"to give society time to explore its possibilities and co-develop norms and safeguards"
Or, "this safety stuff is harder than we thought, we're just going to call 'tag you're it' on society"
Or,
-Oppenheimer : speaking "man, this nuclear safety stuff is hard, I'm just going to put it all out there and let society explore developing norms and safeguards".
Oppenheimer was making a bomb from day 1, he knew exactly what he was doing and how it would be used. There aren't so many different use cases for a bomb, after all. It was a nice movie, but it does not absolve him
The bomb was the end of conventional warfare between nuclear nations. MAD has created an era of peace unlike anything our species has ever seen before.
Well it works great, until is doesn't. We're perpetually a few bad decisions from a few possibly deranged actors away from obliterating all of those gains and then some.
Right, and in the meantime nuclear-armed countries mostly get to avoid the horrible, endless churn of death and war and teenagers being sent off to the meat grinder to push some border here or some border there.
We have eliminated warfare between nuclear countries, conflicts have been reduced to nuclear/non-nuclear or proxy warfare, and that's a very solid reduction in suffering.
Or, "this safety stuff is harder than we thought, we're just going to call 'tag you're it' on society"
Or,
-Oppenheimer : speaking "man, this nuclear safety stuff is hard, I'm just going to put it all out there and let society explore developing norms and safeguards".
-Society : Bombs Japan
-Oppenheimer : "No, not like that, oops".