The 70th anniversary this week of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki reminds us that even after seven decades, the social political, and moral implications of the birth of the nuclear age still are the subjects of an unresolved – perhaps unresolvable – debate.It may help to bring some clarity to the issues by examining their component parts through the eyes of the people who lived through the development of these horrific weapons. As I concluded from researching my book "
Big Science," which is devoted in part to the role of a new breed of physicists in that work, the decision to build and deploy the atomic bomb is very different from the decision to move ahead with its successor, the hydrogen, or thermonuclear, bomb.
The 70th anniversary this week of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki reminds us that even after seven decades, the social political, and moral implications of the birth of the nuclear age still are the subjects of an unresolved – perhaps unresolvable – debate.It may help to bring some clarity to the issues by examining their component parts through the eyes of the people who lived through the development of these horrific weapons. As I concluded from researching my book "Big Science," which is devoted in part to the role of a new breed of physicists in that work, the decision to build and deploy the atomic bomb is very different from the decision to move ahead with its successor, the hydrogen, or thermonuclear, bomb.
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