J. Robert Oppenheimer

There is a particular kind of person history reaches for when a technology arrives that is too large for the people who made it. Not the loudest believer, and not the person who refuses to build. Someone in between—someone who builds, and then cannot stop thinking about what they have built. J. Robert Oppenheimer was that person for the atomic bomb, and we reach for him now because we have made something else that cannot be un-made. He directed the laboratory that built the first nuclear weapon, watched the Trinity fireball rise over the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, and spent the remaining twenty-two years of his life trying to tell a country that did not want to hear it that the thing could not be recalled. He argued for international control of atomic energy and was destroyed for his caution