Feynman, Dyson, Olum on the morality of Los Alamos

In February 1948 Time Magazine published an interview with Oppy in which appeared his famous confession, “In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” Most of the Los Alamos people at Cornell repudiated Oppy’s remark indignantly. They felt no sense of sin. They had done a difficult and necessary job to help win the war. They felt it was unfair of Oppy to weep in public over their guilt when anybody who built any kind of lethal weapons for use in war was equally guilty. I understood the anger of the Los Alamos people, but I agreed with Oppy. The sin of the physicists at Los Alamos did not lie in their having built a lethal weapon. To have built the bomb, when their country was engaged in a desperate war against Hitler’s Germany, was morally justifiable. But they did not just build the bomb. They enjoyed building it. They had the best time of their lives while building it. That, I believe, is what Oppy had in mind when he said they had sinned. And he was right.

— Freeman Dyson

Why did we let ourselves do such an incredibly awful thing, sitting there in our offices and conference rooms and talking about it, then doing experiments and calculations, moving step-by-step to the creation of this horror? Would I do it again if I had to? Do I feel now that it was a wrong thing to do?

I feel still today that there was no choice. We knew the Germans were working on a nuclear bomb, and that they had started as much as two years earlier than we. We knew it was possible they could get it. We knew if they got it and could deliver it in their huge intercontinental rockets, they could very likely win the war, ultimately taking over the whole world. I felt then there was indeed no choice, knowing that the Germans were doing it, and what consequences would be for all of us if they got a nuclear bomb and we did not.

But that raises another question. When V.E. Day, victory in Europe, came in the spring of 1945, we were quite certain the Japanese had no bomb. The Japanese had hardly gotten anywhere toward building a bomb, and there was no belief they possibly could have one. Why didn’t we all stop and walk off the project then? We no longer needed what we had been trying so hard to achieve. We didn’t have to worry about somebody else getting it first. Nonetheless, I know of no one, none of the scientists at Los Alamos, none of our friends, who had to make such a decision. I suppose there are many reasons for what it was. Probably the best, and it is not one to be particularly proud of, is that when you are involved in something like that and carry it close to final creation, it just is hard to stop. You are totally caught up in it.

— Paul Olum

With any project like that, you continue to work, trying to get success, having decided to do it. What I did immorally, I would say, was not to remember the reason that I said I was doing it. So that when the reason changed, which was that Germany was defeated, not the singlest thought came to my mind at all about that — that meant now — that I had to reconsider now why I’m continuing to do this. I simply didn’t think, ok?

— Richard Feynman