The 80th anniversary last week of the atomic bombings that helped end World War II came at a most peculiar time. That is in part because we can’t mark that anniversary without also noting the astonishing Manhattan Project that built atomic weapons.

上周是原子弹爆炸80周年纪念，当年的爆炸加速了“二战”的结束。这个纪念日出现在一个极为特殊的时刻。部分原因在于，我们在纪念这个日子时，无法不提及研发原子弹的惊人计划——曼哈顿计划。

The Manhattan Project was a towering achievement, one of the great stories of human effort and accomplishment. Yet the Trump administration has been systematically dismantling the culture of research that the Manhattan Project and World War II bequeathed us, a culture that propelled American prosperity.

曼哈顿计划是一座高耸的丰碑，是人类努力与成就史上的伟大壮举之一。然而，特朗普政府正系统性地瓦解曼哈顿计划和“二战”留给我们的科研文化——正是这种文化推动了美国的繁荣。

At no other time in modern history has a country so thoroughly turned its back on its core national strengths. The very elements that made the Manhattan Project such a success are today under assault. With devastating cuts to science and health research, the administration is turning its back on a history of being powered and renewed by the innovation and vision of immigrants. What America may find is that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project — which, in the end, wasn’t the bomb but a new way of looking at how science and government can work together.

在现代史上，还从未有国家如此彻底地背弃自己的核心优势。当年成就曼哈顿计划的关键要素，如今正遭受冲击。政府大幅削减科学与健康研究经费，背弃了由移民的创新精神与远见所推动并革新的历史传统。美国终将发现，我们已将曼哈顿计划最伟大的遗产挥霍殆尽——其核心并非原子弹本身，而是开辟了科学与政府协作的新范式。

That the Manhattan Project happened is itself a minor miracle. For nearly two years, the U.S. military seemed to want nothing to do with the effort of inventing an atomic bomb.

曼哈顿计划本身就堪称一个小小的奇迹。在近两年的时间里，美军曾经似乎对研发原子弹毫无兴趣。

From 1939 to 1941, a ragtag group of mostly Jewish refugee scientists from Hitler’s Europe, including Albert Einstein, approached the government and met with military officials. The scientists educated them on the discovery of nuclear fission, its implications for war and their fears that Hitler would develop an atomic bomb first.

从1939年到1941年，一群主要由那些从希特勒统治下的欧洲逃离出来的犹太难民科学家组成的群体（其中包括阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦），与政府和军方进行了接触。科学家们向他们介绍了核裂变的发现、对战争的影响，以及他们对希特勒会首先研制出原子弹的担忧。

The military brushed them off. “The colonels kept rather aloof,” the physicist Eugene Wigner recalled after one such meeting in October 1939, as Hitler took Poland. “They were friendly, they smiled, but they never expected to see a working atomic bomb in this world.”

军方对此不屑一顾。“上校们相当冷淡，”物理学家尤金·维格纳回忆在1939年10月的一次这样的碰面时说，当时希特勒正在攻占波兰。“他们很友好，面带微笑，但他们完全不指望世上真能造出原子弹。”

One of those colonels told Wigner and Edward Teller, dismissively, that he would award $10,000 to whoever could develop a death ray and prove it by killing a goat — the implication being he imagined that project more likely than a bomb that unlocked the power of the fundamental building block of the universe.

其中一位上校不屑地告诉维格纳和爱德华·泰勒，只要谁能研制出死亡射线并通过杀死一只山羊来证明，他将给予1万美元的奖励——言下之意是，相比一种可以释放宇宙基本构成单元的力量的炸弹，他认为死亡射线还更现实一些。

That the push came from refugees from fascist Europe was not a coincidence. “These people — these Hungarian-, German- and Italian-born — knew the organization in dictatorial countries; it occurred to them that there might be ties between research and military applications, that in Germany all scientific work might have been enrolled in the war effort,” Laura Fermi — the wife of the atomic pioneer Enrico — wrote later. “American-born and -raised physicists had not yet found the door out of their ivory tower: The first knew the military state and the concentration of powers, the latter had seen only democracy and free enterprise.”

