Scott Evil said:

>And if we had kept the bomb secret for a little bit longer,
>would the cold war have ever gotten started? Would the Soviets
>have been able to develop a bomb of their own?

The Manhatten and Trinty Projects were fully compromised by Soviet spies. Google: Fuchs Greenglass Rosenberg. The Soviets had blue prints of the Fat Man implosion bomb along with models of the explosive lenses. By delaying our own atomic weapons development we would have handed victory in the Cold War over to Joseph Stalin.

A more interesting question: Should we have developed thermonuclear weapons? Oppenheimer would have said "no" but Ed Teller said "yes". Ed Teller won that argument but I think Oppenheimer was correct. If we lose a city in the next ten years to an Islamic nuclear weapon, I think more people will be inclined to agree with Oppenheimer.

Gary