A few mornings before this lecture, Neville turned on the television and watched a man explain that the bomb dropped on Nagasaki was small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, releasing only about 20,000 tons of TNT -- just half of one percent of the energy the material actually contained, since scientists of the time did not yet know how to unlock the rest. Neville contrasts that destructive power with the far greater, and freely available, creative power of imagination he asks the audience to use that night to help rather than harm.