推动力源自法西斯欧洲的难民并非偶然。“这些来自匈牙利、德国和意大利的流亡科学家深谙独裁国家的组织模式，他们意识到科研与军事应用之间可以存在联系，在德国，所有科学研究都可能被纳入战争机器，”原子能先驱恩里科·费米的妻子劳拉·费米后来写道。“在美国出生长大的物理学家尚未走出象牙塔：前者见识过军国体制与集权统治，后者只经历过民主制度与自由企业。"

The physicist Arthur Holly Compton — who would go on to lead the effort to build the world’s first nuclear reactor in December 1942, tucked in an old squash court at the University of Chicago — explained: “Research in new fields of science had not been recognized by the United States government as a significant source of national strength. There was at Washington no indi­vidual or office having power to deal adequately with a new scientific development whose importance, though urgent and vital, was ill defined. It was simply not in our tradition.”

物理学家亚瑟·霍利·康普顿（他日后将于1942年12月在芝加哥大学一个旧壁球馆里主持建造全球首个核反应堆）解释说：“当时美国政府尚未认识到新兴科学领域的研究是国家实力的重要源泉。华盛顿没有任何个人或机构有能力充分处理一项新的科学进展，尽管有着紧迫而重大的意义，却难以界定。这完全不符合我们的传统。”

That arms-length relationship didn’t last long. What came to be known as the Manhattan Project, a $2 billion initiative, employed hundreds of thousands of Americans by 1945 in sites from Oak Ridge, Tenn., to Los Alamos, N.M. World War II efforts like it and the “Rad Lab” at M.I.T., which helped pioneer radar, forever transformed the country and the world.

这种疏远的关系并未持续太久。到1945年，这个后来被称为曼哈顿计划的20亿美元项目，在从田纳西州橡树岭到新墨西哥州洛斯阿拉莫斯的基地雇用了数十万美国人。像它和麻省理工学院助力雷达技术突破的辐射实验室这样的“二战”科研项目，永远改变了这个国家和世界的格局。

Out of this grew a tradition of government-supported science, technology and education efforts. Those fields became a source of national strength and arguably the primary driver of American economic hegemony and prosperity in the eight decades since.

由此形成了政府扶持科技教育的传统。这些领域成为国家实力的源泉，可以说是80年来美国经济霸权和繁荣的主要驱动力。

Organizations like the national labs at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Berkeley that grew out of the Manhattan Project became the backbone of a stunning period of scientific and technological advances in the decades after the war. They were joined by the National Science Foundation (founded in 1950); Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA (founded in 1958); and the National Institutes of Health, which became a major grant-maker after the war — not to mention a host of other agencies like NASA and the Department of Energy.

曼哈顿计划衍生的橡树岭、洛斯阿拉莫斯、伯克利等国家实验室，成为战后数十年科技突飞猛进的支柱。之后陆续加入的有：1950年成立的国家科学基金会、1958年成立的国防部高级研究计划局、战后转型为主要资助机构的国立卫生研究院——更不必提美国宇航局、能源部等众多机构了。

The return on a relatively modest government investment has been astounding; DARPA alone helped birth the internet, GPS and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine.

并不算高的政府投资得到了惊人的回报；仅国防部高级研究计划局就催生了互联网、GPS和莫德纳的新冠疫苗。

Today, just as China’s own research and development efforts take off, the Trump administration has been erasing this legacy. Agencies like the National Science Foundation have been gutted, and the administration’s war on universities is already leading to huge cuts at science and health labs around the country; the Republican Congress and Trump administration are squashing progress in technologies like solar panels and electric vehicles that the rest of the world is mostly keen to adopt, likely leaving the United States not only behind but potentially not even in the game.

