An important publication in the immediate wake of the Second World War and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This symposium, held on 15 November, 1945, included the likes of: Robert Oppenheimer who spoke on atomic weapons; H.D. Smyth on the history of atomic energy; Enrico Fermi on developing the first chain-reacting pile in Chicago; John Wheeler on particle research; and Arthur Compton on the future of atomic energy.
Oppenheimer’s contribution is notable. The month prior, he’d resigned from his position at Los Alamos having grown increasingly uneasy as to the ramifications of his work and the death toll and subsequent radiation sickness from the two strikes that ended the War in the Pacific.
This unease is readily apparent in his speech: “Atomic weapons are based on things that are in the very frontier of physics; their development is inextricably entangled with the growth of physics, as in all probability with that of the biological sciences, and many practical arts … [W]e have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world. We have made a thing that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing. And by so doing, by our participation in making it possible to make these things, we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man, of whether it is good to learn about the world, to try to understand it, to try to control it, to help give to the world of men increased insight, increased power.”
In a biographical notice on Oppenheimer, Robert Bacher writes of this speech: “In November, 1945, the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Sciences held in Philadelphia a joint symposium on ‘Atomic Energy and its Implications.’ Oppenheimer, who had been elected a member of the Society in the spring of 1945, contributed to the symposium a discussion of atomic weapons. No one who heard him ever forgot the eloquence and deep emotion with which he pictured the destructiveness of the bomb or the force of his call for international control of this new awesome development” (Bacher).
Bacher, R.F., “Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967)” in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 116, No. 4, (1972), p.284.
