w/r/t dropping atomic bombs on targets in Hiroshima/Nagasaki, instantly vaporizing 240,000 civilians and killing another 250,000 within several years due to fallout:
"I thought our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives," said General Dwight D. Eisenhower...
General Leslie Groves was less cryptic: "There was never, from about two weeks from the time I took charge of this Project, any illusion on my part but that Russia was our enemy, and the Project was conducted on that basis."
...In March of the following year, Oppenheimer told Truman:
"Mr. President, I have blood on my hands."
Truman's reply: "It'll come out in the wash."
Later, the president told an aide, "Don't bring that fellow around again."
― gygax! (gygax!), Tuesday, 9 August 2005 21:04 (twenty years ago)