Pandora's Keepers

by Brian Van DeMark

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Brian VanDeMark teaches history at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis. He has lectured throughout the world, including at Oxford, where he was a Visiting Fellow at St. Catherine’s College and the Rothermere American Institute. He coauthored Robert S. McNamara’s #1 bestseller, In
Retrospect, and assisted Clark Clifford with his bestseller, Counsel to the President. His Into the Quagmire, published by Oxford University Press, is one of the classic works on Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam.

  * The value of c2—the square of the speed of light—is 100,000,000,000,000,000,000.

  * The NDRC became the OSRD in June 1941.

  * Evidence has recently come to light suggesting that Oppenheimer was an “unlisted” member of a Communist Party cell at Berkeley into the early 1940s. No concrete evidence has emerged, however, that he ever committed espionage against the United States on behalf of the Soviet Union. See Jerrold and Leona Schecter, Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History (Brassey’s, 2002), pp. 316–17; and Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb, pp. 31–32, 54–57, 111, 251, 289, 340–41.

  * Teller’s security clearance was expedited at the specific request of Oppenheimer, whose own clearance would be withdrawn a decade later as a result of hearings at which Teller testified as a key witness against him. See chapter ten, pp. 275–279.

  * Sherwin, A World Destroyed, p. 163. The Interim Committee had seven members: Stimson, as chairman (with his special assistant George Harrison as deputy); Ralph Bard, an undersecretary, representing the Navy Department; Will Clayton an assistant secretary, from the State Department; experienced scientific administrators Vannevar Bush, James Conant, and Karl Compton; and James Byrnes, as Truman’s personal representative.

  * The USSR successfully tested its first atomic bomb in late August 1949. See chapter 9, p. 219.

  * Policy makers also indulged in self-deception. Stimson told Truman on May sixteenth: “I am anxious to hold our Air Force, so far as possible, to the ‘precision’ bombing which it has done so well in Europe. I believe the same rule of sparing the civilian population should be applied, as far as possible, to the use of any new weapons.” (Henry L. Stimson Diary, Sterling Library, Yale University.) Truman, for his part, insisted to the end of his life that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were directed against “military” targets.