What is tangency in this case?' He said it was 159 degrees in either direction. I said, 'Well, I've had some trigonometry, some physics. But what should we do this time? He said, 'You can't fly straight ahead because you'd be right over the top when it blows up and nobody would ever know you were there.' He said I had to turn tangent to the expanding shockwave. I told him that when we had dropped bombs in Europe and North Africa, we'd flown straight ahead after dropping them - which is also the trajectory of the bomb.
So I was ready to say I wanted to go to war, but I wanted to ask Oppenheimer how to get away from the bomb after we dropped it.
PT: Even though it was still theory, whatever those guys told me, that's what happened.
