen bomb never could be made.
And he believed me. Since that time, I changed my opinion several times.
But now there is Pearl Harbor.
Atomic research is accelerated and moves to the University of Chicago and Teller with it.
Here, in December 1942, successful experiments clear the way for an attempt to build the first atomic bomb.
For safety and security, the work will be done in the wilderness of New Mexico, at Los Alamos.
Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant American physicist, will lead the effort, his well-known pre-war leftist connections forgiven.
The laboratory moves to Los Alamos from Chicago.
Now, Edward Teller expects to work on his particular vision, the hydrogen bomb, feeling that Oppenheimer had agreed.
That was my clear impression. In fact, I understand that Oppenheimer used the idea of the hydrogen bomb
in order to show that a separate establishment, separate from the big laboratory in Chicago, was necessary.
Yet Los Alamos was in a desperate race to beat the Nazis to the atomic bomb.
The hydrogen bomb could only be secondary. It anyway required an atomic bomb to trigger it.
The priorities were obvious.
For the first time, I was exposed to a situation where the work had to be organized.
I now understand that it had to be organized.
Our director, Oppenheimer, introduced that organization in a really remarkably tactful and reasonable way.
But this, at that time, I did not understand.
At that time, Oppenheimer and Teller were in conflict over the hydrogen bomb.
And Teller tried, it seems, both to avoid atomic bomb work and to entice others into a hydrogen bomb project.
Teller at Los Alamos had some very violent conflicts with Oppenheimer on just the subject of the super versus atom bomb.
He felt that the project should concentrate already then on thinking and inventing what was then called the super, which is the hydrogen bomb.
He tried to persuade me that my division should essentially partly at least occupy itself with this project,
which I couldn't see at all because I was wondering whether even atom bomb will come in time to have any impact on the war.
Indeed, in May 1945, devastated by three million tons of explosives, the equivalent of one small hydrogen bomb, Germany surrenders.
Only in July is the first atomic bomb ready to be tested in New Mexico at Jornado del Muerto, the trail of death.
But there was still the question, would it work?
The first atomic explosion was created under Robert Oppenheimer's direction.
This is how he later spoke of it.
We knew the world would not be the same.
Few people laughed, few people cried, most people were silent.
I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
I suppose we all thought that one way or another.
Three weeks later, the first atomic bomb is to be dropped on a Japanese city.
Now most scientists are eager to abandon the physics of destruction and return to pure science.
But Edward Teller, consumed by the need to develop his concept of the 1,000 times more destructive hydrogen bomb,
is prepared to stay at Los Alamos, provided they accept his terms.
Oppenheimer resigned as director.
His successor Bradbury asked me to stay on.
I told him that I will, if one of two conditions are satisfied.
Either if we work on the hydrogen bomb, or if that is excluded,
if we commit ourselves to 12 tests per year on the atomic bomb to improve that.
Bradbury said he would like to do both, but in the present political climate neither is possible.
That made it clear to me that work in Los Alamos would go at a snail's pace, if at all.
And so I left.
He returns to the University of Chicago, to pure science, but he also develops close links with the military and Congress,
urging a stronger nuclear defense against his perception of a communist menace.
But Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, the man who influences nuclear weapons policy and can thwart Teller's hopes,
sits on three dozen committees and chairs the GAC, the General Advisory Committee, of the Atomic Energy Commission.
He was a national hero. He was consulted by all the branches of the government.
He was deeply involved in UN resolutions of great importance.
And there's no question that he was extraordinary.
He was far and away the most influential scientist in the country, perhaps in the world.
But in the world of 1949, Russia explodes her first atomic bomb.
Must America now escalate beyond the atomic bomb to Edward Teller's apocalyptic hydrogen bomb?
Oppenheimer's GAC holds a meeting, and in a watershed decision, they reject a crash program on the hydrogen bomb.
How did Teller react?
I did not do more than worry and think.
