Bridget oppenheimer biography book
Bridget oppenheimer biography book
Bridget oppenheimer biography book series.
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
July 21,
“With the end of the Cold War, the danger of nuclear annihilation seemed to pass, but in another ironic twist, the threat of nuclear war and nuclear terrorism is probably more imminent in the twenty-first century than ever before.
In the post-9/11 era, it is worth recalling that at the dawn of the nuclear age, the father of the atomic bomb warned us that it was a weapon of indiscriminate terror that instantly made America more vulnerable to attack.
When [J. Robert Oppenheimer] was asked in a closed Senate hearing in ‘whether three or four men couldn’t smuggle units of an [atomic] bomb into New York and blow up the whole city,’ he responded pointedly, ‘Of course it could be done…’ To the follow-up question of a startled senator, ‘What instrument would you use to detect an atomic bomb hidden somewhere in a city?’ Oppenheimer quipped, ‘A screwdriver [to open each and every crate or suitcase].’ The only d