December 2002 Newsletter

A FOOTNOTE ON HIROSHIMA AND ATOMIC MORALITY: CONANT, NIEBUHR, AND AN "EMOTIONAL" CLERGYMAN, 1945-46

by James G. Hershberg, George Washington University

One of the most prominent, if private, debates about the morality of using the atomic bomb occurred in an exchange of letters in March 1946 between the era's most prominent educator and most prominent theologian: James B. Conant -- President of Harvard University and, as an official of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and then as a member of the Interim Committee, a key figure in the decisions to build and use the atomic bomb in World War II -- and Reinhold Niebuhr, then a professor at Columbia University. Conant, who as a member of the Interim Committee had endorsed the bomb's use (and was recorded in the minutes of its May 31 meeting as suggesting the criteria of using the weapon on "a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers' houses" (1)), was upset on the morning of March 6, 1946, by a report on the front page of The New York Times that listed Niebuhr among the signatories of a draft declaration by the Federal Council of Churches calling the use of the bomb "morally indefensible." (2) An admirer of Niebuhr who had vainly tried to lure him to Cambridge, Conant had been especially disturbed to read of the theologian's position because, like many liberals who had supported intervention in World War II, he had often cited Niebuhr's writings on the permissibility of using immoral means to achieve moral ends to defend U.S. participation in the conflict against Nazi Germany. In an unusually impassioned (for him) letter, Conant sharply defended the atomic bombings as being no more immoral than strategic incendiary bombings of cities (noting that "I was as deeply involved in the one method of destruction as the other, so at least" on that point he could be impartial) or many other violent actions committed by the United States in the process of winning the war. Moreover, with fears an eventual conflict with Russia increasing, Conant worried that disavowing the bomb's use on Japan implicitly meant foreswearing such weapons for the future, and unilaterally disarming -- "a logical and defensible position, but to my mind unrealistic." While Niebuhr robustly defended the desirability of acknowledging some "expression of guilt" regarding the bomb's use -- "I thought it important from the Christian standpoint to admit the moral ambiguity of all righteous people in history, who are, despite the good they do, involved in antecedent and in marginal guilt" -- Conant's protests clearly had some impact, since the theologian subsequently acted to tone down the Council's statement on the bomb. (3)

While some have wondered whether Conant's letter represented, as he frankly acknowledged to Niebuhr, "a highly personal reaction by one who has a guilty conscience," the exchange can also be seen as a highly symbolic conversation reflecting the efforts of leading American liberals, who had favored the war (and would likewise support the Cold War) and opposed isolationism, to grapple with the problems of ends vs. means in the atomic age, and the integration of nuclear weapons into America's moral as well as military arsenal as it headed into the postwar era of global leadership and possibly renewed conflict. The exchange has been recounted in several works, including Richard Fox's biography of Niebuhr and my own work on Conant. (4)

What is presented here for the first time, however, is an antecedent exchange between Conant and a far less prominent religious figure, which sheds light not only on the intensity of his reaction to Niebuhr's statement but on his own rationale for using the atomic bomb in the first place. In a handwritten postscript to his March 6 letter to Niebuhr, Conant alluded to having received a few months earlier "a very emotional letter from a clergyman denouncing me for my part in the atomic bomb development." In response, Conant had urged him to read Niebuhr's Children of Light and Children of Darkness, which stoutly defended the morality of going to war to defend civilized values. Now, Conant told Niebuhr, "I can't reconcile this book with your signature on the document in question."

Though Conant had alluded only vaguely to the clergyman at issue, I had discovered the final letter in the exchange to which he referred to Niebuhr in time to include it in my book. In it, on December 13, 1945, the Rev. Bradford Young of Grace Church in Manchester, New Hampshire thanked Conant for his "patient answer to my somewhat excited letter." Rev. Young acknowledged that he "largely followed" the reasoning in Niebuhr's Children of Darkness and Children of Light, and that the "A-bombing was no worse in its effects than the obliteration bombing." However, clearly alluding to previous correspondence, Rev. Young reacted negatively to what he described as Conant's argument that it had been necessary to drop the bomb on Japanese cities in order to alert world public opinion to the danger of future atomic war so that measures could be taken to put the weapon under international control. Considering the human cost to the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Young had written, this was a calculation that "only God" could make. "What bothered me," he added, "was to see you preparing and participating in such a Godlike decision with apparently no sense of presumption, no fear and trembling, no feeling of tragic involvement in a horrible deed." (5) Unfortunately, at the time I was finishing James B. Conant (the early '90s), I had been unable to locate Young's original "somewhat excited letter," nor Conant's response.