如今，就在中国的研发事业腾飞之际，特朗普政府却在背弃这一传统。国家科学基金会等机构遭受重创，政府对高校的打压已导致全美各地的科学及健康实验室经费锐减；共和党掌控的国会与特朗普政府正扼杀太阳能电池板、电动汽车等全球热门技术的发展，美国恐怕不仅会掉在后面，甚至有可能彻底出局。

Even necessities like weather forecasting and high-quality government data collection face wreckage, and officials are starting to unwind public health advances like fluoride in water and mandatory childhood vaccinations. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services is targeting for cuts research breakthroughs that appear just around the corner — including mRNA-based treatments that could help address high-mortality diseases like glioblastoma and pancreatic cancer.

就连天气预报和高质量的政府数据收集等基础服务也面临崩溃，官员们开始取消公共卫生领域的进步措施，比如在饮用水中添加氟化物和强制性儿童疫苗接种。小罗伯特·F·肯尼迪领导的卫生与公众服务部正着手削减临近取得突破的研究——包括可能有助于治疗胶质母细胞瘤和胰腺癌等高致死率疾病的mRNA疗法。

In addition, there is the administration’s war on immigration and its hostility to foreign researchers and students coming to the United States to build careers, discover breakthroughs and found start-ups that could transform the world. For much of the past century, the pull of America’s great universities, openness to science and tradition of democracy has brought the smartest minds to our shores, just as it did Fermi, Wigner, Teller and most of the other core participants in the Manhattan Project.

此外，政府还对移民开战，对赴美开拓事业、寻求突破、创立变革性企业的外国研究人员与学生采取敌视态度。在过去一个世纪的大部分时间里，美国顶尖学府的吸引力、对科学的开放态度以及民主传统，正如当年吸引费米、维格纳、泰勒以及曼哈顿计划的大多数核心成员那样，将最杰出的英才汇聚至此。

Among the country’s most elite business club — the five companies with over a $2 trillion market cap — immigrants and their offspring played a key role in all of them, from Apple’s Steve Jobs (the son of a Syrian immigrant) and Google’s Sergey Brin (born in Moscow) to the Taiwanese-born Jensen Huang of Nvidia and even Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, got a critical early investment from his adoptive father, a Cuban refugee.

在美国最顶尖的商业俱乐部——市值超过2万亿美元的五家公司中——移民及其后代都扮演着核心角色。苹果的史蒂夫·乔布斯是叙利亚移民之子；谷歌的谢尔盖·布林生于莫斯科；英伟达的黄仁勋生于台湾；甚至亚马逊的创始人杰夫·贝佐斯的关键早期投资来自他的养父，一位古巴难民。

It is all the more puzzling that the attack on universities and government-supported research has come from the Trump administration — which in 2020 led the closest and equally herculean analogue of a modern Manhattan Project, the Operation Warp Speed effort to develop and distribute a Covid-19 vaccine in stunning time. It is equally puzzling that this model of development is undermined by figures like Elon Musk, a onetime immigrant student, and Marc Andreessen, whose fortune came from Netscape, which was built on inventions supported by funding from the National Science Foundation.

令人费解的是，对高校及政府资助研究的攻击竟来自特朗普政府——该政府2020年曾主导媲美曼哈顿计划的曲速行动，以惊人的速度研发出并投放新冠疫苗。同样令人困惑的是，这种发展模式却遭到了埃隆·马斯克和马克·安德里森等人的破坏，前者曾是一名移民学生，后者的财富来源于网景公司——一家以国家科学基金会资助的发明为基础建立的公司。

The world stands on the precipice of breakthroughs in artificial intelligence that might, with time, prove as transformational as the unlocking of the atom did during World War II. Whether we can hold onto our scientific advantage, though, is an open question.

世界正处于人工智能突破的边缘，假以时日，其变革意义或堪比“二战”期间原子能的释放。然而，我们能否保持科技优势，是一个未知数。

If China is able to capitalize on our self-inflicted wounds to invent and secure the future of the 21st century instead, we may find that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project.

若中国趁我们自损之际抢占先机，赢得21世纪的未来发明主导权，我们或终将发现——我们辜负了曼哈顿计划最伟大的遗产。