This is an edited transcript of an interview with Richard Feynman. He talks openly about how
he and his fellow atomic scientists of the Manhattan Project could drink and revel in the success of the terrible weapon they had created while on the other side of the world in Hiroshima thousands of their fellow human beings were dead or dying from it; and why Feynman could just as well have gotten along without a Nobel Prize. Invitation to the Bomb While working on his PhD thesis, Feynman was asked to join the project to develop the atomic bomb. It was a completely different kind of thing. It would mean that I would have to stop the research in what I was doing, which is my life’s desire, to take time off to do this, which I felt I should do in order to protect civilization. Okay? So that was what I had to debate with myself. My first
reaction was, well, I didn’t want to get interrupted in my normal work to do this odd job. There was also the problem, of course, of any moral thing involving war. I wouldn’t have much to do with that, but it kinda scared me when I realized what the weapon would be, and that since it might be possible, it must be possible. There was nothing that I knew that indicated that if we could do it they couldn’t do it, and therefore it was very important to try to cooperate. (In early 1943 Feynman joined Oppenheimer’s team at Los Alamos). With regard to moral questions, I do have something I would like to say about it. 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. All kinds of attempts were made to redesign it to make it a worse bomb and so on. But what I did, - immorally I would say – was to not remember the reason that I said I was doing it, so that when the reason changed, because Germany was defeated, not the singlest thought came to my mind at all about that, that that, meant now I would have to reconsider why I am continuing to do this. I simply didn’t think, okay? Success and Suffering On 6 August 1945 the atomic bomb was exploded over Hiroshima.The only reaction that I remember – perhaps I was blinded by my own reaction – was a very considerable elation and excitement, and there were parties and
people got drunk and it would make a tremendously interesting contrast, what was going on in Los Alamos at the same time as what was going on in Hiroshima. I was involved with this happy thing and also drinking and drunk and playing drums sitting on the hood of –the bonnet of-a Jeep and playing drums with excitement running all over Los Alamos at the same time as people were dying and struggling in Hiroshima. I had a very strong reaction after the war of a peculiar nature-it may be just from the bomb itself and it may be for other psychological reasons, I’d just lost my wife or something, but I remember being in New York with my mother in a restaurant, immediately after Hiroshima and thinking about New York, and I knew how big the bomb in Hiroshima was, how big an area it covered and so on, and I realized from where we were-I don’t know, 59th Street-that to drop one on 34th Street, it would spread all the way out here and all these people would be killed and all the things would be killed and there wasn’t only one bomb available, but it was easy to continue to make them, and therefore that things were sort of doomed because already it happened to me-very early, earlier than to others who were more optimistic-that international relations and the way people were behaving were no different than they had ever been before and that it was just going to go the same way as any other thing and I was sure that it was going, therefore, to be used very soon. So I felt very uncomfortable and thought, really believed , that it was silly: I would see people building a bridge and I would say ‘they don’t understand’. I really believed that it was senseless to make anything because it would be destroyed very soon anyway, but they didn’t understand that and I had this very strange view of any construction that I would see, I would always think how foolish they are trying to make something. So I was really in a kind of depressive condition. ‘I Don’t Have To Be Good Because They Think I’m Going to Be Good’