Until two friends, Lawrence and Alvarez, came to me, inquired about the status of the hydrogen bomb,
and pointed out to me that it is my duty to go ahead.
Lawrence and Alvarez lobby in Washington for a crash program on the basis that Teller was ready and able to develop his bomb.
In the first place, it was not Teller's bomb at that time.
Secondly, in 1949, nobody really knew how to build a thermonuclear weapon.
There were those who believed it might be possible, but we didn't really know how to build it.
Third, it was the feeling of the General Advisory Committee that there was no need militarily for that weapon.
And fourth, as expressed in both the majority and minority reports of the General Advisory Committee,
there was a strong feeling that it was morally wrong to develop that weapon.
It was simply one of unlimited destructive power, and since it was not needed, it was wrong.
At that time, the GAC accepted the feasibility, at least implicitly accepted the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb.
They protested merely on moral grounds, only after the president has overridden their objections.
Then the argument surfaced that it could not be done anyway. It was a peculiar situation.
The actual GAC statement describes the bomb as neither technically promising nor militarily appropriate,
and adds that given its unlimited power, it carries much further than the atomic bomb itself,
the policy of exterminating civilian populations.
But in Washington, Teller and his friends lobby to overturn these objections
and seek support for a crash hydrogen bomb program.
He is extremely impressive when he is in a witness stand with his bushy eyebrows.
I wish I could grow something like that myself.
Very impressive appearance. He is very eloquent in the way he speaks.
He has a passion in his voice, which is extremely effective on impressionable politicians.
I had to use every trick in the book, very particularly, to get to influential people and tell them the truth.
To get to them needed tricks. To tell them the truth at that time turned out relatively easy.
They checked and agreed.
Millions of freedom-loving men throughout the world by destroying the enemy's war-making capacity.
This is the time of the raging Cold War and heroic Air Force posturing.
Our strategic air command is ready to strike the enemy at the heart of its war-making capacity.
It is the perfect marketing opportunity for the claim that the hydrogen bomb is necessary and practical.
The question of extending the policy of exterminating civilian populations remains merely moral.
It is the right product at the right time, and it is packaged in the unsubstantiated claim that the Russians might already be ahead.
Truman has no political alternative but to overturn the GAC recommendation.
But in 1950, were bombs a thousand times more destructive than the Hiroshima one strategically necessary?
I believe that there was no pressure on national security for the development of hydrogen weapons in 1950.
We had the capability of building and delivering large fission bombs that could have done more than an adequate amount of damage.
I would greatly have preferred an extreme effort being made to prevent the development of hydrogen weapons on either side.
Nevertheless, Teller heads back triumphantly to Los Alamos to push his hydrogen bomb program ahead.
But now, the mathematician Stanislas Ulam shows that Teller's calculations could not produce a workable bomb.
He thought Teller was sort of, I don't like to use the word maniac, but monomaniac without the maniac intended.
It's too single-minded for Ulam's taste, and Ulam I think found this, let's say, as amusing.
Yet did an idea of Ulam's trigger a breakthrough for Teller?
Ulam did contribute by calculations in a valuable way.
It is also true that he and I were not friends.
Things were not going swimmingly in Teller's direction.
Ulam brought an idea which allowed things to sort of start with a fresh start and on a much more hopeful basis.
The success of this program would lead to Edward Teller's being hailed as the father of the hydrogen bomb.
It's somewhat flippantly I've said more than once that actually it's wrong to call him the father of the hydrogen bomb.
He should be called the mother of the hydrogen bomb because it was Stan Ulam who had the original idea.
He inseminated Teller. Teller, therefore, produced the hydrogen bomb.
Questions of collaboration between people, whose idea came from whom, are questions of detailed priority which I prefer not to discuss.
It's hard to know who thought what at what time.
Yet even while there is now progress to a workable bomb, Teller is unhappy at Los Alamos and he starts to agitate for a weapons laboratory of his own.
