Science Quote by Philip Morrison

A scientist choosing to narrate New York City as a target is a deliberate act of moral translation: it drags the atomic bomb out of the abstract realm of yield, blast radius, and “strategic value” and drops it into the lived geography of an audience that might otherwise treat nuclear war as a distant, technical problem. Morrison isn’t bragging about authorship; he’s signaling a calculated rhetorical move. The phrase “the description of the effect” sounds clinical, almost detached, but that coolness is the knife. It suggests that the horror doesn’t need embellishment. If you simply describe it accurately, the politics should collapse under the weight of the facts.

The context matters: One World or None (1946) was a public-warning project by scientists who had built, or helped build, the bomb and now feared the postwar rush toward normalization and arms racing. Morrison, a Manhattan Project physicist, is speaking from inside the machine. That insider status gives the sentence its quiet accusation: we know exactly what this does, and pretending otherwise is a choice.

The subtext is also about scale and complicity. “A single atomic bomb” is doing double duty, hinting at both the terrifying sufficiency of one weapon and the absurd understatement of early nuclear discourse, when “one” would soon become stockpiles. “New York City” is not just a place; it’s finance, media, culture, density - a proxy for modern life itself. By making the unimaginable concrete, Morrison’s intent is prevention: to force democratic publics to feel, not just understand, what policy planners were learning to rationalize.