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Nor is it entirely safe to assume that a nation with a pluralist form of government will embark only on a just war. Wars of empire—the British in India and South Africa, the Americans in the Philippines, the French in Indochina—are morally problematic, and, even after the end of formal empire, adventures from Suez to Saigon suggest that democracies sometimes go to war for the wrong reasons. These are matters concerned with jus ad bellum—the justice of war. Equally complicated are issues of jus in bello, justice in war. A nation might go to war for good reason: because it is attacked or is in imminent danger of attack, because it wishes to stop aggression, or because it is determined to end a genocide or the terrible suffering of another nation’s people. Yet in its just wars it must fight well and fairly, doing only what damage is necessary to defend itself or halt aggressions or stop the slaughter of innocents. In the realm of jus in bello lies the real vexation for scientists who serve the state.37

There is a scientific counterpart to Crocean realism, as applied to international relations. It is best represented by Percy W Bridgman, who was Robert Oppenheimer’s physics teacher at Harvard. Even after the Second World War, Bridgman claimed that scientists were meant only to seek the truth and then to publicize it. What politicians and policymakers do with the truth thus uncovered is up to them and to the societies they represent, not to the scientists who make the discoveries. To demand scientific responsibility for the terrible things done with their discoveries is to put science in thrall to the state, chilling scientific research by insisting implicitly that it remain safe, free of any possible application to harmful purposes. A biologist might be constrained from working with microbes that, if misused, might cause an epidemic, but if used properly could eradicate a disease. An experiment in genetics could be used by a state to enforce a policy of racist eugenics—or lead to a cure for diabetes or cerebral palsy. It must remain for the scientist, according to Bridgman, to conduct her work without fear that the state will do the wrong thing with its result. Science must be amoral.38

Bridgman’s ‘ethical positivism’ became problematic in the extreme for the physicists and chemists who designed and built the atomic bomb. It remained possible to argue, in 1945, that the bomb was, as Irving Langmuir wrote, an ‘accident’ onto which scientists had stumbled, or that the bomb in essence already existed as a force of nature, which scientists had thus not so much invented as discovered. But most of those involved in the atom bomb project felt differently. Had they not solved the structure of the atom and made its nucleus fission? Had they not taken it upon themselves in 1939 or 1940 to stop publicizing their findings in the international republic of science for security reasons, and to entreat the US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt to authorize the building of the bomb? Had they not constructed a graphite-moderated pile to elicit a chain reaction in uranium, fashioned great factories to produce the bomb’s nuclear fuel, worked months on end in the New Mexico desert to refine the bomb’s shape and design, forge its metal jacket, and fabricate its delicate triggering mechanism? In H. G. Wells’s The World Set Free, Wells Holsten learns how to make radioactivity. Afterward, he ‘felt like an imbecile who has presented a box full of loaded revolvers to a Creche’. ‘I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds,’ thought Oppenheimer as he watched the mushroom cloud rise over Alamogordo at dawn on 16 July 1945. Another physicist put it more prosaically: ‘Now we are all sons of bitches.’39

Decent and humane by nearly all accounts, the scientists from many nations delivered to the US military an atomic bomb. They knew that the bomb would be used against an enemy (though some hoped that after Germany surrendered the bomb would not be dropped on Japan, a lesser evil in their view), and they suspected how awesomely destructive it would be. They