Charles Mann

You have a career ahead of you.

And he went against all of that.

I think I'm coming to realize now, only now, not when I knew him, that

that this thing about him being on top of the world and playing jokes and having fun and all this kind of stuff is a little bit like a stand-up comedian who has a terrible tragedy in his life that he wants to keep in that box and not go near.

and then he loses her within weeks of the bomb being tested.

Imagine one, two, boom, boom, those losses or those transformations in your life.

How are you going to recover from that?

I had a very strong reaction after the war of a peculiar nature.

It may be from just the bomb itself, and it may be for some other psychological reasons.

I had just lost my wife or something.

But I remember being in New York with my mother in a restaurant right after, immediately after, 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, to drop one at 34th Street, and then it would spread all the way out there, and all these people would be killed, and all the things would be killed.

And that 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 appeared to me, very early, earlier than to others who were more optimistic, that international relations and the way people were behaving was no different than it had ever been before, and that it was just going to go out the same way as any other thing, and I was sure 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 believe that it was senseless to make anything because it would all be destroyed very soon anyway.