Manhattan Gandhi Quotes

We take it for granted that great individuals—Gandhi, Kennedy, Martin Luther King—can have great positive impacts on the world. But we are loath to believe the same about negative impacts—unless the individuals are obvious monsters like Hitler or Stalin. But small numbers of people can have large, negative impacts, especially if they are organized, determined, and have access to power. Seitz, Jastrow, Nierenberg, and Singer had access to power—all the way to the White House—by virtue of their positions as physicists who had won the Cold War. They used this power to support their political agenda, even though it meant attacking science and their fellow scientists, evidently believing that their larger end justified their means. Perhaps this, too, was part of their professional legacy. During the Manhattan Project, and throughout the Cold War, for security reasons many scientists had to hide the true nature of their work. All weapons