Religion: Godless Gotterdammerung

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". . . This emphasizes that perfect automatism, that absolute lack of human consciousness or aim, which our society is rapidly achieving. As a uranium pile, once the elements have been brought together, runs through a series of chain reactions, until the final explosion takes place, so the elements of our society act and react, regardless of ideologies or personalities, until The Bomb explodes over Hiroshima. . . . The more commonplace the personalities and senseless the institutions, the more grandiose the destruction. It is Götterdämmerung without the gods. . . ."

Of scientists who worked on the bomb: "It is fair to expect such men . . . to be aware of the consequences of their actions. And they seem to have been so. ... Yet they all accepted the 'assignment' . . . because they thought of themselves as specialists . . . not as complete men. . . ."

Of the scientists—still unnamed—who refused: "They reacted as whole men. . . . Today the tendency is to think of peoples as responsible and individuals as irresponsible. The reversal of both these conceptions is the first condition of escaping the present decline to barbarism. . . ."