American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

Oppenheimer was not, of course, the only scientist to harbor such thoughts. That year his former Cambridge tutor, Patrick M. S. Blackett (of the “poisoned apple” affair), published Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy, the first full-blown critique of the decision to use the bomb on Japan. By August 1945, Blackett argued, the Japanese were virtually defeated; the atomic bombs had actually been used to forestall a Soviet share in the occupation of postwar Japan. “One can only imagine,” Blackett wrote, “the hurry with which the two bombs—the only two existing—were whisked across the Pacific to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just in time, but only just, to insure that the Japanese Government surrendered to American forces alone.” The atomic bombings were “not so much the last military act of the Second World War,” he concluded, “as the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia now in progress.”