{"product_id":"james-b-conant-harvard-to-hiroshima-and-the-making-of-the-nuclear-age-9780394579665","title":"James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age","description":"\u003cp\u003eJames B. Conant was one of the giants of the American establishment. In this monumental biography  the first ever written  James G. Hershberg gives us the life of the renowned educator and scientist who led the U.S. governments effort to develop weapons of mass destruction  and whose own story mirrors Americas transition from isolationism to global superpower at the dawn of the nuclear age. Here is the full scope of Conants astonishing life. Born in a working-class suburb of Boston  he demonstrated a remarkable aptitude in science that won him the chance to study chemistry at Harvard  where academic distinction led to a professorship. Then  in 1933  when this son of a photoengraver seemed a likely prospect for a Nobel Prize  Conant tearfully left his laboratory to assume the presidency of Harvard  the pinnacle of American education. It was during his tenure as president that his life took an even more amazing turn: in 1941  as science adviser to FDR  he was given the secret assignment of determining whether or not the atomic bomb could or should be built. Drawn out of the secure confines of the university  Conant entered public life at one of the most tumultuous and uncertain moments in American history and remained  for the next dozen years  among a handful of government advisers intimately involved in the decisions relating to nuclear weapons. He administered the Manhattan Project and witnessed the July 1945 Trinity test at Alamogordo  New Mexico  where for a horrifying instant he believed the world was literally coming to an end before his eyes; and that same summer  while serving on a secret panel  it was Conant who made the fateful recommendation to use the new weapon  without warning  on a Japanese city. Finally  in 1952  he left the \"bad business\" of nuclear policy-making after he and J. Robert Oppenheimer lost a bitter fight to prevent the building of the hydrogen bomb. Thereafter  in public and in private  Conant wrestled with the terrible implications of the power he had taken part in unleashing  never to erase the terrifying awareness that he had helped humanity usher into existence the means of its own annihilation. Yet his fear of nuclear catastrophe did not prevent him from becoming one of the first of the Cold War warriors  an advocate of stern military measures and global interventionism aimed at protecting the postwar order from Communism. And when McCarthyism threatened American universities  Conant struggled to balance the supposedly conflicting imperatives of academic freedom and national security. As Eisenhowers representative in Germany during the mid-1950s he swallowed private doubts and oversaw the rearmament of that nation - whose menace had impelled the development of the bomb only a decade earlier - against a new enemy: the Soviet Union. Integrating a wealth of previously classified information with original research  this penetrating and compellingly written biography illuminates a deeply enigmatic and pivotal figure who was a key force in shaping U.S. nuclear  scientific  foreign  and educational policies for almost half a century. James B. Conant peels back layers of government and institutional secrecy and the personal reticence of its subject to reveal the life and times of an exceptional man who achieved much  at great personal cost  and whose career - its accomplishments  limitations  and failures - helped define the American century.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45647897329717,"sku":"ByrdShop_0394579666","price":24.89,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780394579665.jpg?v=1781699429","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/james-b-conant-harvard-to-hiroshima-and-the-making-of-the-nuclear-age-9780394579665","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}