Success Quote by Sidney Altman

Nuclear weapons, Altman implies, didn’t just change geopolitics; they colonized the imagination. The line’s sly power is in its scale shift: from “the bomb” as an epochal machine to the mind of “even a six-year old.” That phrasing isn’t cute. It’s an indictment of how quickly a society can turn catastrophe into awe, and how early the cultural script gets installed: genius builds, nations tremble, history pivots.

Altman, a working scientist who came of age in the long afterglow of Hiroshima and the Manhattan Project, is pointing at a mid-century American mythos where scientists became near-clerical figures. The “mystique” isn’t merely technical fascination; it’s prestige, secrecy, and the seductive idea that intellect can literally move the world. That aura traveled through classrooms, magazines, Cold War rhetoric, and the anxious glamour of “big science.” To be impressed at six is to absorb, before ethics or politics, the hierarchy of attention: the biggest story is the weapon, and the protagonists are the people in lab coats.

The subtext is a quiet discomfort with that inevitability. “Could not fail” reads as fatalistic, as if the culture left no alternative: you were going to be dazzled, because everyone was. Altman’s sentence compresses a whole era’s bargain - funding and status in exchange for proximity to power - and hints at the psychological cost. The bomb didn’t just demand scientists; it made science itself feel bomb-shaped: monumental, secretive, and morally weighty, whether or not the next discovery deserved that aura.