The criminal legacy of Harvard

 

Jeffrey St Clair 

For some reason, I’d always thought of Enrico Fermi as one of the more humane of the mad scientists working on the military application of splitting atoms. Then I read Fermi proposed that instead of building a bomb, the Manhattan project physicists should concentrate on amassing as much radioactive material as possible and using it to poison the food supply of Nazi Germany. This, like so many other mad schemes, appealed to Edward Teller who promptly worked out a plan to separate piles of Strontium-90. In the end, Oppenheimer rejected the scheme–not because it might end up irradiating half of Europe for the next 1000 years but because wouldn’t kill enough German soldiers. Oppenheimer wrote to Fermi: “I think we should not attempt a plan unless we can poison food enough to kill a half a million men.” May, 1943.

+ When we think about the criminal legacy of Harvard, high on the list should be the fact that the first person to recommend targeting civilians with atomic weapons was Harvard’s president James B. Conant, who during a May 1945 meeting of Truman’s Interim Committee, rejected pleas from scientists like Leo Szilard that representatives from the Japanese government, who were looking for ways to end the war, be invited to see a test shot of the A bomb. Instead Conant insisted that the bomb should be dropped without warning on an industrial target, which “employed a large number of workers and [was] closely surrounded by workers’ houses.” It was Conant’s argument that persuaded Defense Secretary Henry Stimson to put Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the target list.