However, during a later visit to Cambridge, I returned to the Harvard Archives -- where, under the University's stringent 50-year secrecy rule, the papers for 1945-46 did not open up completely until the summer of 1996 -- and found the rest of the exchange. The exchange had been prompted by a presentation Conant gave on December 3, 1945, to the Harvard Club of Manchester, New Hampshire. One member of the audience was Rev. Young, an Episcopalian minister (and Harvard graduate) active in social causes and described by one family member as a "Norman Thomas-style socialist" (though not a formal party member) and a "very serious pacifist." (6) During his talk, Conant showed photographs of the destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "As the pictures told their terrible story," Young wrote Conant the next day, "I felt that all of us there were war criminals reenacting a scene strangely like that when Goering et al. were compelled to view the pictures of the barbarities of Buchenwald." Like the Germans, Young went on, Americans had "closed their eyes to what we had done or what was done in our name," "not daring to speak or even think of the scores of thousands of our brother humans who perished by our hand. Or we said, as cruel people have often justified their savagery, it shortened the war." If there were no good reason why "the bomb could not have been demonstrated to the Japanese as persuasively yet as harmlessly" as it had been to Conant in New Mexico, then "the crime you helped us all commit was of the same stupendous order of the bomb." Perhaps Conant's well-known calm demeanor perhaps further infuriated Young, for he added: "If you have a conscience about that crime, you concealed it wonderfully well. If you have none, it's monstrous." Though described by a family member as having a "rational clerical" rather than an emotional manner, a clearly outraged Young signed off "With hopes for your repentance and all the world's." (7)

In his response, dated December 7, Conant did indeed recommend consulting Niebuhr's text, stressed as he did elsewhere the inextricable linkage between the acceptance of the ethics of strategic bombing of cities and the use of the atom bomb, (8) and described his own rationale for using the weapon as two-fold: "first, because it was a valuable supplement to the strategic bombing then in progress and which I hoped would end the war without an invasion; and second, because I felt certain that unless this bomb was demonstrated in combat there was very little chance of arousing public opinion to a point where they would take sufficiently drastic action to control it in the future." (9) That Conant gave equal prominence to this postwar rationale as well as to wartime military imperatives (which would become the orthodox or traditional defense for the bomb's use) is significant, for it reflected that strong sense of fear animating him as well as many of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project (including Oppenheimer) of a postwar nuclear arms race and eventual nuclear World War III. The simple argument that it was needed to defeat Japan and avoid an invasion was not enough, in other words, if the consequence would be to trigger a postwar nuclear arms race among the former Allies, i.e., between the US and the Soviet Union. Some atomic scientists, particularly among those at the Met Lab in Chicago, believed that dropping the bomb without warning on Japanese cities would be most likely to cause such a disastrous competition -- and they propounded their views in the summer of 1945 in the Franck Report, which was submitted to the Interim Committee but never reached Truman's desk. (The text has been published in various places, most conveniently as an appendix to the most recent paperback edition of Martin J. Sherwin's A World Destroyed.) However, Oppenheimer and other leading atomic scientists (including Fermi, Lawrence, and Arthur Compton) dissented, finding no plausible alternative to use of the bomb on Japanese cities without prior warning -- and so reported as the Scientific Panel to the Interim Committee. And, as physicists interviewed in the documentary "The Day After Trinity" recall, Oppenheimer explicitly argued to scientists at Los Alamos that the bomb's use in this fashion represented the best chance to convince the world to accept international control after the war.

Conant, too, I believe, came to this position, although the minutes of the Interim Committee do not record him as specifically making this argument (not entirely surprisingly, since even if he did make such a case the only known discussion over whether or not to use the bomb at all came during an informal lunchtime conversation). While at least one commentator has questioned whether Conant really held this position, (10) this new letter to Young provides an additional, albeit post hoc, piece of evidence to suggest that he genuinely did. However, it remains unclear whether in his heart of hearts Conant sincerely believed that using the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the best course to follow to head off a nuclear arms race leading to a nuclear World War II -- as early as May 1944 he had privately feared that humanity's only alternatives were a "race between nations and in the next war destruction of civilization, or a scheme to remove atomic energy from the field of conflict" -- or whether he was rationalizing to himself his participation in, and support for, a decision and action he now viewed as inevitable and politically impossible to oppose; or, for that matter, whether Conant really knew himself.

