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By Root 1301 0

protracted writing process. Katherine Reeve was my first editor and got me started; Luciana O’Flaherty took over and prodded me to finish during my sabbatical leave in London in 2006. Luciana’s able and helpful assistant, Matthew Cotton, and my Oxford production editor Kate Hind, brought the book home. Hilary Walford copyedited the manuscript, even as the water rose around her house in Gloucester during the summer of 2007. Zoe Spilberg hunted down the photographs and negotiated permission for their use. Carolyn McAndrew handled the proofreading and eliminated the last of my sincere but, as it turned out, unnecessary attempts to spell in British.

I got interested in the atomic bomb because of my Stanford University graduate adviser Barton J. Bernstein, whose deep research on the subject I only gloss here. At Colgate University, my home institution, I was lucky enough to teach a course on the bomb with my colleague from across the Quad, Charles Holbrow. Since Charlie was responsible for doing the physics part of the course, I was fortunate that Robin Marshall, a physicist at the University of Manchester, read the manuscript and saved me from a number of errors. Laura Hein offered suggestions throughout, and Sam Walker bravely read the entire manuscript and said nice things about the writing. Conversations with friends and colleagues, including Carl Guarneri, David Robinson, Karen Harpp, Walter LaFeber, Frank Costigliola, and Jeremi Suri, helped to keep me on task, more or less. I am grateful to them all. I also thank audiences at the University of Minnesota, the University of Wisconsin, Fitchburg State College, Nanzan University, Kitakyushu University, and the Hiroshima Peace Institute, for questions, comments, and corrections following my lectures at these places. Students and colleagues at Colgate helped enormously. Thanks especially to my four terrific research assistants: Sarah Hillick, Alexander Whitehurst, Adam Florek, and Casey Graziani.

My parents, Roy and Muriel Rotter, and my in-laws, Chandran and Lorraine Kaimal, supported me unswervingly, which they seem to think is their job. My daughters, to whom the book is dedicated, have become young women in the course of my writing it. In the acknowledgements in my last book I characterized them as “naughty”; they are that no longer, but smart and beautiful and my proudest work ever. As always, my greatest debt is to my wife, Padma. Writing about the atomic bomb is not the most cheerful of pursuits. She kept me going, and much more.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Contents

Plates

Introduction

ONE - The World’s Atom

1. Dissecting the atom

2. The republic of science

3. The republic threatened: the advent of poisonous gas

4. The ethics of battlefield gas

5. Scientists and states: the Soviet Union and the United States

6. The ethical obligations of scientists

TWO - Great Britain: Refugees, Air Power, and the Possibility of the Bomb

1. Hitler’s gifts, Britain’s scientists

2. The advent of air power

3. War again, and the new doctrine of air bombardment

4. The discovery of nuclear fission, and the bomb reimagined

THREE - Japan and Germany: Paths not Taken

1. Finding uranium

2. The Germans advance

3. Japan’s nuclear projects

4. Germany’s nuclear projects

5. The Americans and British move forward

FOUR - The United States I: Imagining and Building the Bomb

1. The MAUD Committee and the Americans

2. The Americans get serious

3. To war

4. Resolving to build and use the bomb

5. Oppie

6. Groves

7. Centralizing the project

8. Fissions: uranium and plutonium

9. Life and work on ‘The Hill’

10. A different sort of weapon

FIVE - The United States II: Using the Bomb

1. The progress of the war against Germany

2. The allies and the strategic bombing of Germany

3. The war in the Pacific

4. The bombing of Japan

5. The firebombings and the atomic bombs

6. Doubters

7. The dismissal of doubt

8. To Alamogordo, July 1945

9. Truman at Potsdam

10. Why the bombs were dropped

11. Alternatives to the atomic bombs, and moral objections to attacking civilians