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Bohr got only the bare thirty minutes of his scheduled appointment, most of which Churchill had monopolized. “As he was leaving,” Aage Bohr concludes, “my father asked for permission to write Churchill, whereupon the latter answered, ‘It will be an honour for me to receive a letter from you,’ adding, ‘but not about politics!’”2011 “We did not speak the same language,” Bohr said afterward.2012 His son found him “somewhat downcast.”2013 He was angrier than that; in his seventy-second year, still stinging, he told an old friend: “It was terrible that no one over there”—England and America both—“had worked on the solution of the problems that would arise when it became possible to release nuclear energy; they were completely unprepared.”2014 And further, “It was perfectly absurd to believe that the Russians cannot do what others can. . . . There never was any secret about nuclear energy.” Churchill’s obduracy was compound but straightforward. He was up to his neck in preparations for the Normandy invasion; he sniffed conspirators encroaching back-channel and instinctively swatted them down; he resented the awe his colleagues accorded this certified great man (“I did not like the man when you showed him to me, with his hair all over his head, at Downing Street,” he gnawed at Cherwell afterward); he could not listen carefully enough, or was too certain of his own opinions, to be convinced that the bomb would change the rules.2015 A year later the seventy-year-old Prime Minister had budged no further. “In all the circumstances,” he wrote Anthony Eden in 1945, “our policy should be to keep the matter so far as we can control it in American and British hands and leave the French and Russians to do what they can. You can be quite sure that any power that gets hold of the secret will try to make the article and this touches the existence of human society. This matter is out of all relation to anything else that exists in the world, and I could not think of participating in any disclosure to third or fourth parties at the present time.”2016 “He had always had a naive faith in ‘secrets,’ ” concludes C. P. Snow. “He had been told by the best authorities that this ‘secret’ wasn’t keepable and that the Soviets would soon have the bomb themselves. Perhaps, with one of his surges of romantic optimism, he deluded himself into not believing it. He was only too conscious that British power, and his own, was now just a vestige. So long as the Americans and British had the bomb in sole possession, he could feel that that power hadn’t altogether slipped away. It is a sad story.”
Making of the Atomic Bomb
Richard Rhodes
The best way to compensate for the negativity bias is to regularly take in the good.
Hardwiring Happiness
Rick Hanson
Find one thing you can improve on—late-night eating, skipping breakfast—and make that change. Find small ways to improve; they all add up. You will feel so much better, your performance will show it, and before too long, the small changes become a way of life.
Jump Attack
Tim S. Grover
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
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