APPENDICES

Document 1

Grace Church
Manchester, N.H.

Dec. 4, 1945

Dr. James B. Conant
Harvard University
Cambridge, Mass.

Dear Dr. Conant:

I listened to your address last night at the Harvard Club and watched the pictures of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with great interest. As the pictures told their terrible story, I felt that all of us there were war criminals reenacting a scene strangely like that when Goering et al. were compelled to view the pictures of the barbarities of Buchenwald. Like them we closed our eyes to what we had done or what was done in our name. But we did it by not daring to speak or even think of the scores of thousands of our brother humans who perished by our hand. Or we said, as cruel people have often justified their savagery, It shortened the war.
Have you heard any good reason why the bomb could not have been demonstrated to the Japanese as persuasively yet as harmlessly as it was demonstrated to you in New Mexico? If there was none, the crime you helped us all commit was of the same stupendous order as the bomb.
If you have a conscience about that crime, you concealed it wonderfully well. If you have none, it's monstrous.
With hopes for your repentance and all the world's
Faithfully yours, [signed] Bradford Young

[Source: James B. Conant Presidential Papers, Box 293, "X-Y-Z" correspondence folder.]

Document 2

HARVARD UNIVERSITY
CAMBRIDGE 38, MASSACHUSETTS

Office of the President
December 7, 1945

The Reverend Bradford Young
Grace Church
Manchester, New Hampshire

Dear Mr. Young:

I am wondering if you have read the little book by Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr entitled, I believe, "Children of Light and Children of Darkness"? If not, I suggest you do, as I think it bears very directly on the problem you presented in your letter to me.
As I said at the Harvard Club the other night, I feel the chances of our getting through the next decade or two without any destruction of our industrial civilization depend to what extent men of good will can think clearly about the difficult problems which are present; and surely clear thinking depends on accurate analysis of the premises of one's thinking. The applies to the past quite as much as to laying plans for the future.
I feel the premises of your argument are erroneous. The destruction caused by the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan was neither different in kind nor in extent to the damage done by high explosives and incendiaries on a vastly greater scale in both Japan and Germany. This fact does not seem to be appreciated by the American people, perhaps because a censorship on war news never gave a true picture of the devastation that was being rained on German and Japanese cities by our Air Corps. For example, Tokyo was destroyed over a vastly greater area by the two thousand plane raids carrying incendiaries than were Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The decision as to the ethics of destroying civilian structures and killing civilians in connection with the air war was made when we started our strategic bombing of Germany and Japan, not when the two atomic bombs were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The significance of the atomic bomb from a purely military point of view is not the destruction which was caused, which was the equivalent of the explosion of twenty thousand tons of T.N.T., but the fact that one plane--not a thousand planes--could carry this load. Unless this fact is understood clearly, we shall go all wrong in our thinking about the future.
I was in favor of using the atomic bomb as it was used (though I am sure my opinion carried no weight and was perhaps not even known to the President) for two reasons: first, because it was a valuable supplement to the strategic bombing then in progress and which I hoped would end the war without an invasion; and second, because I felt certain that unless this bomb was demonstrated in combat there was very little chance of arousing public opinion to a point where they would take sufficiently drastic action to control it in the future. Nothing has happened since August 6 to change my views.

Very sincerely yours, [signed] James B. Conant

[Source: James B. Conant Presidential Papers, Box 293, ?X-Y-Z? correspondence folder.]

Document 3

Grace Church Manchester, N.H.

Dec. 13, 1945

Dr. James B. Conant
Harvard University
Cambridge, Mass.