Teller wanted a second lab because he quarreled with the people running Los Alamos, accused them of sluggishness and inactivity,
and he wanted to have a lab in which he would have the control of.
But Robert Oppenheimer and the GAC once again vote down a Teller initiative.
And once again, Teller sets out to challenge Oppenheimer's power.
One of my friends, then scientific advisor of the Air Force, Dave Griggs, an excellent man, knew of my hopes and he came to me.
Unfortunately, he died a few years ago of a heart attack.
He took me to Jimmy Doolittle. You may have heard of him.
He took me to the Secretary of Air. He took me to the Secretary of Defense.
Only two weeks before that last interview, the Secretary of Defense wrote a memo, We don't need a second laboratory.
After I was allowed to talk to him, he wrote another memo, We need a second laboratory.
He did not give any reasons. He just said, I changed my mind and I admired him for it.
The new laboratory is built at Livermore in California, a monument to Teller's ambition and to his second victory over Oppenheimer.
Minus 15 seconds.
At this time in 1952, Los Alamos is pushing ahead with Teller's hydrogen bomb program, continuing it after Teller has left.
It is they who actually test the new bomb concept.
Edward Teller is not at this test, but observing the effect on a seismograph in California, he sends out a wire reading, It's a boy.
Meanwhile, Robert Oppenheimer is challenging the accepted Cold War defense attitudes.
He argues that the inflexible policy of massive nuclear retaliation should be reassessed.
That bigger bombs do not automatically mean a better defense.
And this is leading him into trouble with the new Republican administration, the military, the emergent McCarthy and the FBI.
Trouble which will culminate in 1954 with the hero scientist being charged at a witch hunt hearing with his long known previous communist contacts and with having delayed the hydrogen bomb program.
Edward Teller becomes involved when the FBI digs up, along with other well known evidence, a two year old interview with Teller about Oppenheimer and his opposition to the hydrogen bomb.
The transcript indicates that Teller had then said Oppenheimer's opposition to the hydrogen bomb is not due to any subversive reasons, but rather to a combination of reasons,
including personal vanity in not desiring to see his Oppenheimer's work on the atomic bomb done better on the hydrogen bomb.
I told the FBI man that Oppenheimer and I differ sharply on the question of the hydrogen bomb.
This I may have said with some emphasis, but I am very sure that I added, and this is in the FBI files, that I considered Oppenheimer to have every right to express his opinion what should be done concerning the hydrogen bomb.
The transcript indicates that Teller also said he would do almost anything to see Oppenheimer separated from the General Advisory Committee,
because of Oppenheimer's poor advice and policies regarding national preparedness and because of his delaying of the development of the hydrogen bomb.
But at the time of the hearings, that was a matter of the past. The hydrogen bomb succeeded. Another important issue, to establish a new laboratory to which Oppenheimer was opposed,
had been decided against the advice of Oppenheimer. I was, at the time of the hearings, no longer particularly interested whether Oppenheimer stayed or did not stay on the General Advisory Committee.
Even so, when called to the hearings, Teller testifies against Oppenheimer.
I said I have confidence in the loyalty of Oppenheimer, but Oppenheimer is a complicated individual.
I don't understand his actions. I wish that the security of our country was in hands which I understood better and therefore trusted more.
This, I believe, is an almost literal quote, if not completely literal.
I think the reason a substantial part of the scientific community felt so strongly about his testimony was that it was possible to draw an inference that Oppenheimer's advice should no longer be sought
because it disagreed with the position which Edward himself was advocating with regard to the development of thermonuclear weapons and his interpretation of Oppenheimer's role in that area.
It's very complicated. Other scientists testified against Oppenheimer, but there's no question that Teller's testimony was the most devastating and excited the greatest amount of wrath.
I was under oath. That limits one's testimony in a very severe manner. I did not violate my oath. I did not want to testify. I could have testified differently, not much differently.
He thought that Oppenheimer was somehow a Machiavelli who had far more influence than he really had in the real world.
