When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.

More from J. Robert Oppenheimer

• Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.
• I am become Death, shatterer of worlds.
• There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.