Hubert Alyea: A lump of uranium about this big, it's very heavy, weighs about half a ton, that
much uranium undergoing its reaction could give off enough energy -- more energy than
all the TNT dropped by all the airplanes during all of World War II. Or to put it
another way, suppose you had raids on all the cities of the world tonight, carrying
some of these atom bombs. Two thousand planes, one night's raid. How many nights would
you have to fly TNT? The answer is instead of a single night, you'd have to carry
TNT, two thousand planes, night after night, for 130,000 years. Doesn't give off enough
energy?
...four seconds later, there are only 30 to care for the dying. Oppenheimer has testified
that 40 million United States citizens could be wiped out overnight by the use of
these bombs. What are you going to do in a world in which there is such fantastic
energy? In which, within another 25 years the world as we know it...
...people to understand better the peoples of other nations. This the step in the
right direction. And peace treaties will be mere transitory scraps of paper unless
the people in our country understand the peoples in Asia and Africa, and South America,
and Canada. You know there are 34,000 young people from other nations studying in
this country today. This is what I mean as a step in the right direction to get us
to understand people better. When we do understand them, when people who have come
to us from other lands, go back to their other lands, and tell them what the United
States is like -- not just what we see in the Hollywood movies, or the kind of thing
that we don't really think represents our democracy, but a sympathetic understanding
of those people, and getting those people in turn to understand us. When that is achieved,
when we have spent dollars for such understanding, this is a step in the right direction.
And so I hope that the urgency brought on by the presence of these atom bombs, the
fantastic power of these new weapons, will get us busy understanding people all over
the world. And will give us not only peace and goodwill amongst men, but under an
international law and order, we may look forward at last to peace among men of goodwill.
