"My eventual participation is especially ironic in view of my own earliest attitudes toward bombing and my unusual introduction to the nuclear age. An intense abhorrence of both population bombing and nuclear weapons went back to my childhood during World War II. A year before Pearl Harbor, when I was nine years old, newsreels of the London Blitz impressed me with the incomprehensible cruelty of the Nazis. The demolition and burning of cities filled with people of all ages seemed to express their demonic character. In grade school after Pearl Harbor, we had air raid drills. One day my teacher handed out a model of a short, slim silver-colored incendiary bomb, which was used to spread fires. We were told it was a magnesium bomb, whose blaze couldn’t be extinguished by water. You had to cover it with sand to keep oxygen from feeding the flames. In every room in our school there was a large bucket filled with sand for this purpose. I take it that this was a way of making us identify with the war effort, the likelihood of German or Japanese bombers penetrating as far as Detroit being quite small in retrospect. But the notion of the magnesium bomb made a strong impression on me. It was uncanny to think of humans designing and dropping on other humans a flaming substance that couldn’t easily be extinguished, a particle of which, we were told, would burn through flesh to the bone and wouldn’t stop burning even then. It was hard for me to understand people who were willing to burn children like that. Later newsreels showed American and British bombers bravely flying through flak to drop their loads on targets in Germany. I believed what we were told—that our daylight precision bombing was aimed only at war factories and military targets (even if, regrettably, some civilians were also hit by accident)."