The workings of history often seem inevitable: Bygone decisions appear inescapable, and the viability of alternate pathways easily discounted. Recent history is, however, recent—important moments not yet carved in stone. Serhii Plokhy’s “The Nuclear Age” ably presents the variability of political, military and ethical considerations that have been central to decision makers since the dawn of the atomic era in the 1940s.
Mr. Plokhy, a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, shows that nuclear theorizing and research were initially international, focused on peaceful rather than military applications. Faced with impending war in the 1930s, however, scientific internationalism fragmented, with physicists reverting to their national allegiances. Breaking the atom was no longer an academic proposition but profoundly threatening. On Oct. 11, 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was presented with Albert Einstein’s now-famous letter on nuclear science’s wartime potential; Roosevelt saw that the challenge would be “to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.” As Mr. Plokhy says, nuclear-deterrence strategy was born at that moment.
Subsequent moralizing about nuclear weapons, often by the scientists developing them, pales before Roosevelt’s willingness to act on his gut instinct. Berlin, Tokyo or Moscow might have beaten the U.S. to the atomic bomb, but they didn’t, because, Mr. Plokhy tells us, America was the only country “prepared and affluent enough to take the scientific, financial and, ultimately, military risk” to prevail.
Read the full article here.