Superpower

Everybody should have fully realised after the A-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that world history had entered a new age. However, scientists appear to have understood the new situation more completely than statesmen, and even they began to disagree among themselves about how to proceed. The scientists dilemma was expressed in different ways by J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller. At first, they appear to have agreed that further research could not be stopped, that, as Teller put it, they should not try ‘to say how to tie the little toe of the ghost to the bottle from which we had just allowed it to escape’. However, while Oppenheimer continued to work for international understanding and restraint, Teller's anti-communism and Russophobia came to convince him that the USA should pursue its own research.

In November 1945, Oppenheimer gave a speech to fellow scientists at Los Alamos. ‘It is not possible to be a scientist’, he argued, ‘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 to help in the spread of knowledge, and are willing to take the consequences’. He went on 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’.