Albert Camus on The Atom Bomb In 1945

''The world is what it is, which is to say, not much. That's what each us learned yesterday thanks to the formidable chorus that radio, newspapers, and information agencies have just unleashed regarding the atomic bomb. We are told, in fact, amid a host of enthusiastic commentaries, that any mid-sized city whatever can be totally razed by a bomb about the size of a soccer ball. American, English, and French newspapers are overflowing with elegant dissertations on the future, the past, the inventors, the cost, the pacific vocation and war-like effects, the political consequences, and even the independent character of the atomic bomb. We'll sum it up in one sentence: mechanical civilization has just reached its final degree of savagery. We are going to have to choose, in a future that is more or less imminent, between collective suicide and the intelligent use of scientific conquests.
Meanwhile, it is permissible to think that there is some indecency in celebrating in this way a discovery that is, first of all, putting itself at the service of the most formidable destructive rage that humanity has demonstrated for centuries. It will occur to no one to be surprised, no doubt, except from some remorseless idealism, in a world that has been turned over to all the heartbreaks of violence, incapable of any control, indifferent to justice and simple human happiness, that science should devote itself to organized murder.
These discoveries must be recorded, commented upon for what they are, announced to be the world so that humanity may have an accurate idea of its destiny. But to surround these terrible revelations with picturesque or humorous writings, this is something that cannot be borne.''