Prescient I. Rabi to Bill Moyers "...I think our troubles may come when we forget our origins..." "..once we're a mob...

[NNadir]

...we're not Americans."

As I'm reading a biography of Edward Teller, my thoughts turned to I.I. Rabi, the 1944 Physics Nobel Laureate, who despised Teller.

I came across this interesting transcript of an interview with him conducted by Bill Moyers in 1984, four years before his death.

It's here: I. I. Rabi: Man of the Century July 25, 1984

Some excerpts:

BILL MOYERS: You don’t believe that the scientists who worked on that project and who built that bomb destroyed worlds?

I.I. RABI: No, not at all. No. Mostly they were good American citizens and worked on this because they wanted to support the United States and support the President. It was a real, real adventure. You made this bomb out of materials which hadn’t existed in nature, uranium-235 and plutonium. So it was a tremendous achievement.

BILL MOYERS: So there was this sense of intellectual excitement, of scientific pursuit.

I.I. RABI: Tremendous, tremendous — a new world and a power of the intellectual structure that could make it, that could calculate the properties of materials which hadn’t existed before. No, to have this occur was an extraordinary thing, a wonderful things. And of course, it’s inherent in nature, so it was bound to come out unless you destroyed culture and civilization first.

BILL MOYERS: Was there a fear that if we didn’t get there first, the Nazis would?

I.I. RABI: That was, very much so, and on the part of some — certainly on the part of some of the people like Niels Bohr and others who came to work on it who had such a great respect for the Germans.

BILL MOYERS: And they knew some of the German scientists too?

I.I. RABI: Oh, they knew them very well.

BILL MOYERS: —who presumably were working on the project?

I.I. RABI: Yes, the scientific community, the pre-war scientific community or the pre-Nazi, was a real community. One knew everybody of importance.

BILL MOYERS: So the assumption was they were as good as the scientists working here, and they could probably get there about the same time.

I.I. RABI: Assumption was, on the part of some, that they were better. Their anti-Semitism, particularly, lost their best people and the cohesion and the faith in their government. So they really destroyed themselves...

Over the years I've struggled with Hiroshima and Nagasaki a great deal, both in rationalization and in horror, having come to conclude (for my part) that in the place and times it was almost a necessary act, and in some way, one that might save the world, since no one would have ever funded the building of a nuclear reactor without the fear of a German bomb.

Here is a perspective I never heard before, the effects of using the bomb on Europe:

BILL MOYERS: Did you approve of Truman’s decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima?

I.I. RABI: Oh, yes. And the reasons behind it were very powerful, because Europe was starving. The only people who could feed them were we. And we were using up all our shipping in the Pacific to support this tremendous offensive that was going on.

BILL MOYERS: The European war was over, and we were making —

I.I. RABI: The European war was over. And we were concentrating on the Japanese war, and we were going to take it. We contemplated a million casualties. But it was the psychology of the American people — I’m not justifying it on the part of military grounds — and part of the existence of this mood, this feeling the military, and we had the backing of the American people, no question.

BILL MOYERS: Why not, however, drop it in some uninhabited and desolate place to show the Japanese as a demonstration of what a weapon like this could do?

I.I. RABI: That wouldn’t show very much. The report came back. They arranged tremendous pyrotechnics. And who would they send?

BILL MOYERS: You mean, who would the Japanese send to watch this demonstration?

I.I. RABI: That’s right. And of course, it would take time. You’d have to convince them this really was a bomb. So it was like —

A fascinating discussion, I think.

I don't ever think that much about Rabi...

Perhaps I should think more of him...