"Despite their revolutionary character those bombs were built under an old and familiar set of assumptions: that if they worked, they would be used. Few of the thousands of people employed in the wartime Manhattan Project saw their jobs as differing from the design and production of conventional weapons. Atomic bombs were meant to be dropped, as soon as they were ready, on whatever enemy targets yet remained. Technology might have changed, but the human habit of escalating violence had not. The bombs' builders would have been surprised to learn, therefore, that the first military uses of nuclear weapons, on August 6 and 9, 1945, would be the last for the rest of the 20th century. As the means of fighting great wars became exponentially more devastating, the likelihood of such wars diminished, and ultimately disappeared altogether. Contrary to the lesson Thucydides drew from the greatest war of his time, human nature did changeāand the shock of Hiroshima and Nagasaki began the process by which it did so."
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John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History, p. 52
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
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Manhattan Project
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