Kai Bird Quote

Oppenheimer’s story also reminds us that our identity as a people remains intimately connected with the culture of things nuclear. We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945, E. L. Doctorow has observed. It was first our weaponry and then our diplomacy, and now it’s our economy. How can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful would not, after forty years, compose our identity? The great golem we have made against our enemies is our culture, our bomb culture—its logic, its faith, its vision.