Dear Dr. Conant:

Thank you for your patient answer to my somewhat excited letter. I've read Dr. Niebuhr's Children of Darkness and the Children of Light and largely follow his reasoning. I also admit that the A-bombing was no worse in its effects than the obliteration bombing.
What was different was the possibility of a demonstration of the power of the A-bomb sufficiently convincing to make unnecessary its use against human targets. Just the gesture of trying to arrange such a demonstration at a time when Japan was ready to quit anyway would in my judgment have done more for the remnants of human decency than any other act. The decision to destroy two cities as the best way to arouse public opinion to control the A-bomb in the future must be based on so many uncertainties that only God could make it.
What bothered me was to see you preparing and participating in such a Godlike decision with apparently no sense of presumption, no fear and trembling, no feeling of tragic involvement in a horrible deed.

With kind personal regards, [signed] Bradford Young

[Source: "Atomic Bomb, 1945-46" folder, Box 273, Conant Presidential Papers, Pusey Archives, Harvard University.]

Document 4

HARVARD UNIVERSITY
CAMBRIDGE 38, MASSACHUSETTS

Office of the President
March 6, 1946

Professor Reinhold Niebuhr
3041 Broadway New York, N.Y.

Dear Professor Niebuhr:

At the risk of having this letter considered a highly personal reaction by one who has a guilty conscience I am writing you frankly about the report which you signed and which appeared in this morning's papers. I refer to the report of the Committee of the Federal Council of Churches dealing with the atomic bomb. It seems to me that your Committee does not take into account sufficiently the relation of the use of the atomic bomb to strategic or area bombing. It is true that you have a paragraph looking in that direction but it is to my mind quite insufficient. If the American people are to be deeply penitent for the use of the atomic bomb, why should they not be equally penitent for the destruction of Tokyo in the thousand plane raid using the M69 incendiary which occurred a few months earlier? (I may say that I was as deeply involved in one method of destruction as the other, so at least on these two points I can look at the matter impartially.) If we are to be penitent for this destruction of Japanese cities by incendiaries and high explosives, we should have to carry over this point of view to the whole method of warfare used against the axis powers. To my mind your two paragraphs which attempt to do this are not adequate and still leave the atomic bomb paragraph out of proportion.
But more important that this question is the strange feeling that I have that by taking this stand the leaders of the Protestant churches are cutting themselves off from a vast body of American opinion. I think a poll of opinion of citizens with high standards of moral responsibility and upright conduct would show only a small percentage taking the point of view presented in your document. I think a very large majority would follow the line of argument which is implied in my criticism, namely, that the atomic bomb was, from the point of view of its use in the last war, part and parcel of the total operation of that war.
One more point before I close this letter. I am worried about where your line of argument takes us in regard to the future. Are we to scrap all our armament at once? That is a logical and defensible position, but to my mind unrealistic. If not, how should our military staff plan for the waging of war in the future? Are we to rule out strategic and area bombing by incendiaries or high explosives and are we to rule out the use of the atomic bomb, even in retaliation? If so, then most of the arguments some of us have been using against university military training rather fall on the ground. If not, then is the atomic bomb sufficiently different in its effect from incendiaries and high explosives to rule that out?
Of course I don't have to tell you that I am a great believer in eliminating the atomic bomb as a potential weapon [handwritten insertion: "for a surprise attack"] through international control. But I recognize this may be very difficult. In that connection I am sending you some remarks I made on this subject last fall. My views are essentially unchanged, but most people think I am a wild optimist.

With all good wishes.

Very sincerely yours, [signed] James B. Conant

[handwritten:]

P.S. A short time ago I received a very emotional letter from a clergyman denouncing me for my part in the atomic bomb development. I advised him to read your excellent book "Children of Light and Children of Darkness". I can't reconcile this book with your signature on the document in question.

[Source: Reinhold Niebuhr Papers, Library of Congress, Correspondence, Box 3, Conant file; also (without postscript) in James B. Conant Presidential Papers, Pusey Archives, Harvard University.]

Document 5

March 12, 1946

President James B. Conant
Harvard University
Cambridge 38, Massachusetts

Dear President Conant:

