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On February 2, 1939, Leo Szilard wrote Joliot-Curie from America: When Hahn’s paper reached this country about a fortnight ago, a few of us at once got interested in the question whether neutrons are liberated in the disintegration of uranium. Obviously, if more than one neutron were liberated, a sort of chain reaction would be possible. In certain circumstances this might then lead to the construction of bombs which would be extremely dangerous in general and particularly in the hands of certain governments. He did not identify “certain governments.” Everyone knew; it was on all their minds: with such bombs, Hitler could rule or destroy the world. Haunted by this specter, the giants of European physics joined Lise Meitner in a general migration. Leaving Fascist Italy to receive his prize in Stockholm, Fermi canceled his return ticket in Sweden and headed for New York and the laboratories of Columbia University. Young Edward Teller went to George Washington University. Victor F. Weisskopf joined the Rochester faculty, and Bohr was packing to join Einstein in Princeton. He suggested that Lise Meitner and her nephew Dr. O. R. Frisch remain in Copenhagen long enough to conduct a confirming experiment. On January 16, 1939, Bohr reached New York. Awaiting him was a cable from Meitner and Frisch. The experiment had been affirmative—staggeringly so; the atom they split had freed 200 million volts of electricity. If uranium could be harnessed, theoretically it would be twenty million times as powerful as TNT.

The Glory and the Dream

William Manchester

These case studies helped me resolve a paradox that has appeared repeatedly in my attempts to help established companies that are confronted by disruptive entrants—as was the case with Blockbuster and U.S. Steel. Once their executives understood the peril that the disruptive attackers posed, I would say, “Okay. Now the problem is that your sales force is not going to be able to sell these disruptive products. They need to be sold to different customers, for different purposes. You need to create a different sales force.” Inevitably they would respond, “Clay, you’re just naive. You have no idea how much it costs to create a new sales force. We need to leverage our existing sales team.” Or I would say, “You know that brand of yours? It isn’t going to work on this new disruptive product. You need to build a different brand.” Their response was just the same. “Clay, you have no idea how expensive it is to create a new brand from scratch. We need to leverage one of our existing brands.” The language of the disruptive attackers was completely different: “It’s time to create the sales force” and “It’s time to build a brand.”

How Will You Measure Your Life?

Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

Trump was not done. Nor was he satisfied that it sufficed for the United States, the top nuclear power in the world, to issue an unprecedented threat. Within the White House but not publicly, Trump proposed sending a tweet declaring that he was ordering all U.S. military dependents—thousands of the family members of 28,500 troops—out of South Korea. The act of removing the dependents would almost certainly be read in North Korea as a signal that the United States was seriously preparing for war. On December 4, McMaster had received a warning at the White House. Ri Su-yong, the vice chairman of the Politburo, had told intermediaries “that the North would take the evacuation of U.S. civilians as a sign of imminent attack.” Withdrawing dependents was one of the last cards to play. The possible tweets scared the daylights out of the Pentagon leadership—Mattis and Dunford. A declaration of intent to do so from the U.S. commander in chief on Twitter was almost unthinkable. A tweet about ordering all military dependents out of South Korea could provoke Kim. The leader of a country like North Korea that only recently had acquired nuclear weapons and had many fewer nukes than a potential adversary could be trigger-happy. A use-it-or-lose-it mind-set could take hold. The tweet did not go out. But Trump wouldn’t drop the matter, and raised the issue of withdrawing U.S. military dependents with Senator Graham. On December 3, before Trump and Kim’s war of words, and after a North Korean ICBM test, Graham had advocated removing military families from South Korea. “It’s crazy to send spouses and children to South Korea,” he said on CBS’s Face the Nation. He suggested making South Korea an unaccompanied tour for service members and said, “I think it’s now time to start moving American dependents out of South Korea.” Now, a month later, when Trump called, Graham seemed to have had a change of heart. “You need to think long and hard before you make that decision,” Graham said. “Because when you make that decision, it is hard to go back. The day you do that is the day you rock the South Korean stock market and the Japanese economy. That is a big frigging deal.” “You think I should wait?” Trump asked. “Mr. President,” Graham said, “I don’t think you should ever start this process unless you’re ready to go to war.”

Fear

Bob Woodward

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