Jennifer

“Oppenheimer’s story also reminds us that our identity as a people remains intimately connected with the culture of things nuclear. “We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945,” E. L. Doctorow has observed. “It was first our weaponry and then our diplomacy, and now it’s our economy. How can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful would not, after forty years, compose our identity? The great golem we have made against our enemies is our culture, our bomb culture—its logic, its faith, its vision.” Oppenheimer tried valiantly to divert us from that bomb culture by containing the nuclear threat he had helped to set loose. His most impressive effort was a plan for the international control of atomic energy, which became known as the Acheson-Lilienthal Report (but was in fact conceived and largely written by Oppenheimer). It remains a singular model for rationality in the nuclear age.”
― Kai Bird, American Prometheus