FOR THE WASHINGTON POST, I’ve reviewed Garrett Graff’s new book The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making & Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb. It’s a very handsome and fine-looking book, but its contents—and the form of oral history itself—forbid the kind of clear analysis and condemnation this subject demands:
As soon as the defeat of the Nazis was certain, however, dissent came in a wave. The Polish-Jewish physicist Joseph Rotblat walked out the front gates of Los Alamos and devoted the rest of his life to the study of fallout. Albert Einstein regretted signing the letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 suggesting that a bomb was possible; if he had known the Germans couldn’t succeed, he wouldn’t have lifted a finger. The brilliant and brave Hungarian scientist Leo Szilard was Einstein’s co-author on that letter. By July 1945, he was circulating a petition to fellow scientists at Los Alamos warning that a nation “which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.”
Read the full review here: The story of nuclear war through the eyes of those who built the bomb