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"You know what I'd do to keep the world out of a nuclear war? Most of the decision makers have never seen a bomb. These guys talk about bombs--so many kilotons, so many mega tons--it doesn't mean anything to 'em. So I say maybe every five years every world leader should have to strip down--Mrs. Thatcher in her bikini and the other guys in skivvies--and watch a multimegaton bomb go off. What'll impress them is not the flash, not the size of the cloud and not the boom. It's the heat. If they're about 25 miles away, they will get very antsy, 'cause they'll get hotter and hotter, and they will worry that maybe somebody's made a mistake. The heat. Really scares the bejesus out of you. After that the chances of their ever using a bomb would diminish rapidly."
He also makes it clear that he is less opposed to the proponents of disarmament than to an attitude that suggests that in the real world the U.S. has no right or reason to maintain nuclear weapons, and, for that matter, that the Americans had no business bombing Hiroshima in the first place. "A few years ago, Senator [Mark] Hatfield organized a big peace exhibit in the rotunda of the Senate. So here's this big exhibit, and all it showed was the horrors of Hiroshima. [Some of the artifacts came from the Hiroshima Peace Museum.] All the burned victims. Just awful things. Melted cups. Now my objection was that in a peace exhibit you ought to have shown Pearl Harbor too. Then you could say, This is the way it started, and this is the way it ended. Let's not do this again.'"
One more phone call about the Ford. Eventually he sells it for $200. Says the tires are worth that.
"So anyway, I finally got to go to Tinian, flying from Los Alamos to San Francisco to Hawaii to Johnston Island. In Hawaii you would see where the American ships were sunk--parts of 'em sticking out of the water. And you'd see the pock-marks on the buildings. And when you got to Johnston Island, there were wrecked planes on the field. And when you got to Kwajalein, there'd been one hell of a battle there. I picked spent bullets right off the ground--.30 caliber, .50 caliber. Parts of airplanes and amphibious vehicles lay all over the place. The control tower was all busted up. Then we got to Tinian, and all the Japanese buildings were gutted. Remnants, standing like Coventry. You went around to these places, and you got the idea that something had been going on."
"I got to Tinian in March 1945, and the Indianapolis arrived in July with the uranium from Los Alamos. The Indianapolis was sunk by the Japanese after it left Tinian; if it had been hit before, no Hiroshima. We were working six days a week on Tinian, trying to get ready for the mission. We all got jungle rot on our feet and hands. I remember going to a doctor and asking what to do. He told me, 'Scratch it.' I used to watch the B-29s, hundreds of 'em, coming back from missions like a flock of geese. Those big airplanes, coming in to land. Some smoking, some with their props feathered."