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Motivation During the Manhattan Project

GOURLEY: In your life, you've accepted quite a level of risk, as far as radiation is concerned.
GOFMAN: I was pretty happy to do that. I would do that again, because in my lifetime (you don't know about it, Karoline), [I would do] anything that would help defeat Hitler and [the] Japanese warlords. I'd be happy to take a lot of radiation or whatever it took. You could have come into our lab in Gilman in 1942 to '44 at midnight or two in the morning. The chances were better than even you'd find us all there. We didn't have to be there; that was just how we felt about things.

I've had people from NHKTV, that's big Japanese TV. They have several different branches-Tokyo NHK, Hiroshima NHK; we were on both of them. I remember the last one. They said, "Don't you feel badly that you worked on the bomb, thinking of all the horrendous things that it did at Hiroshima/Nagasaki?" I said, "Well, you know, it shouldn't have happened. I think you should have thought of it when you bombed Pearl Harbor. If we hadn't had Pearl Harbor, we wouldn't have [had] the Philippine Death March and we wouldn't have [had] Guadalcanal and we wouldn't have had Iwo Jima and we wouldn't [have] firebomb[ed] Tokyo and Hiroshima; it would not have been bombed. You should have thought of that before you bombed Pearl Harbor."



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