Training to Work

Philip Morrison

Institute Professor Emeritus
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts

The first noteworthy job that I had after earning my PhD was building the first atom bomb in Los Alamos. When the war ended, I took a tour by train through Japan to survey the damage that the bomb had done. The Japanese Army was demobilizing. Tired men were crowding into trains -- into both passenger cars and boxcars -- to ride home. At the station in Hiroshima, thousands of people lay dying on the platform. It was a sizable railroad station, and it had a roof -- the only one left on the street. But the roof had holes in it, and the rain came through. The city was in ruins, its hospitals destroyed. People all over the country were hungry. Japan was in really bad shape.

More than 60 cities had been destroyed -- two of them by atomic bomb, the others by tons of firebombs that the United States had dropped by the thousands. I was astonished by the power of the nuclear blasts. One atom bomb had created as much ruin and misery as hundreds of airplanes had. When I returned to the United States, my colleagues and I formed an organization that is now called the Federation of American Scientists. What we told the U.S. Congress in 1945 remains true today: It isn't hard to build an atom bomb. Anyone who really wants to build one can do it. But you can't win a nuclear war by having superior firepower, and no defense is 100% foolproof -- because even a small penetration of nuclear firepower is extremely damaging. So the only solution is an international agreement that minimizes the number of bombs that each country keeps. We still haven't solved that problem, but I'm optimistic. I thought that we would have destroyed the world by now, but it seems that our statesmen are smarter than they pretend to be.

Philip Morrison (philmorr@mit.edu) was the subject of an investigation in 1952 by a congressional anticommunist committee. Morrison, who is 84, has been the book reviewer for Scientific American for more than 30 years.

Patrick Dunne

Director
3i PLC
London, England

I'm a venture capitalist, so I'm in the position of coaching people who are the business equivalent of teenagers -- entrepreneurs in their early twenties who don't like having structure or control imposed upon them, and who believe very strongly that they're right. How do you get passionate young entrepreneurs to realize that they might actually be wrong about something? You build a relationship with them, and you earn their respect before you try to influence them.

I learned that lesson at my first job after college, when I was working as a math-and-statistics problem solver for an industrial-gas chemical company. I had to persuade guys who were 20 years more experienced than I was to reconfigure distribution patterns and to relocate plants. Some of the managers were glad to have me there. They used young people like me deliberately, to provoke thought and to ask ignorant questions, which would sometimes lead to better answers. Others were much more defensive and felt that their status was being challenged. It was important for me to take more time with the ones that were sensitive and to earn their trust by proving that I could be useful to them. At the root of it all is respect. It might sound terribly old-fashioned, but if you show people respect, you get respect in return.

Patrick Dunne (patrick_dunne@3i.com) is in charge of marketing worldwide for 3i PLC, a venture-capital firm with 30 offices in Asia, Europe, and the United States. He is the author of Directors' Dilemmas: Tales From the Frontline (Kogan Page, 2000).