![]() ![]() People were soon persuaded that there was no danger, a post-war technical report declaring that 'the impossibility of igniting the atmosphere was assured by science and by common sense' yet it is hard to see how mere common sense could have had much to say about a matter complicated enough to have worried the likes of Teller and Oppenheimer. E.Teller 'proposed to the assembled luminaries the possibility that their bombs might ignite the earth's oceans or its atmosphere and burn up the world'.111 J.R.Oppenheimer, the project leader, took the proposal fairly seriously. Probably the earliest such heart-searching took place when the first nuclear weapons were being developed. As R.Ruthen writes,110 'Since the beginning of the nuclear age, researchers have met many times to discuss whether there was any chance that a proposed experiment might initiate a catastrophe.' When physicists considered performing experiments at very high energies, fears of vacuum metastability were by no means the first to be voiced. We now come to two possible sources of risk which I take much less seriously, although it might be wrong to disregard them entirely.
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