J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER 



tion in which we find ourselves, and of what is good and bad. 

 Some, which are importantly affected by the public interest, 

 and which are among the gravest, must be made in the public 

 sector, and by public institutions. This life that we have in 

 common has had its cognitive basis weakened and debilitated 

 because so much is missing from our common understanding, 

 and from public knowledge. It is confronted with situations in 

 many ways unlike those for which its institutions were devised 

 and developed. Our public life is more vast; its events occur 

 with a more startling variety and rapidity; and its interconnec- 

 tions are more numerous, more swift, more subtle, and less 

 well understood than in any other age. It lacks, as an essential 

 element of nobility, the union of simplicity and truth. 



When the industrial revolution led to the increasingly 

 widespread exploitation of fossil fuels, the public interest was 

 ill protected, at least in part because the new knowledge re- 

 quired was not available. It developed without informed con- 

 sideration of the grave future problems of health, of climate, 

 and of the restructuring of human patterns of life. Even with 

 the early development of nuclear fuels for industry, in spite of 

 important and troublesome areas of continuing ignorance, we 

 knew and know far more of the dangers and are far better pre- 

 pared to cope with the public interest; but even of the knowledge 

 that we do have, the part that is properly in the public sector, and 

 is commonly understood, reveals a piteous lack of preparation for 

 understanding it, and a strange and troubling mixture of ex- 

 aggerated fear, hope, and pervasive cynicism. 



Among the choices for which our inherited institutions ap- 

 pear poorly suited and inadequate are the uses of the un- 

 precedented new instruments of warfare. Throughout history, 

 arms have characteristically been the last arbiter of disputes. 

 We have come to live in an aae when this cannot continue. 

 Yet political institutions, if they are to serve man at all, can 



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