The nuclear road not taken
By Arjun Makhijani, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Published on August 5, 2025
The nuclear era started 80 years ago with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and has continued to harm generations of people across the world to this very day.
There was another way.
The B Reactor at the Hanford Site, near Richland, Washington, during construction. It was the first large-scale nuclear reactor ever built, at 250 megawatts. The reactor achieved criticality on September 26, 1944. US Energy Department
It all started in 1939, when Albert Einstein signed a letter, drafted by Leo Szilard, to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning that Nazi Germany might develop “extremely powerful bombs of a new type” and urging him to act to prevent Hitler from getting an atomic bomb monopoly. The fear was legitimate. Only one scientist, Joseph Rotblat, quit the Manhattan Project in December 1944, when it became clear that Hitler did not have a viable atomic bomb program. None quit when Germany was defeated; looking back at that moment, another Los Alamos scientist, Richard Feynman, said in a 1981 BBC interview that he “immorally” failed to “reconsider” his continued participation after Germany was defeated. “I simply didn’t think, okay?” he declared.
That the Manhattan Project continued into 1945 is central to the tragedy of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. But also tragic is the multigenerational harm that nuclear weapons production, testing, and cleanup have inflicted across the world—to this very day.
Nuclear peace
There was a competing view about the purpose of the atomic bomb, well beyond preventing Nazi nuclear blackmail. It was graphically framed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who briefed President Harry Truman about the project on April 25, 1945, shortly after he became president following Roosevelt’s death. Stimson warned that atomic weapons could destroy civilization. Yet, he added, “if the problem of the proper use of this weapon can be solved, we would have the opportunity to bring the world into a pattern in which the peace of the world and our civilization can be saved.” A US atomic monopoly was at hand.
Stimson’s 1945 nuclear-bomb-tipped world peace is an interesting definition of civilization. But the idea of US post-war control of the world had emerged years before, at about the same time that Einstein and Szilard sent their letter to Roosevelt.
Another scientist-engineer, much less well known, had greater ambitions that aligned with the foreign policy establishment in Washington at the time. Vannevar Bush (no family connection to the two presidents of the same name), who had just been appointed as head of the prestigious Carnegie Institution for Science, believed that “the world is probably going to be ruled by those who know how, in the fullest sense, to apply science.”[1] He wanted to preside over the development of scientifically advanced weapons for use in World War II, like bombs made smart using radar. A year and a half before Pearl Harbor and the subsequent US entry into the war, Roosevelt appointed Bush as his White House point-person just for that purpose.
The vision of nuclear-tipped global control prevailed in December 1944. The Manhattan Project was accelerated to ensure atomic bombs would be used during World War II.
Germany had been de-targeted long before—on May 5, 1943—when the Military Policy Committee, headed by Bush, first considered bomb targeting options. The committee decided that it was too risky to target Germany; German scientists might be able to reverse-engineer their own nuclear bomb if the Allied bomb turned out to be a dud. Targeting would be in the Pacific region, and it would be kept secret. The target proposed that day was the Japanese fleet at the Truk Lagoon in Micronesia; if the bomb was a dud, it would sink. Preparations for bombing Japan proper were made in 1944.
Manhattan Project scientists, however, continued to believe that their efforts were all about racing against Germany. Bush had decided to keep them in the dark about policy. There is no evidence Germany was even considered as a target after May 1943. Gen. Leslie Groves, who managed the Manhattan Project, wrote in April 1945: “The target is and was always expected to be Japan.” Eighty years later, this important historical fact is little known.
The fork in the road
In December 1944, the big plutonium production plant was nearing completion at Hanford, Washington. Uranium irradiated in nuclear reactors built there was put into a giant, remotely operated plant from which small amounts of plutonium created in the reactors were chemically separated. The process also created vast quantities of highly radioactive liquid waste—far more radioactive even than plutonium itself. Chemical separation started the day after Christmas, and the first plutonium from Hanford was not delivered to J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team at Los Alamos until February 1945. The radioactive mess made at Hanford still sits on a mesa 10 miles from the Columbia River, whose waters are the lifeblood of the Pacific Northwest.
Per Einstein’s wisdom, the Manhattan Project should have been stopped in December 1944: The Nazis did not have the bomb; the war was ending. Soviet, American, and British allies were moving fast, through intense battles, to occupy all of Germany. Had the project been stopped, there may have been room for a future without nuclear weapons.
