The Role of the Scientific Elite in the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb

Abstract

In his recent book, The Power Elite, C. Wright Mills makes important use of the concept moment at which important and far-reaching decisions are made by the small in-group of the power elite, institutional leaders of the military, corporations, and the state. (8) If Mills wants to clarify the governmental decision-making process by this concept, it seems to us that he succeeds only in oversimplifying the process to the point of serious distortion. Political decisions have histories: the history of any given decision is a series of prior decisions, which, depending on the matter dealt with, are often made by individuals entirely outside of the institutional network Mills considers. It may well be that many significant decisions concern only the big corporations, the state, and the army. To rule out consideration of other groups, institutionalized or not, that affect the political order, on such an implicit, quasi-statistical basis, however, does no service to the conceptual problems confronting the developing field of political sociology. This point can be made clear by an analysis of one of Mill's own illustrations of a pivotal moment-the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The implication of Mills' cursory, dramatic treatment of this decision is that the decision was selfcontained. Once the resource-the atomic bomb-became available, the decision about whether and when to drop it was the significant political decision, and one in which only members of the power elite participated. An examination of the history of this decision, however, reveals a complex series of prior, consciously political decisions, made by men who were by no means members of Mills' power elite. These decisions relate not only to the final use of the bomb, but also to the early mobilization of the primary resource, the creative capacities of physicists, and their organization to produce the bomb.