Three years later, with Hitler dead and the Nazis defeated, President Harry Truman faced a comparably weighty decision. If such a possibility existed, Compton concluded, “these bombs must never be made.” As Compton said, “Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind.” Certainly, any reasonable human being could be expected to respond similarly. Oppenheimer and the brain trust he assembled had just calculated the possibility that an atomic explosion could ignite all the hydrogen in the oceans or the nitrogen in the atmosphere. Robert Oppenheimer while vacationing in Michigan during the summer of 1942. In his personal narrative Atomic Quest, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Arthur Holly Compton, who directed atomic research at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory during the Second World War, tells of receiving an urgent visit from J. From Japan Focus, an Asian Pacific e-journal, posted J.