I don’t think it was an important part then, except that since people were going to Japan and getting killed in this period it was a great relief. And for several days after the news came out I was convinced that this was actually a… a hoax, because Hiroshima was a port city, and so I assumed that in fact somebody had equipped a barge with a few thousand tons of TNT, just as the cliché went, and they’d slipped this barge into the harbor, and then they flew a little airplane over and dropped something and set off this bomb. And so I assumed this was a great trick for fooling the Japanese into thinking we had an atomic bomb.

But Nagasaki wasn’t so accessible, so… I think many people must have wondered, why… why did we drop two bombs? Why wasn’t one enough? My first thought was that it was to convince them that it wasn’t a hoax. A few years later then, I met Oppenheimer for the first time when I was in graduate school at Princeton, and he was very hospitable… and tragic.