"If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world," he told the team, "the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima."
A week later, Oppenheimer visited the White House, where he told Harry Truman, "Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands." Truman flew into a rage and ushered the "cry baby scientist" from the Oval Office.
Truman had missed Oppenheimer's point: he felt guilt not for Hiroshima, but some future nuclear genocide he imagined.
But other members of Oppenheimer's team weren't so imaginative. They saw the hard evidence of the effects of the the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and it horrified them.
Fellow physicist Mark Oliphant, considering that evidence, would later lament, "During the war I worked on nuclear weapons, so I, too, am a war criminal."
