James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age

New York: Knopf, 1993. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. 8vo - over 7. IISigned by Author. ISigned by Author Signed by Author Type: Hardback First Edition Hardcover Book and Dust Jacket in Near Fine Condition. ix, 948 pages with Principal Sources, Notes, Index. 9.5 x 6.5 x 2.25 inches. Illustrations. Tan half cloth w/gilt titles, brown boards, very clean, tight, solid and square. Former owner name on endpaper. Internals as new. This monumental biography brings us the life of the renowned educator and scientist who led the U.S. government's effort to develop weapons of mass destruction, and whose own story mirrors America's transition from isolationism to global superpower at the dawn of the nuclear age. It portrays the political and diplomatic history of the forty or so years of America's ascendancy. In 1941, when he was president of Harvard University, he was science advisor to FDR and was given the assignment of determining whether or not the atomic bomb should or could be built. He administered the Manhattan Project and witnessed the July 1945 Trinity test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, where he apparently felt it seemed the world was coming apart before his eyes. . It was he who later that year made the fateful recommendation to use the new weapon on the Japanese that ended the war with Japan in WW II. 1993, Alfred A. Knopf.