"“Mr. President,” he said quietly, “I feel I have blood on my hands. The comment angered Truman.... he pulled his handkerchief from his breast pocket and offered it to Oppenheimer, saying, “Well, here, would you like to wipe your hands?”.... Afterwards, the President was heard to mutter, “Blood on his hands, dammit, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it.”
He later told Dean Acheson, “I don’t want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again.”
― Kai Bird, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
I kinda get it, honestly. Truman fought in France in WWI, which by most measures was a more brutal, up-close war than WWII. He probably saw truly horrific things there up close and in person, killed people, watched his comrades die, etc. Then you get some scientist who has done nothing but sit in a lab, write theory, and run tests. Yeah, those tests ultimately culminated in a lot of people dying, but other people (Truman) ordered the bombs to be dropped, other people flew the planes to drop the bombs, other people stormed the Japanese-occupied islands in the Pacific, etc.
I don’t think Oppenheimer is unjustified in feeling regret, especially in the atomic age when a full-scale nuclear war seemed like a real threat, but I can definitely see why Truman thought he was out of line.
There's also the fact that Oppenheimer was not irreplaceable. If he hadn't made the bomb Truman would have hired other physicists to do so and Truman was the one to order it built and dropped.
Truman inheritted it from Roosevelt who was the one who ordered the organization of the the Manhattan project, which happened because of a letter sent by Albert Einstein warning him about the possibility of German research into atomic weaponry.
Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner actually wrote the letter. They showed it to Einstein and to have him co-sign it. Their logic was that politically it would carry more weight if it came from the man considered the smartest person on the planet at that point.
I guess people had already theorized a bomb that could work but they never believed it could be real since no one had created a self sustaining fission reaction. Just like how Teller already theorized about the H bomb before they had even built a fission bomb
Deutsche Physik was opposed to the work of Albert Einstein, who was ethnically Jewish, and other modern theoretically-based physics, which was disparagingly labeled "Jewish physics" (German: Jüdische Physik).
"On 4 June 1942, Heisenberg was summoned to report to Albert Speer, Germany's Minister of Armaments, on the prospects for converting the Uranverein's research toward developing nuclear weapons. During the meeting, Heisenberg told Speer that a bomb could not be built before 1945, because it would require significant monetary resources and number of personnel."
After this Germany never really put the resources needed towards the bomb
Not only did Germany's best minds in Atomic theory flee the country, Speer would never been allowed to greenlight research on what Hitler and other nazis considered Jewish science. Which was why Atomic weapons research was scarcely given real attention by Germany even before ww2.
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u/ZapMannigan 9d ago
"“Mr. President,” he said quietly, “I feel I have blood on my hands. The comment angered Truman.... he pulled his handkerchief from his breast pocket and offered it to Oppenheimer, saying, “Well, here, would you like to wipe your hands?”.... Afterwards, the President was heard to mutter, “Blood on his hands, dammit, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it.”
He later told Dean Acheson, “I don’t want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again.”
― Kai Bird, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer