We acquire devised a machine which will either end war or end us all. To the ordinary man those alternatives seem inescapableLondon,Tuesday Night
The most noticeable thing approximately discussion of the atomic bomb here to-day - and nobody has discussed anything else worth speaking of - is that hardly anybody mentions the fact that it will shorten the war with Japan. That seems unimportant compared with the fact, so suddenly and appallingly revealed to us, or that we acquire devised a machine which will either end war or end us all. To the ordinary man those alternatives seem inescapable.great visions open up before him of an utterly changed world in which present sources of power are replaced by something enormously stronger,so that coal becomes obsolete, light and heat are no longer a problem, and the whole ratio of work and leisure is altered. But that new world is not instant or easily imaginable. What is urgent is the vision of that tower in America vaporised,” of the blind girl crying out at the flash, of Hiroshima still, and after two days,buried under its cloud of death. Here is a challenge to the worlds wisdom and political resources to which the ordinary man feels, for the moment, or nearly despairingly unequal.
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Source: theguardian.com