X 590 if there is no good reason to expect the development of specific defenses against the bomb, if all the great powers are already within striking range of each other, if even substantial superiority in numbers of aircraft and bombs offers no real security, of what possible avail can large armies and navies be? Unless we can strike first and eliminate a threat before it is realized in action—something which our national Constitution effectively forbidse—we are ~ bound to perish wider attack without even an opportunity to mobilize resistance, Such at least seems to be the prevailing conception among those who, if they give any thought at all to the military implications of the Oe themselves with stressing its character as a weapon of aggression. /- ~ The conviction that the bomb represents the apotheosis!afagsressive ine struments is especially marked among the scientists who developed it. know the bomb and its power, of miracles. They They also know their ovmm limitations as producers They are therefore much less sanguine than many laymen or military officers of their capacity to previde the instrument which will rob the bomb of its terrors. One of the most outstanding among them, Professor J. Robert Oppenheimer, has expressed himself quite forcibly on the subject: "The pattern of the use of atomic weapons was set at Hiroshima. weapons of aggression, of surprise, and of terror. They are If they are ever used again it may well be by the thousands, or perhaps by the tens of thousands; their method of delivery may well be different, and may reflect new possibilities of interception, and the strategy of their use may well be different from what it was against an essentially defeated enemy. But it is a weapon for aggressors, and the elements of surprise and of terror are as intrinsic to it as are the Tfissionable nuclei "94 The truth of Professor Oppenheiner's statement depends on one vital but unexpressed assumption: that the nation which proposes to launch the attack will aH. “Atomic Weapons and the Crisis in Science," Saturday Review of Literature,