SDA Volume 4, Number 3
Retrospecitve on the Nuclear Age:
Quotes
"In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose."
--J. Robert Oppenheimer, Scientific Director of Los Alamos Laboratory,
where the first atom bombs were designed and built. In: "Physics in the Contemporary World,"
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. IV, No. 3, March 1948, p.66.
"They held their arms bent [forward] ... and their skin - not only on their hands but on their faces and bodies, too - hung down ... Many of them died along the road. I can still picture them in my mind - like walking ghosts. They didn't look like people of this world." --Interview with a Hiroshima survivor by Robert Jay Lifton. reprinted in Donna Gregory. The Nuclear Predicament: A Sourcebook. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986) p. 6.
"There is a film that tells how a war almost broke out between America and the Soviet Union, and after that I didn't sleep for several nights thinking about this, about how war almost broke out and how our existence is hanging on a thread."
--Oleg (Ukraine, age 15) in International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, "What Soviet Children are Saying about Nuclear War." reprinted in Gregory. The Nuclear Predicament. p. 183.
"We scientists recognize our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of the simple facts of atomic energy and its implications for society. In this lies our only security and our only hope - we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not death."
Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience With Atomic Radiation. (New York: Delacorte Press, 1982)
"Where science fiction goes, can the atom be far behind? My only fear is that I may be underestimating the possibilities."
--Glenn T. Seaborg, AEC Chairman (1971) in Stewart L. Udall. The Myths of August. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994)
"Is it possible for a scientific society to continue to exist, or must such a society inevitably bring itself into destruction? It is a simple question but a very vital one. I do not think it is possible to exaggerate the gravity of the possibilities of evil that lie in the utilization of atomic energy."
--Bertrand Russel, English Philosopher, November 1945, reprinted in Jonathan Schell,
The Fate of the Earth, (New York: Knopf, 1982).
Institute for Energy and Environmental Research