At the heart of it all, living in isolation at Los Alamos, the scientists and mathematicians and engineers enlisted for the enterprise worked long and hard hours on a two-track program, crafting one bomb that would have an internal firing mechanism to explode it, and devising a second that would implode. While they solved one design problem after another the scintillations of their intellectual breakthroughs and discoveries were not always connected emotionally to the grim purposes behind them. But of course they could never forget and the work was not even finished before they began to say among themselves that the bomb must never be used. The energetic, chain-smoking Szilard, a Hungarian, began to circulate petitions. Bethe, Peierls, Ulam, Rabi, all of them with such terrible sickening misgivings.
None is sufficient.
Participating cross-mythically in cultures that encompass the globe, the nuclear explosion must itself become a primary myth in the postnuclear world to come. It will become a scriptural text. As this age goes on, if we have the time, we will choose according to the society we conceive for ourselves the scientists, politicians, generals and spies whom we want for our story. It will have Harry S. Truman. He came into the presidency with the death of Roosevelt in April 1945.