Quotes from Kai Bird

In 1945, at the beginning of the Cold War, our leaders led us astray. We need to think of the Cold War as an aberration, a wrong turn. As such, we need to go back to where we were in 1945 - before we took the road to a permanent war economy, a national security state and a foreign policy based on unilateralism and cowboy triumphalism.

I know the dangers and the seductions of the Middle East. It is part of my identity. I grew up among a people who routinely referred to the creation of the State of Israel as the Nakba - the catastrophe. And yet I fell in love with and married a Jewish American woman, the only daughter of two Holocaust survivors, both Jewish Austrians.

By any definition, what happened in Bhutan in the years 1989-93 was ethnic cleansing. The Bhutanese government denies this and has refused to repatriate any of those forcibly expelled.

It is one thing to be against unilateralism and against nonhumanitarian interventionism - but it is quite another thing to be against humanitarian interventionism.

Bhutan is a beautiful place. High-end tourists love it.

Adler returned to his father's Temple Emanu-El in 1873 and preached a sermon on what he called the "Judaism of the Future." To survive in the modern age, the younger Adler argued, Judaism must renounce its "narrow spirit of exclusion." Instead of defining themselves by their biblical identity as the "Chosen People," Jews should distinguish themselves by their social concern and their deeds on behalf of the laboring classes.

His deepest fear was that its invention would inspire a deadly nuclear arms race between the West and the Soviet Union. To prevent this, he insisted, it was imperative that the Russians be told about the existence of the bomb project, and be assured that it was no threat to them.

president was "a simple man, prone to make up his mind quickly and decisively, perhaps too quickly—a thorough American." This was not a great president, "not distinguished at all . . . not Lincolnesque, but an instinctive, common, hearty-natured man.

His rationale was simple. Time was of the essence, and any bill that quickly set up legislation to oversee the domestic aspects of atomic energy would pave the way for the next step: an international agreement to ban nuclear weapons. Oppie had rapidly become a Washington insider—a cooperative and focused supporter of the Administration, guided by hope and sustained by naïveté.

He had become the simple philosopher king, adored by his ragtag followers of expatriates, retirees, beatniks and natives. Despite his cultivated aura of otherworldliness, he fit comfortably into their island world. On St. John, the father of the atomic bomb had somehow found just the right refuge from his inner demons.

He was always very kind and considerate to anybody below him," recalled Harold Cherniss. "But not at all to people who might be considered his intellectual equals. And this, of course, irritated people, made people very angry, and made him enemies." Wendell

Some of the information in those binders was even manipulated to appear more damaging to Oppenheimer.

He worked for Rockefeller?" Oppenheimer said, puffing on his pipe. And then lowering his voice, he quipped, "I, too, have taken money for doing harm.

This was, I think, the secret of his attraction for women. I mean, it felt almost that he could read their minds—many women have said this to me. Women at Los Alamos who were pregnant could say, 'The only one who would understand was Robert.' He had a really almost saintly empathy for people.

Afterwards, the President was heard to mutter, "Blood on his hands, dammit, he hasn't half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don't go around bellyaching about it." He later told Dean Acheson, "I don't want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again.

the United States exploded a 10.4-megaton thermonuclear bomb in the Pacific, vaporizing the island of Elugelab. A clearly depressed Conant told a Newsweek reporter, "I no longer have any connection with the atomic bomb. I have no sense of accomplishment.

Oppie told his audience that he was not going to argue with the president's motives and aims—but "we are 140 million people, and there are two billion people living on earth." However confident Americans might be that their views and ideas will prevail, the absolute "denial of the views and ideas of other people, cannot be the basis of any kind of agreement.

What are we to make of a civilization which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life," he asked, but "which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everybody except in prudential and game-theoretical terms?

He was frustrated essentially because he wanted to be Niels Bohr or Albert Einstein, and he knew he wasn't." Weil

In his speeches about the Institute, Oppenheimer continually emphasized that science needed the humanities to better understand its own character and consequences.

permanent form of cruelty.

En la carrera, extremadamente competitiva, por publicar nuevos descubrimientos, se escribieron más artículos sobre teoría cuántica en Gotinga que en Copenhague, Cavendish o cualquier sitio del mundo.

The task of getting rid of Oppenheimer was far too important to leave to the clownish, sensation-seeking senator from Wisconsin. It would require careful planning and skillful maneuvering. After leaving Hoover, Strauss returned to his office and wrote to Senator Robert Taft, urging him to block McCarthy if he attempted to launch an investigation of Oppenheimer. It would be "a mistake," he wrote. "In the first place some of the evidence will not stand up.

Stalin had no "master plan" for Germany, and wished to avoid military conflict with the United States. At the end of World War II, Stalin reduced his army from 11,356,000 in May 1945 to 2,874,000 in June 1947—suggesting that even under Stalin, the Soviet Union had neither the capability nor the intention to launch a war of aggression.