Merle Tuve on staying with the Carnegie Institution of Washington after World War II.

Tuve:

Then after the war I decided against a public life. There were various people who wanted me to be president of a university and dean of a university, and so on, in different places in the country. I chose instead to stay with Carnegie because it was a private life. I felt a bit drained, too, by not only the stresses of the war but especially the atomic bomb stresses after the war. I had been on Roosevelt's original S-1 Committee, the Uranium Committee that Einstein had asked for. Dr. [L. J.] Briggs, the head of the Bureau of Standards was chairman. I was a member of that from 1939 to 1941. But when Ernie Lawrence and Arthur Compton came in and criticized our committee and said that we had to do it in a big way, I said: "Well the Germans can't afford to do it in a big way. I am all for making sure it can't be done in the kitchen sink. But this business of wanting to spend half a billion dollars — there isn't room for that in this war." I said: "I'm working on the present war." So I resigned from the S-1 Committee. All that did was turn them loose. [M. L. E.] Oliphant was the one who really prodded the U.S. into doing that. He joined up with Lawrence and Compton to push the Uranium Committee into doing things big. Well, I was wrong. They did get it done in the course of this war. But I was not happy about bombs. I was interested, of course, in propulsion and energy.