Teller must have had somehow the feeling that if he could once destroy Oppenheimer's political power that somehow things would be all right.
At that time Oppenheimer hardly had any political power to destroy.
I think it was very sad that he did this. I don't know why. In fact, he did so. Whether he would now on second thoughts have tried to avoid it, I have no idea.
But it hurt Oppenheimer. It enraged many people and saddened others and gave Teller a problem which I expect he still on occasion finds he must live with.
My wife was very badly hurt. By our old friends we were practically ostracized. She became sick. I did not.
I managed to retain a very few friends and acquire some new ones and they are still my friends.
Oppenheimer was a great physicist. He and I had some political disagreements. These are a matter of the past.
We today are facing in my opinion the most serious crisis in the history of the United States due to many weaknesses, due to many mistakes.
If we prefer now to talk about the past that did lead to this unity rather than about the future, which is a strong reason for us to unite, we are doing a very wrong thing.
Oppenheimer was a great physicist. He and I had some political disagreements. These are a matter of the past.
After the hearings, Teller's life changes course. Ostracized by much of the scientific community, he is embraced by the military, by industry, and by congressional hawks.
He influences the official 50s policy of massive nuclear capability and he becomes a hero of the establishment media.
Edward Teller makes the cover of Time. At Livermore, he drives his laboratory into competition with Los Alamos, generating a virtual arms race in what have been called new, often Baroque, and sometimes Rococo varieties of nuclear weapons.
Efficiency is increased so that a single bomb can kill 10 million men, women, and children at 12 cents a head.
Each new bomb has to be tested, and each new test produces radioactive fallout which spreads around the world.
The radioactivity affecting the human life cycle measurably increases. Sometimes, as with the Fortunate Dragon at the earlier bikini test, there is swift and obvious injury.
Three hours after the H-bomb had been detonated, a downpour of radioactive ash descended on the Fortunate Dragon and its crew of 23.
It was three days more before the ship and its contaminated crew and fishing catch sailed into port. By that time, the men suffered from the beginning symptoms of deadly radiation poisoning.
The arguments against the use and testing of atomic weapons boiled up into a global debate.
A vast movement builds against nuclear testing, but Teller still insists that tests are necessary for national security and speaks out against the proposed test ban treaty.
Not to ratify the treaty would be a mistake. But to ratify the treaty would be an immeasurably bigger mistake.
But politics are changing, and as the Cold War wanes, Teller's views become less fashionable, and a limited test ban agreement is signed.
The limited test ban agreement drove testing underground.
That deprived us from the knowledge as to what the Russians are doing. Prior to that agreement, we could gather the products of their explosions and thereby find out approximately what they are doing.
Furthermore, the limited test ban agreement deprives us from much of the information about effects of atomic explosions.
As Teller loses influence in government, he turns more and more to industry, redirecting his explosive ideas into non-military areas.
The leading advocate of learning to love the bomb as a peaceful explosive is Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb.
This explosion underground in New Mexico was the first demonstration of Teller's thesis that bombs can be used for something other than war.
It demonstrated that if you blow up an H-bomb underground, you get a very big cavern.
The next step was to find some use for a big cavern.
This was the next step six years later, squeezing natural gas out of otherwise impervious rocks by blowing a big hole in the rocks with an H-bomb.
Everything worked as planned. The bomb went off and the gas was squeezed out.
There is one problem. The product of this demonstration, the gas, is so radioactive that it cannot be marketed.
But Dr. Teller remains convinced that the problems of converting nuclear bombs to peaceful uses can be solved.
He promoted the Colorado natural gas venture both publicly and behind the scenes.
Teller becomes energy advisor to Governor Nelson Rockefeller.
To his theme of nuclear supremacy, Teller adds that of energy self-sufficiency.
I have written a book about it, Energy from Heaven and Earth, using every possible form of energy.
Today, for instance, nuclear energy is a small percentage.
It contributes two or three percent of our total energy.
