Tomatoes: The weapon of choice. They would have thrown tomatoes at Oppenheimer too, Dr. Recker consoled himself, switching on his windshield wipers to smear away the tomatoes that demonstrators pelted his windshield with as he drove through the police line to get to his office. Lots of signs had that upside-down We Cover the Earth logo that NGers had converted into a cartoon Red Marble Earth, its atmosphere boiling away. It served its purpose for those who needed a flag to rally around. Among the huge puppets of the president, some of the protestors held signs that actually showed the Earth’s atmosphere on fire. An obvious reference to Oppenheimer. Beatniks or whatever they were called back then had gone ballistic when they found out that some physicists on the Manhattan Project were worried that the test of the first A-bomb would ignite the Earth’s atmosphere. Of course, beatniks never stopped to consider how carefully Oppenheimer’s team had check the calculations to make sure that setting the atmosphere on fire had a low probability. Maybe if those beatniks had been marines onboard one of the battleships steaming toward a beach invasion of Japan, they would have had a different opinion. The bomb had saved the lives of over a million soldiers. Both American and Japanese.

If the NGers throwing garbage at him had stopped to consider that, they would fight through the police line to thank him for the judo flip his team did on off-the-shelf video game hardware, getting it to coordinate banks of math processors to break the exaFLOP barrier: 40,000 core processors running a quintillion calculations per second—fast enough to simulate reality as never before. Cosmologists wanted time on it to study the Big Bang; relief workers wanted to model world hunger; banks were hoping to coordinate billions of worldwide charge-card transactions…. Everyone wanted time on his computer, but the number one law of science was ‘He who pays plays,’ so was it his fault that the first thing his funders put it to use on was to simulate the way nuclear warheads behaved in the first microseconds of a blast?

A well-armed society makes for polite people, as Oppenheimer’s baby showed so long ago. Maybe if someone explained that to these neo-hippies, they’d be grateful it was being used to make better weapons instead of modeling climate change as they all wanted. What good was a cooler world if it was embroiled in war?