Five years ago, the idea of Atomic Power was only a dream. You have made that dream a reality. You have seized upon the most nebulous of ideas and translated them into actualities. You have built cities where none were known before. You have constructed industrial plants of a magnitude and to a precision heretofore deemed impossible. You built the weapon which ended the War and thereby saved countless American lives. With regard to peacetime applications, you have raised the curtain on vistas of a new world.
—Leslie Groves, “On the Transference of Nuclear Authority from the Manhattan Project to the Atomic Energy Commission,” 1947 (via nickkahler)
And killed so many others and made the world live on the edge of destruction.





