There are young people today who feel that we shouldn’t have developed the atomic bomb — that it was a mistake. I believe that this is because, through no fault of their own, they don’t have this sense of history. They didn’t live through this most terrifying period when we thought we were losing the race with Adolf Hitler. I might go on and say that after we had developed the atomic bomb, and it looked like it was certainly going to work, and Germany had surrendered, the question arose then whether it should be used on Japan. I was a member of a group under the chairmanship of James Franck, an ex-German physicist who was working at the Metallurgical Laboratory as chairman of a committee of about seven to eight scientists who issued what has become known now as the Franck Report, where we recommended that the bomb not be used on Japan. That it be demonstrated first in the presence of Japanese observers on some uninhabited island, with the thought that they would see what a terrible weapon it was, what it would do to their country if it were used, and would induce the Emperor of Japan to surrender, without the need for the use of the atomic bomb on the Japanese people.