Thank you very much for your letter. While there may be some differences between us on the atomic bomb, they are certainly not as wide as you assume from the partial report in the New York Times of our Federal Council document.
First of all, we were careful to insist that no absolute distinction could be drawn from this new level of destructiveness and the levels which a technical civilization had previously reached. We called attention to the fact that the report of the Army air forces on the strategic effects of obliteration bombing suggested that such bombing was on the whole ineffective.
In regard to the statement about the bomb itself, the emphasis of the majority of the Committee was not upon the use of the bomb but upon its use without warning. The position taken was that we would have been in a stronger moral position had we published the facts about this instrument of destruction, made a demonstration of its effects over Japan in a non-populated section, and threatened the use of the bomb if the Japanese did not surrender. This, I take it, was also the position of a considerable number of the physicists engaged on the project. While the New York Times' report, by omitting some paragraphs, did not make clear that the objection of most of us was to the surprise bombings, I find in rereading the report that even the full text does not make sufficiently clear what was the conviction of most of us - that the eventual use of the bomb for the shortening of the war would have been justified. I myself took the position that failing in achieving a Japanese surrender, the bomb would have had to be used to save the lives of thousands of American soldiers who would otherwise have perished on the beaches of Japan.
Your letter prompts me to write to the Chairman of the Committee and ask for a restatement of this paragraph before the document is published. As it now stands the shortened form of it, and even the more extensive text, subjects the majority of the Committee to justified criticisms such as you have made.
I should like to make an additional point about the expression of guilt. During the war I had a letter from a Captain of our Army which landed in Normandy, in which he observes how the people rejoiced in their liberation and mourned over their destroyed homes, and added how much evil we must do in order to do good. This, I think, is a very succinct statement of the human situation. The pacifist always declares that we cannot do good if it involves the doing of evil, which is an impossibility. On the other hand, it seems to me there is too general a disposition to disavow guilt because on the whole we have done good - in this case defeated tyranny. I was ready to sign the report on the expression of guilt - particularly because I thought it important from the Christian standpoint to admit the moral ambiguity of all righteous people in history, who are, despite the good they do, involved in antecedent and in marginal guilt.
I greatly appreciate the report of your address on the atomic bomb in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin, with which I am in complete agreement.
I am taking the liberty of sending you a blast of mine against the world government people, appearing in this week's issue The Nation, with which I think you will on the whole agree.

Yours cordially,

[signature]
Reinhold Niebuhr

[Source: Reinhold Niebuhr Papers, Library of Congress, Correspondence, Box 3, Conant file; also in James B. Conant Presidential Papers, Pusey Archives, Harvard University.]

Document 6

March 13, 1946

Dear Bob:

To judge from several letters I have received, it seems to me that the section of our report dealing with the irresponsible use of the bomb, is subject to misunderstanding, at least the misunderstanding of those of us who are not pacifists. We objected to the use of the bomb without warning, but could not have said that it should in no case have been used. When the report is ultimately published I should think that it might be well to make this distinction sharper. It certainly existed in the minds of the Committee, as you will remember from the discussion.

A brief note like this is inadequate to deal with the issue. I am writing only to call your attention to a problem which has come to me through the correspondence of various critics.

Sincerely yours,

Reinhold Niebuhr

Dr. Robert Calhoun

[Source: Reinhold Niebuhr Papers, Library of Congress, Correspondence, Box 5.]

Document 7

HARVARD UNIVERSITY
CAMBRIDGE 38, MASSACHUSETTS

Office of the President
March 23, 1946

Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr
Union Theological Seminary
Broadway at 120th Street
New York 27, New York

Dear Dr. Niebuhr:

May I in this one letter make a belated acknowledgement of your two letters of March 6 and 12. I am sorry to have intruded upon you with so many communications and I thank you for your good letters in answer to both of my earlier notes. We are, of course, sorry that you can't be with us at Harvard next year for the James Lectures. I haven't heard yet whether it was possible to postpone your coming, but I certainly hope that one way or another before long you will be giving a series of lectures in the Harvard Yard.
Your letter about the Federal Council document relieves my mind considerably. I imagine we still are in disagreement, but not as completely so as I had feared.
In these days of uncertainty regarding the UNO [United Nations Organization] we must all have our fingers crossed and hold our breath, hoping that somehow or other we can get through the final perils. Somehow it seems to me the next six months may be quite crucial. If Russia should break away from the UNO or succeed in breaking it up, then we should have to reexamine a good many problems, it seems to me, but I continue to be an optimist until events prove my optimism to be sheer folly.
With all good wishes.

Sincerely yours, [signed] James B. Conant

[Source: Reinhold Niebuhr Papers, Library of Congress, Correspondence, Box 6; James B. Conant Presidential Papers, Pusey Archives, Harvard University.]

1. Interim Committee minutes, 31 May 1945, reprinted in Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1975), pp. 295-304.

