Ian Hacking Quotes

Other paths would include making nuclear fission cheap enough and safe enough that people broadly embrace it, so that could be scaled up.

My job was to produce plutonium that was used for atomic bomb.

Unlike uranium, plutonium was created in an American lab in 1940, but scientists soon realized that it could produce even wilder chain reactions and even bigger explosions. In fact, fearing another country would create it, too, the American government went to great lengths to keep even the existence of plutonium a secret.

I don't know why people are always afraid of a nuclear blast.

I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.

I'm afraid there's a big confusion in the world between nuclear power and nuclear arms.

No scientific subject has ever aroused quite the same mixture of hopes and fears [as atomic energy].

I hate people. People make me pro-nuclear.

In America, we're tired. We're exhausted in terms of nuclear.

The Atomic Age is here to stay - but are we?

Goodness, I know nothing about nuclear energy.

In the past, science has often been able to provide adequate protection against new weapons it has given into the hands of an aggressor, but it cannot promise such efficient protection against the destructive use of nuclear power

The only reason to treat nuclear power differently from all the other developments in the field of physics is its staggering possibilities as a means of political pressure in peace and sudden destruction in war.

By developing atomic energy for peaceful purposes, you reach the nuclear option. There are no two atomic energies.

These experiments might make it possible to produce power by means of nuclear energy and radioactive elements. Unfortunately also perhaps atomic bombs.

Fermi thought that the conservative thing was to play down the possibility that a chain reaction might happen, and I thought that the conservative thing was to assume that it would happen and take all the necessary precautions.

I would say that I was absolutely convinced of the possibility of our making an uranium engine, but I never thought that we would make a bomb; and at the bottom of my heart, I was really glad that it was to be an engine and not a bomb.

What's all this fuss about plutonium? How can something named after a Disney character be dangerous?

There was a concept a long time ago that you would do a different type of reactor called a "fast reactor," that would make a bunch of another element called plutonium, and then you would pull that out, and then you would burn that. That's called "breeding" in a fast reactor. That is bad because plutonium is nuclear weapons material. It's messy. The processing you have to get through is not only environmentally difficultly, it's extremely expensive.

I, who had been in favour of nuclear energy for generating electricity ... I suddenly realised that anybody who has a nuclear reactor can extract the plutonium from the reactor and make nuclear weapons, so that a country which has a nuclear reactor can, at any moment that it wants to, become a nuclear weapons power. And I, right from the beginning, have been terribly worried by the existence of nuclear weapons and very much against their use.

Of all the failed technologies that litter the onward march of science - steam carriages, zeppelins, armoured trains - none has been so catastrophic to prosperity as the last century's attempt to generate electricity from nuclear fission.

Leave the atom alone.

In 1947 I defended my thesis on nuclear physics, and in 1948 I was included in a group of research scientists whose task was to develop nuclear weapons.

The whole nuclear thing is a terrible mess and it's hard for me to understand why it is that we, the United States, seem to be the only ones that are really particularly concerned about it and prepared to do something.

We hope that this honor you have done us will bring the time of further realization of these benefits closer and will help all mankind to live better and be happier through the atom and isotopes.