Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow

And it happened to be in the middle of a world war, so that obviously affected the trajectory of this technology.

There was a famous letter that Einstein co-wrote to President Roosevelt.

The letter basically said that this phenomenon had been discovered and that it could be an important source of energy in the future.

And then it mentioned that there was also the possibility that it could be used to create a really powerful weapon and that there was reason to believe that Nazi Germany was working toward that.

So that was basically the impetus for the Manhattan Project.

It was spurred partly by fear that Nazi Germany was working on this and would get there first.

So pretty soon after the war, there was a lot of excitement about turning to the civilian uses, building reactors.

And there were a few motives for that, I would say.

One was, interestingly, this sort of desire to redeem the horror of the atomic bomb.

You might think the reaction would have been, wow, this is really scary.

We should just avoid this kind of technology at all costs.

But in fact, it was the opposite.

It was like,

we should really use this in a constructive way.

So it was in front of the delegates from the United Nations at the UN headquarters in New York.

He gives this speech where he kind of reviews the dangers of atomic weapons and the existential threat they pose.

But he says, you know, if I just stopped there, that would be a tragedy and we have to look to the possibilities from this new technology as well.

So at first, there wasn't a lot of worry.

Generally, the public was on board.

There was all this relief that the war was over and excitement about modern prosperity and people were getting all these gadgets and washing machines and dishwashers.