In the year 2000, being optimistic, it could contribute almost as much as 20 percent.
Solar energy, under the very best conditions, will contribute a little less than what nuclear energy could contribute.
But we could radically decrease our dependence on oil and on gas.
I think the energy problem is much more complicated and perhaps more intractable than Dr. Teller would like to believe.
I think his solution to the energy problem is to build more of every source one can think of simultaneously
and to bludgeon the energy problem into submission with additional supplies, new energy sources.
I think this is an enormous oversimplification, a very naive view of what the energy problem is really all about.
Edward Teller sees, as do others, America powered by energy, dependent on an energy source that is dwindling.
And his policy would provide for alternate energy sources, sources from shale oil, synthetics from coal, and nuclear power.
Those are what we have. We know where they are. We ought to go get them. It's right.
And in the sense of right and wrong, Edward would choose that course.
In the face of the very difficult set of questions associated with equity, he would go ahead and pay the price.
Three Mile Island, is that the price that must be paid?
Three Mile Island was a terrible accident. It caused damage to the tune of $500 million.
It did not kill anybody. In the meantime, many accidents happened where lots of people were killed, not nuclear.
Three Mile Island proved two things.
A reactor can be most stupidly mishandled. Mishandled with incredible stupidity.
And still, it does not hurt people.
And secondly, it proved a very old theorem, at which I arrived when I was chairman of the Reactor Safeguard Committee.
If you think something is foolproof, the fool is always bigger than the proof.
Well, Dr. Teller is fond of pointing out that at Three Mile Island, the fools did their worst and there still wasn't a catastrophe.
But the fact is, the fools didn't quite do their worst. There were other things that very nearly went wrong, that could easily have gone wrong,
and that could have produced a much larger accident than the one that actually took place.
I think Three Mile Island should have served as a warning.
Well, there's lots of good reasons for being against nuclear power. I'm not necessarily saying that the people who protest against it are wrong.
I feel that they ought to be protesting much more strongly against bombs than against power stations.
That a bad nuclear accident is likely to kill maybe a few thousand people.
A bad nuclear war is likely to kill a few billion people. That's about a million times as many.
And that's an enormous difference.
And the instrument which would make this difference would be Edward Teller's nuclear weapon.
Teller maintains that only nuclear superiority can keep the peace and save Western democracy from Russian conquest.
And he warns, as he has for at least 30 years, that America is losing the race, that Russia is closing the gap.
That they move faster than we are, I think is beyond question.
Whether they have surpassed us or not is a question of fine-tuning, which you cannot judge without knowing the details.
I know the details. I believe the Russians have surpassed us and that we are in a dangerous situation.
There are many who honestly disagree with me.
There are some who I think feel that you can't trust in democracy, that you have to keep the American public constantly in a state of panic.
Or otherwise they won't do those things that are necessary for their own defense.
That everybody will figure happy days are here to stay and that as a consequence will cut back on defense expenditures.
But I think we can trust the judgment of the American people.
If the Russians are very much stronger than we are.
If they feel they can win a war with great certainty and with limited sacrifices.
And if we resist, there will be war.
Central to Edward Teller's life has been the hydrogen bomb, its development and its exploitation in bigger and better weapons and more of them.
He is able to contemplate nuclear war and he believes that afterward survival and reconstruction are possible based on civil defense.
Civil defense is feasible.
The Russians are spending upwards of a billion dollars a year on it and they are doing an excellent job.
We are doing practically nothing.
Important?
In case of a nuclear war, more than half of the American people would be killed.
And America would cease to exist.
In Russia, the casualties probably would be less than they have been in the Second World War.
Quite possibly much less.
And they would have attained world domination.
There is at present no question of defense as important as civil defense.
Civil defense might have made sense when nuclear weapons were relatively small.
That is, there were atom bombs, not hydrogen bombs.
And particularly when the numbers were small.
When we are disposing over 10,000 strategic nuclear warheads, the Soviets will probably have about the same number by 85.
