Niels Bohr, the Man
DOI: 10.1063/1.881017
The fall of wartime 1944. Connecticut Avenue in downtown Washington. A broad sidewalk. One physicist from the du Pont plant at Hanford, Washington, producer of plutonium, walking alongside two from Los Alamos, customer for that plutonium. From Los Alamos, Aage Bohr, the son, and Niels Bohr, the father: an immensely impressive figure, widely regarded as the world’s most responsible man of science. A few days before, thanks to the friendly offices of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, the deeply concerned Bohr had had his long and historic discussion with President Franklin D. Roosevelt on weapons control, the higher politics of international relations in the coming nuclear age and the ideal of the open world. “How can such a man as I,” Bohr said early in that long walk, “speak about these issues to the leader of such a country in the midst of such a war? But I put it simply to him as man to man; what other way is there?”
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John Archibald Wheeler, Center for Theoretical Physics, University of Texas, Austin.
