DISSERTATION

"Terror and Mystery": The United States and Fear of Weapons of Mass Destruction, 1900-1945

My dissertation is a study of how the United States government reacted to the emerging threat of nuclear attack, from Albert Einstein's 1905 declaration that matter and energy were just different forms of the same thing (e=mc²) through the end of the Second World War and the threat of Nazi nuclear weapons.  Its table of contents: 

In a 1950 meeting with senior State and Defense Department officials, Robert Oppenheimer (right) observed that "two things stand out sharply with reference to the atomic bomb: one is terror and the other is mystery."  For U.S. political and military leaders, the "terror" was the prospect of nuclear attack, and the "mystery" was just how close enemies and potential enemies were to having an atomic bomb.  Ensuring that no nuclear weapon ever struck the United States or its armies overseas was one of the central motivations of U.S. national security policy, not only after 1949, but during the Second World War and in the early post-war years as well.  

Nuclear fission was discovered in Nazi Germany in 1938.  The scientific community succeeded with remarkable speed in drawing the attention of government officials to this new danger, and by the time the United States entered the war, many scientists and political leaders feared that Germany was already ahead in the world's first nuclear arms race.  By 1942, most British and American leaders were confident of ultimate victory in the war; for those select few "in the know," however, the atomic bomb was the one wild card that could change everything.  It is never easy to "prove a negative," but by 1944 the absence of evidence of a massive German atomic program had eased these fears substantially.  It was not until Allied armies entered Germany that Manhattan Project officials knew for certain that they had not lost the race for the bomb.  German surrender left Japan as the sole combatant when the first American atomic bombs became ready in early August 1945.