Bill+Week+Twelve+Assignment

Can you think of a crime that would result in a jailtime of at least 5,000,000 years? How does being responsible for the death of over 200,000 people sound? If I had just been responsible for this magnitude of death, I honestly have no idea how I would feel. But I probably wouldn’t have said what Oppenheimer did. “But when you come right down to it the reason that we did this job is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing. If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out how the world works; that it is good to find out what the realities are; that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values.” He is basically saying that what he is partly responsible for is justified because he is a scientist. Oppenheimer uses the phrase, “If you are a scientist”, twice in the above quote. When a non-scientist reads this, they cannot really agree or disagree with the statements following that phrase because they son’t know what it is like to tihnk like a scientist. He also says, “As scientists I think we have perhaps a little greater ability to accept change, and accept radical change, because of our experiences in the pursuit of science. And that may help us -- that, and the fact that we have lived with it -- to be of some use in understanding these problems.” I interpret this as saying that sue to the fact that he is a scientist, he can accept the radical changes he played a large part in. However, I would expect a speech being delivered to the Association of Los Alamos Scientists to include points like this. If someone were to stand in front of the association and say something along the lines of, “All of you hold a great responsibility for the deaths of a large sum of people, without you the world would be a better place,” I think there may be a negative response. One of the strongest points in Oppenheimer’s entire speech is in the last paragraph, he says “But there is another thing: we are men, too. We cannot forget our dependence on our fellow men. I mean not only our material dependence, without which no science would be possible, and without which we could not work; I mean also our deep moral dependence, in that the value of science must lie in the world of men, that all our roots lie there. These are the strongest bonds in the world, stronger than those even that bind us to one another, these are the deepest bonds -- that bind us to our fellow men.” Here, he shows to the world that he is more than “just” a scientist, he does have morals and he knows that you can never forget who you really are, even when times get rough.