Pandora's Keepers by Brian Van DeMark Read Free Book Online Page A

larger setting. It follows their intertwined lives chronologically, showing how they related to one another and reacted to the history they made together. Part I traces the atomic scientists’ effort to build the bomb and, with it, to end World War II. Part II explores how the atomic scientists came to understand the bomb’s consequences, both for their own lives and for the world they changed forever through their creation.
    Two themes—two morals of the story—emerge along the way. The first is how inexorable was the trap into which the atomic scientists fell, a trap largely of their own making. The atomic scientists were deeply thoughtful men, no fools in any way, yet they were drawn into a frenzy of creation, throwing themselves into the enterprise and laboring beyond all expectations of human capacity to produce a weapon of unprecedented destructiveness. The effort quickly took on a life, and a momentum, of its own, a chain reaction from a chain reaction. When it was done, the bomb they had made horrified and frightened them. The atomic scientists originally sought to build something that would save the world and ended up believing what they created might destroy it. They came to fear the very thing they had built to end fear.
    The second theme is the political and moral awakening of the atomic scientists. Twentieth-century physics was a great adventure of imagination and intelligence, and until the discovery of fission it was carried on in an ivory tower, far removed from the world of politics. It was “pure” science—a contest of the human mind with nature; the object was not to change the world but to understand it. Scientists did physics because it was there to be done and because it was wonderfully interesting. They rarely addressed the political implications of their research or applied moral considerations to their work. They were detached and above such things. But their work on the bomb shook the atomic scientists out of their detachment and forced them to confront larger implications. For the first time, they began to ask questions about politics and morality in the same searching way they had always asked them about Nature. And as they asked these questions, they transformed themselves.
    The atomic scientists’ struggle to come to terms with what they had done is emblematic of the larger and continuing human struggle created by the opening of the Pandora’s box of nuclear weapons. Some of the questions the atomic scientists wrestled with, we are still wrestling with now. Today, as we rush headlong into a future filled with the promise of potentially astonishing scientific and technological advances, we are continually drawn back to the most momentous scientific achievement of the twentieth century—an achievement that raises questions so profound that they seem to transcend time itself.

PART I

    A FEARSOME
GRAIL

PART II

    PANDORA’S
BOX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    This book owes a primary debt to Geoff Shandler, Executive Editor of Little, Brown and Company. He brilliantly edited the manuscript, seeing how it should be structured and precisely where it should be cut. I am deeply indebted to him for enriching the book and bringing it to publication. Emily Loose of Crown Publishers was another splendid editor: demanding in her expectations and incisive in her criticisms. In clarifying many problems of writing and interpretation, she made this a better book than it would otherwise have been, and for that I am grateful.
    Few readers are aware of the endless, essential details of transforming a long manuscript into a printed book. Elizabeth Nagle of Little, Brown has been superb at this, working with problems of text and photographs and many other things. There were others at Little, Brown whom I must also thank for helping to create this book: Steve Lamont and especially Karen Landry for their careful copyediting; and Debbie Lindblom for thoroughly preparing the index.
    My literary agent, Anne Sibbald of