The Motivations of Scientists

Julian Schwinger was a nuclear physicist of great consequence who also happened to be Oppenheimer's friend. He didn't see the point in working on something that he wasn't at all sure would be finished before the end of the war. There's still a debate today among historians about whether or not the Japanese would have surrendered without the bomb and I don't think you can really answer that question. So Swinger was right. The atomic bombs would never affect the head but they weren't very big bombs. They weren't any bigger than the firebombing of Tokyo, which burned out about 18 square miles of downtown Tokyo. Neither the Hiroshima nor the Nagasaki bomb caused that much fire