Atomic Tragedy

Henry L. Stimson ranks as one of the most important U.S. policy makers of the first half of the twentieth century. His public career in government spanned four decades and included bipartisan service under six presidents. Yet his life and work have received surprisingly little attention from scholars. Sean L. Malloy's richly detailed, well-argued monograph is the latest addition to the growing literature on Stimson that offers a critical analysis of his role in what is arguably the most momentous U.S. defense and foreign policy decision of the modern era—to use nuclear weapons against Japan and as a diplomatic tool against the Soviet Union. Malloy's goal is daunting, especially in a relatively brief book, but he achieves it surprisingly well. Making extensive use of archival resources, Malloy employs the lens of biography to recapture Stimson's complicated relationship to the bomb and the context of its use. He identifies the source of Stimson's core values—a belief in moral progress, a passion for social order and legal precedent, and faith in the power of the free market to solve the world's problems—in his bourgeois late-Victorian childhood and in the Progressive Era. Those ideas, according to Malloy, “greatly influenced [Stimson's] later approach to problems of war and peace in the nuclear age” (p. 20). With a commitment to the ideals of public service and a paternalistic confidence derived from his elitist background and belief in white Anglo-Saxon superiority, Stimson personified the patrician class that shaped and guided America's foreign policy in the mid-twentieth century—sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse

Context (archaeology · Paternalism · Political science · Sociology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Twentieth Century Scientific Developments · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

• Site-Specific

  Open Access•Elizabeth Borgwardt•Modern Intellectual History•2008

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• Britain and Hiroshima

  Jacques E C Hymans•Journal of Strategic Studies•2009

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