The ethical question was whether the Atomic Bomb would finally bring peace —or escalate the Second World War. After the American attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August, the weapons of mass destruction led to the Japanese surrender on 15 August 1945, but at an horrific cost: an estimated more than 200,000 lives.

The irony of it all is that the German physicists of the time didn't do any serious research in this field and were in fact convinced that the reports they heard about their colleagues' work in the United States were mere propaganda. The "nuclear arms race" didn't actually exist during World War II and was run only by one side. Despite the fact that a petition was circulated among scientists of the project, pleading not to use the bomb against civilian populations, as it would be both immoral and unnecessary, Oppenheimer opposed it and the infamous destruction we all know of ensued. Although he later confessed feeling horrified and guilty, he never seems to have expressed any real regrets to have headed this programme of destruction. He merely stated that:

„In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humour, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.“ J. Robert Oppenheimer