Richard Rhodes Quote
Rather than sleep, Tibbets crawled through the thirty-foot tunnel to chat with the waist crew, wondering if they knew what they were carrying. A chemist's nightmare, the tail gunner, Robert Caron, guessed, then a physicist's nightmare. Not exactly, Tibbets hedged. Tibbets was leaving by the time Caron put two and two together:'Tibbets stayed a little longer, and then started to crawl forward up the tunnel. I remembered something else, and just as the last of the Old Man was disappearing, I sort of tugged at his foot, which was still showing. He came sliding back in a hurry, thinking maybe something was wrong. What's the matter?I looked at him and said, Colonel, are we splitting atoms today?This time he gave me a really funny look, and said, That's about it.
Rather than sleep, Tibbets crawled through the thirty-foot tunnel to chat with the waist crew, wondering if they knew what they were carrying. A chemist's nightmare, the tail gunner, Robert Caron, guessed, then a physicist's nightmare. Not exactly, Tibbets hedged. Tibbets was leaving by the time Caron put two and two together:'Tibbets stayed a little longer, and then started to crawl forward up the tunnel. I remembered something else, and just as the last of the Old Man was disappearing, I sort of tugged at his foot, which was still showing. He came sliding back in a hurry, thinking maybe something was wrong. What's the matter?I looked at him and said, Colonel, are we splitting atoms today?This time he gave me a really funny look, and said, That's about it.
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About Richard Rhodes
Rhodes has been awarded grants from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation among others. Rhodes is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He also frequently gives lectures and talks on a broad range of subjects, including testimony to the U.S. Senate on nuclear energy.