General Groves’s “Inevitable War with Russia”: Joseph Rotblat’s and Mark Oliphant’s Existential Crises

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1985, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Sir Joseph Rotblat recalled a conversation with the Manhattan Project head, General Leslie Groves, in Los Alamos in 1944. Groves, Rotblat contends, insisted that the primary reason to deploy the atomic bomb was to use it “to subdue the Soviets”. Historian Barton Bernstein suggests that Rotblat’s recollection is a misremembering induced by postwar revisionist historical interpretations. However, a conversation between Groves, Australian physicist Sir Mark Oliphant, and Radiation Laboratory director Ernest Lawrence in 1944 at the University of California in Berkeley, recounted in an explosive memorandum by Oliphant, corroborates Rotblat’s account. While Groves’s remarks may have been flippant, the fear of an impending arms race caused both Rotblat and Oliphant to pivot their thinking from creating nuclear weapons to campaigning for their elimination. Whereas Rotblat’s motives are seen as altruistic, Oliphant’s are considered self-serving. This article strives to reorient this historical debate by arguing that Oliphant, like Rotblat, was similarly a “keeper of the nuclear conscience”.