Dwight Schultz Quotes

I also was producing, working on other materials for the hydrogen bomb. They call it lithium-6 and tritium. I was working on these and the only use for lithium-6 is the hydrogen 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.

The mystique associated with the bomb, the role that scientists played in it, and its general importance could not fail to impress even a six-year old.

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

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Was there really any chance that an atomic bomb would trigger the explosion of the nitrogen in the atmosphere or the hydrogen in the ocean?

There's an amazing documentary, 'The Day After Trinity,' which is crazy good.

During my participation in the Manhattan Project and subsequent research at Los Alamos, encompassing a period of fifteen years, I worked in the company of perhaps the greatest collection of scientific talent the world has ever known.

We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R.

Atoms for War and Atoms for Peace are Siamese twins.

In Los Alamos we were motivated by the desire to develop the atomic bomb before the Germans could do it. That was our main motivation …. The Germans surrendered before the bomb was ready and so it was obvious to use it against our remaining enemy [Japan].

Einstein’s revolutionary theories helped unravel the secrets of the cosmos. They also led to the atomic bomb.

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

When fission was first discovered, within perhaps a week, there was on the blackboard of Robert Oppenheimer’s office a drawing—a very bad … drawing of a [atomic] bomb.

Reports in Washington show that our reasoning was just like that of your physicists. With all this information available, at least to privileged persons, I cannot understand why it is generally held in the United States that we completely missed the basic principle of the bomb until after Hiroshima.

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.

But the first the general public learned about the discovery was the news of the destruction of Hiroshima by the atom bomb. A splendid achievement of science and technology had turned malign. Science became identified with death and destruction.

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 Atomic Age is here to stay - but are we?

The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.

We had news this morning of another successful atomic bomb being dropped on Nagasaki. These two heavy blows have fallen in quick succession upon the Japanese and there will be quite a little space before we intend to drop another.

I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which is my hometown. In Los Alamos is, for people who don't know, a nuclear lab that built the atomic bomb. The only reason the town exists is to make nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction, and that's still happening there.

The original reason to start the project, which was that the Germans were a danger, started me off on a process of action, which was to try to develop this first system at Princeton and then at Los Alamos, to try to make the bomb work.

In the first weeks after Hiroshima, extravagant statements by President Truman and other official spokesmen for the U.S. government transformed the inception of the atomic age into the most mythologized event in American history.

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