Well, now, maybe. There’s a show on Hulu I watch called Manhattan. It’s about the scientists and their wives living in Los Alamos during the development of the Bomb. I’m sure chicks dig it for the stories of the wives, but I like the part about the sheer difficulty the scientists went through in making the bomb. What I meant it was no sure thing for them. They learned through a lot of trial and error.
My point would be, any of the scientists, from Vannaver Bush, to Kirk Compton, J. Robert Oppenheimer, to Ernest Lawrence—all of them—would be surprised as hell if their 1942 selves were able to talk to their post-Trinity 1945 selves.
They probably would have said things like “I never would have thought THAT possible!” to “Why didn’t that work? I was a GREAT idea!”
So, with all respect to those Japanese nuclear scientists like Dr. Ryokicho Sagane, they didn’t have all those trial and error experiences of the Americans.
And that’s why I was very interested in that quote in Truman’s journal. At that moment in time, only 3 days since the word about the atomic bomb got out, all kinds of false claims were being made.
Didn’t Oppenheimer himself say they didn’t know if the Trinity blast would just keep going and destroy the whole universe?
destroyer of worlds