2. See "Japan Atom Bombing Condemned in Federal Church Report" and "Report of Protestant Church Leaders on Atomic Warfare," New York Times, 6 March 1946; for the ultimate report, see Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, Commission on the Relation of the CHurch to the War in Light of the Christian Faith, Atomic Warfare and the Christian Faith (New York, 1946).

3. See James B. Conant to Reinhold Niebuhr, 6 March 1946, and Niebuhr to Conant, 12 March 1946, both in box 3, Conant file, Niebuhr Papers, Library of Congress; and, for Niebuhr's effort to tone down the report's criticism of the atomic bomb decision, Niebuhr to Robert L. Calhoun, 13 March 1946, box 5, Niebuhr Papers, LC.

4. Richard Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985), pp. 224-225, and James G. Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993, and Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 282-285.

5. Rev. Bradford Young to James B. Conant, 13 December 1945, box 273, "Atomic Bomb, 1945-46" folder, James B. Conant Presidential Papers, Pusey Library, Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, MA.

6. Telephone interview with Marilyn B. Young (Rev. Young's daughter-in-law), 8 March 2001.

7.Rev. Bradford Young to James B. Conant, 4 December 1945, box 293, "X-Y-Z" correspondence folder, Conant Presidential Papers, Harvard University Archives; "rational clerical" is from Marilyn Young telephone interview, 8 March 2001.

8.Conant on several occasions drew a connection between military utility and morality in defending the use of the atomic bomb. Interestingly, new evidence suggests he also did so in opposing the hydrogen bomb four years later, as a member of the Oppenheimer-chaired General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission. Evidence had previously emerged that at the key GAC session late October 1949, Conant opposed the bomb "on moral grounds" (according to a passage in AEC chairman David E. Lilienthal's diaries that he ommitted from the published version), although later, during the 1954 AEC Oppenheimer security hearings, he stated that he had opposed development of the weapon "as strongly as anybody on a combination of political and strategic and highly technical considerations." (Hershberg, James B. Conant, chap. 24.) During a visit to the Harvard University Archives in January 2001, I located a Conant letter in which he elaborated some of the moral considerations involved in his position on the H-bomb. Responding to Caltech physicist Robert F. Bacher (who had sent him a copy of a speech he had given on the hydrogen bomb controversy), Conant stated: "As to criticsms and comments, I think my only one might be that I think the so-called moral issue is a little more tied in to the military issues than you indicate. However, this is a very difficult matter to handle. I think that I should say something like this: that if one raises the question as to whether the hydrogen bomb is as important a military asset as has sometimes been said, then one can come to another consideration. The existence of weapons is always subject to the possibility of their being put to uses that no one intended. History is full of such examples. It has been alleged that the hydrogen bomb, if can be produced, would show people how to produce a weapon which would devastate the entire world. While this is probably a vast overstatement, nevertheless, it seems to be conceded that under certain conditions it might be possible to spread vast havoc over areas which were not intended for military destruction. In short, all of us would sleep better nights if we know either that the bomb wouldn't work or that no one knew how to make it. That being the case, one has to balance the existence of such a weapon, which seems to be on the negative side from a moral point of view, with the gains from a miltary point of view, which would be on the positive side. If it be true, as you maintain, that the positive might not be very large, then it is conceivable that some negative values which almost anybody would admit would tip the balance in a decision. Mind you, I don't say even in this letter that this is my view, for I have kept very quiet except in documents marked TOP SECRET as to what I think on the whole subject. However, I suggest that the so-called moral argument is really entwined to a larger extent than you indicate with the military and scientific arguments which you bring out so well." Conant to Bacher, 12 April 1950, "Bac-Barb 1949-50" correspondence file, box 361, Conant Presidential Papers, Harvard University Archives.

9. James B. Conant to Rev. Bradford Young, 7 December 1945, box 293, "X-Y-Z" correspondence folder, Conant Presidential Papers, Harvard University Archives. The only other place where, to my knowledge, Conant described his reasons for supporting the use of the bomb in similar terms was in a September 23, 1946, letter to Harvey H. Bundy. See Hershberg, James B. Conant, p. 293.

10. Louis Menand, "The Quiet American," The New York Review of Books, Vol. XLI, No. 13 (July 14, 1994), pp. 16-21, esp. p. 17.