The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

US Airforce The City of Hiroshima before and after the bomb - the rings are at 1000ft intervals from the hypocenter

The only reaction that I remember – perhaps I was blinded by my own reaction – was a very considerable elation and excitement, and there were parties and people got drunk and it would make a tremendously interesting contrast, what was going on in Los Alamos at the same time as what was going on in Hiroshima. I was involved with this happy thing and also drinking and drunk and playing drums sitting on the hood of –the bonnet of-a Jeep and playing drums with excitement running all over Los Alamos at the same time as people were dying and struggling in Hiroshima.

I had a very strong reaction after the war of a peculiar nature-it may be just from the bomb itself and it may be for other psychological reasons, I’d just lost my wife or something, but I remember being in New York with my mother in a restaurant, immediately after Hiroshima and thinking about New York, and I knew how big the bomb in Hiroshima was, how big an area it covered and so on, and I realized from where we were-I don’t know, 59^th Street-that to drop one on 34^th Street, it would spread all the way out here and all these people would be killed and all the things would be killed and there wasn’t only one bomb available, but it was easy to continue to make them, and therefore that things were sort of doomed because already it happened to me-very early, earlier than to others who were more optimistic-that international relations and the way people were behaving were no different than they had ever been before and that it was just going to go the same way as any other thing and I was sure that it was going, therefore, to be used very soon. So I felt very uncomfortable and thought, really believed , that it was silly: I would see people building a bridge and I would say ‘they don’t understand’. I really believed that it was senseless to make anything because it would be destroyed very soon anyway, but they didn’t understand that and I had this very strange view of any construction that I would see, I would always think how foolish they are trying to make something. So I was really in a kind of depressive condition.

Nobel Foundation Richard Feynman

‘I Don’t Have To Be Good Because They Think I’m Going to Be Good’