Browsing: poisoning

     When Robert Oppenheimer, the civilian head of the program, informed his boss, the Nobel Prize winning physicist Arthur Compton, about the test’s apocalyptic risk, Compton was appalled. According to Toby Ord in The Precipice (2020), Compton decided, “Unless they came up with a firm and reliable conclusion that our atomic bombs could not explode the air or the sea, those bombs must never be made.” In his memoir Atomic Quest (1956) Compton recalled thinking, “Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind!”