Janna Levin: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Because written in many places about the human beings behind the science, I have to ask you about this, about nuclear weapons. Whereas the greatest of coming together to create this most terrifying and powerful of a technology, and now I get to talk to world leaders for whom this technology, is part of the tools that is used perhaps implicitly on the chessboard of geopolitics. What can you say as a person who’s a physicist and who have studied the physicist and written about the physicists, the humans behind this, about this moment in human history, when physicists came together and created this weapon that’s powerful enough to destroy all of human civilization? I think it’s an excruciating moment in the history of science. And people talk about Heisenberg, who stayed in Germany and worked for the Nazis in their own attempt to build the bomb. There was this kind of hopeful talk that maybe Heisenberg had intentionally derailed the nuclear weapons program, but I think that’s been largely discredited, that he would have made the bomb, could he. Had he not made some really kind of simple errors in his original estimates about how much material would be required or how they would get over the energy barriers. And that’s a terrifying thought. I don’t know that any of us can really put ourselves in that position of imagining that we are faced with that quandary, having to take the initiative to participate in thinking of a way that quantum mechanics can kill people. And then making the bomb, I think overwhelmingly, physicists today feel we should not continue in the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Very few theoretical physicists want to see this continue. That moment in history, the Soviet Union had incredible scientists. Nazi Germany had incredible scientists, and the United States had incredible scientists. And it’s very easy to imagine that one of those three would’ve created the bomb first, not the United States. And how different would the world be? The game theory of that, I think say the probability is 33% that it was in the United States. If the Soviet Union had the bomb, I think they would’ve used it in a much more terrifying way in the European theater and maybe turn on the United States. And obviously, with Hitler, he would’ve used it. I think there’s no question he would’ve used it to kill hundreds of millions of people…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.