"The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children. We were the first to have this weapon in our possession, and the first to use it. There is a practical reality that potential enemies will have it in the future and that atomic bombs will sometime be used against us. That is why, as a professional military man with a half-century of service to his government, I come to the end of my war story with an apprehension about the future. These new concepts of "total war" are basically distasteful to the soldier and sailor of my generation. Employment of the atomic bomb in war will take us back in cruelty toward non-combatants to the days of Genghis Khan. It will be a war of pillage and rape of a society, done impersonally by one state against another, whereas in the Dark Ages it was a result of individual greed and terrorism. Thee new and terrible instruments of uncivilized warfare represent a modern type of barbarism not worthy of Christian man. One of the professors associated with the Manhattan Project told me that he had hoped the bomb wouldn't work. I wish that he had been right."
January 1, 1970