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Other physicists, agreeing with Rabi, take the view that the military-scientific partnership was not only dangerous to the country but detrimental to the quality of American science as well. Philip Morrison, celebrated for his teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, carried the container of plutonium in his hands from Los Alamos to the Trinity test site and, like Agnew, was on Tinian the days of the bombings. Now he spends a good part of his intellectual life arguing for disarmament. Morrison also felt that the Bomb was needed to end the war. Looking back today, however, he says that the physicists learned something after they transferred "their science directly from the peaceable study of the ultimate structure of matter to the fearful desolation of Hiroshima ... They learned rather quickly what had to be done next if we are able to survive for a long time. The statesmen have not learned so quickly, but it is true that their task is a much harder one."
After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Morrison's main concern was "how to get the Bomb into the peace." But once World War II was over, American scientists were inevitably associated in the public mind with war. Hiroshima had entirely changed the popular image of the unworldly professor; he had proved what he could do. By the end of the 1940s, the Soviets had their own atomic weapon, and by 1953, less than a year after the U.S., they tested their first hydrogen bomb. Once the arms race was a fact, the U.S. seemed to need its physicists as saviors and protectors. Places like Los Alamos were transformed from emergency-inspired experimental labs to permanent national institutions. People like Oppenheimer and Morrison left Los Alamos to return to their universities as soon as the war was done. People like Agnew stayed on.
At Los Alamos today, Merri Wood, a tall brunet with a bright, clear-liquid voice and a designer of nuclear weapons, is in a sense Agnew's heir and creation. Not only does Wood not question the connection of her work with the military, she is pleased to have it. For one thing, that connection has provided jobs for those like herself, a former Ph.D. candidate in physics at Georgia Tech, who was specializing in particle transport and found a shop to apply her studies. (Particle transport is a general term for the motion of atomic particles through various materials.) Designing weapons is something Wood wanted to do since junior high school, when she read "everything I could lay my hands on" about the men making the first Bomb. "Out of patriotism, maybe glamour, I don't know, I really admired those people. I never dreamed that I'd be doing it. I'm tickled pink."