And we'll have some more of course by then.
Then it doesn't make any sense to me.
We should start with very simple measures.
I doubt that the Russians will attack us without first evacuating.
When we notice that the Russians evacuate, the president could go on television and say,
the Russians are evacuating.
They are preparing something.
I cannot guarantee your safety in the cities.
If you want to leave, call 222-2222 and then you will get instructions what to do.
With or without civil defense, could there be winners and losers after a nuclear war?
Even with old fashioned wars during the 20th century, there have not been real winners and losers.
Everyone has lost, but if there were to be a great nuclear war, it would be the end of the world,
the end of the human race, the end of civilization.
What difference does it make if the Russians have only 50 times the number of weapons needed to kill everybody on Earth
and the United States have 100 times?
Or if the Russians have 100 times and the United States have 50 times?
Overkill does not exist, even if we used all we had.
Even if Russia did not evacuate, did not exercise its civil defense measures, even then we would not have overkill.
To a very large extent, he is convinced that a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union is inevitable,
is coming and therefore, so to speak, we might just as well get over with as soon as possible
and under the best possible circumstances.
What you want to achieve is a war with the least damage to the United States.
I think, personally, that's a totally unrealistic objective, the damage to the United States, to our society,
will be so great that what will be left will not be any more the United States of America.
In the wake of a nuclear war, there will be victors and there will be vanquished.
And I hope, the only thing I really hope, that it will never come to that.
But history has proved that a victor can recover to his full strength and much more than his full strength.
In a few years, let us remember that the gross national product of the United States is approximately one third of its total wealth.
This gives a measure how quickly recovery is possible, even after a devastated war.
And if one helps the victims, as we helped in the end, the aggressors who were then vanquished,
the Germans and the Japanese, they recovered by economic miracles,
which only means that economics has not completely understood how full and rapid such a recovery always is when the conditions are right.
Well, to me it's unthinkable that anybody would contemplate fighting, surviving, and winning a nuclear war.
The scenario that sometimes is discussed is that the Soviets would try and take out our land-based ICBMs, our Minutemen.
That would mean 1,054 fixed targets.
To have any prospect of taking out the bulk of that force,
they'd have to launch, given about six warheads per missile, something like 500 to 600 missiles.
Now that would kill millions of Americans. It's not any kind of a surgical attack.
No one can really predict what would occur.
All you know is it would be the worst casualty, the worst catastrophe that mankind has ever endured.
A final question then becomes, must the weapons scientist bear the responsibility?
A scientist should be held responsible for the contributions that he makes, as scientific or technological contributions.
The application of those in our society, it seems to me, is the responsibility of others.
And we have institutionalized that process.
So having institutionalized it, I think it's unfair then to go back and lay credit or blame on the scientist for the application.
When we become involved in areas that have a clear and unmistakable implication for destruction,
I don't see any way that we can walk away from our responsibilities.
The responsibility of a scientist is to make science. If he doesn't, nobody will.
If he wants to, he should apply it, knowing that it may be used for good or evil purposes, and one never can know.
And then he has one last responsibility, to explain what he has learned and what he has constructed.
But in a democracy in which I live and in which I believe, the responsibility of the scientist stops at this point.
The decisions should be made by the people and by their representatives.
I never have dreams that I can freely confess. Once I'm in bed, I sleep deaf and dumb.
But recently, I have dreamt, nevertheless, it was of the war that will come.
From the trenches millions of men have crawled, volunteers all, I was assured by a voice.
They raised their rifles, just as the loud voice called. Whom they should shoot, that was their choice.
They approached each other, staring, without making a sound, but then came a scream, as of someone in pain.
As if on command, all rifles were turned around, and by his own hand, each man was slain.
In unending rows, the dreadful slaughter was done.
Really, I never dream, and I wish I could know who was the one, the one who did scream.
But I cannot forget this poem, because peace is very much more than the absence of war.
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