![]() ![]() There was, as one of the scientists, Princeton’s Robert Wilson, suggested, an assumption in the air that, if a bomb became feasible while the enemy––any enemy––was still in the field, it should be used. The opposite, of course, was true for the atomic bomb. There were no high-level meetings to discuss the use of napalm. General Curtis LeMay was permitted by Air Force strategic doctrine to firebomb Tokyo with many tons of incendiaries, but he made the decision to launch the attack himself. Knowing what they knew about the power of a nuclear chain reaction, and whatever they may have guessed about the impact of radioactivity beyond the perimeter of the blast, some scientists and some government policymakers felt a need to think especially hard about how and against whom the atomic bomb should be used. Radar cost more, but it was not a weapon as such. ![]() No other single weapons project received $2 billion in U.S. No one recalls the names of those who developed napalm and other incendiaries. They believed they were engaged in something special. The men and women who imagined and then built the atomic bomb thought they were doing something different from what makers of “conventional” weapons did.
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