Manhattan Project physicist Sir Rudolf Peierls and author Richard Rhodes how the atomic bomb has transformed modern warfare.
Narrator: Manhattan Project physicist Sir Rudolf Peierls and author Richard Rhodes explain the significance of the atomic bomb for modern warfare.
Rudolf Peierls: We said, “Well, this is very important because this means for warfare, this will be an extremely revolutionary weapon.”
Richard Rhodes: There’s a reason why we have had no world-scale wars since 1945. I think that reason is, the introduction of this fundamental change in our relationship with nature called the discovery of nuclear fission, and in the course of time, the application of fission to making fusion work, hydrogen bombs, if you will.
The relationship between nation-states was affected, because if two countries have nuclear weapons, they just simply can’t go to war with each other. If they do, they’ll destroy each other. That’s not the point of a war. The point of a war is to win a victory of some kind, one side, and the other side loses. But if both sides are destroyed, then war is pointless.
I’m not saying the weapons themselves keep the peace. I am saying that the fact that this technology makes it possible to have Mutually Assured Destruction, as it was called, whether it’s at the level of knowing how to build these weapons or at the level of actually having arsenals full of them. That’s made a deep and fundamental change in human affairs.