'Accessory To War' An Uncomfortable Wake-Up Call For Some
An "unspoken alliance" between scientists and the military had been brewing for millennia prior to Hiroshima. Neil deGrasse Tyson and Avis Lang excel at detailing this union and its possible future.
Any doubts that science has a dark side were extinguished when, on August 6, 1945, an American Air Force B-29 bomber dropped the atomic bomb Little Boy on Hirsoshima.
Three days later, Fat Man, a plutonium implosion-type bomb, was dropped in Nagasaki, prompting Japan to surrender.
It had not been three weeks earlier when, on July 16, scientists and military personnel working at the top-secret Los Alamos facility had detonated the first-ever atomic bomb. Everyone present knew that the world would never be the same after that. "Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds," Manhattan Project director J. Robert Oppenheimer was quoted as having said years later, reminiscing about the event.
