3 Quotes by B.J. Hollars

Oppenheimer always chose the more beautiful path. "Science is not everything," he once remarked, "but science is very beautiful.

On August 29th, 1949, when the Soviets conducted their own successful nuclear test, our love for the bomb began to lessen. Perhaps it was foolhardy to think that we alone could hold fire in a fennel stalk. At 5:29 a.m. on that July morning, all we saw was the future when, in fact, we should have remembered how Zeus chained Prometheus to a mountaintop and sent an eagle to eat his liver daily. Night after night, his liver regrew, and day after day, the eagle ate it.

A generation of school-aged children swallowed the lie that we fed them. Their parents swallowed it, too. Not because they believed it, but because hope was more palatable than hopelessness. The truth, of course, was that no "duck and cover" technique could ever deflect a bomb.