Instead, the US government pressed ahead with the bomb project.
On July 16, 1945, a few months after receiving the first plutonium from Hanford, Los Alamos scientists successfully conducted the “Trinity” bomb test, showering nearby communities in New Mexico with radioactive fallout that poisoned the water they collected from their roofs and their laundry hanging out to dry.
The Manhattan Project was accelerated to ensure its use against Japan. It was, among other things, a message to the Soviets. General Groves had believed since 1942 that “Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis … Of course that was so reported to the President.” Joseph Stalin got the message after the United States dropped its first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
Stalin had a small atomic bomb program before the Hiroshima bombing. But after that, it became an all-out effort, involving spies, brilliant Soviet scientists like Kurchatov and Sakharov, slave labor, and—four years later—a poisoned lake and river at Mayak, near Chelyabinsk, where the Soviets made their first plutonium. Five months before he died in 1955, Einstein told Linus Pauling that “he had made one great mistake—when he signed the letter to Pres. Roosevelt.”
Post-war nuclear tragedies
Since their creation, nuclear weapons have created a worldwide archipelago of radioactive wastelands. In a way, the most iconic country of the nuclear age is Congo. Brutally ruled by Belgium, it was central to the bomb project. Its uranium ores, by far the richest in the world, were already being mined, not for the uranium but for the radium, which was used for luminous watch dials and aircraft instruments. After World War II, it became the theater of Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, which focused on its vast resources, with tragic consequences for its people that have endured.
The toxic archipelago of Congo’s uranium extends from Congo itself to Staten Island in New York, where the uranium was first stored, then to Tonawanda (New York), Cleveland (Ohio), Ames (Iowa), and downtown St. Louis (Missouri). From Cleveland, the uranium went to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where it was enriched for the Hiroshima bomb. From Ames, it went to the “atomic pile” in Enrico Fermi’s lab at the University of Chicago to make the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. From St. Louis to Hanford, where the uranium was irradiated in reactors to make the plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb.
Uranium mining and milling wastes scattered throughout the world in countries with no atomic bomb program and no nuclear power plants are perhaps the most underappreciated toxic legacy of the nuclear age. There are over 500 abandoned uranium mines on the lands of the Navajo Nation alone. Between one and eight billion tons of radioactive uranium mine wastes and about 200 million tons of radioactive uranium mill tailings are spread across the United States.
In Iowa and St. Louis, uranium tetrafluoride (also known as “green salt”) was put into crucibles with metal flakes and heated. If it is not done exactly right, there is a risk of chemical explosion, scattering radioactive uranium in the air. Such explosions were common in the 1940s. Workers breathed uranium dust, risking cancer. Uranium is also a heavy metal toxin for the kidneys.
Plutonium injections
During the first decades after the bomb’s creation, the US government did human radiation experiments to gauge the health effects of radiation and aid in nuclear war planning. These experiments were done, without their informed consent, on pregnant women in Tennessee; children thought to be “mentally retarded” were fed radioactive cereal in Massachusetts; ill people who were injected with plutonium without a medical purpose; and prisoners whose testicles were subjected to high levels of radiation in Walla Walla, Washington. These experiments continued until 1974, and a presidential commission investigated them in 1994. The US human radiation experiments underscored how the worst health effects of nuclear weapons were systematically inflicted on the most vulnerable populations, whether in the United States, the Marshall Islands, Kazakhstan, Congo, French Polynesia, or indigenous lands in Australia.
The first nuclear test site of the Cold War was in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. In total, the United States conducted 67 atomic bomb tests at this site, for a total explosive power of 108.5 megatons—equivalent to one Hiroshima bomb every day for 20 years. Bikini Atoll was selected despite the July 1945 safety recommendation by Colonel Stafford Warren, chief of radiological safety at the Trinity Test, that a test of similar magnitude should not be repeated within 150 miles of human populations. The Rongelap Atoll was 110 miles away and had been inhabited for centuries. The 1954 Bravo thermonuclear bomb test at Bikini was over 700 times more powerful than the Trinity bomb, and 14 times greater than the total of the 100 atmospheric tests done at the Nevada Test Site between 1951 and 1962. The Bravo test produced hot spots of radiation as far away as Mexico City, thousands of miles to the east, and Colombo in Sri Lanka, thousands of miles to the west.
Benetick Kabua Maddison, executive director of the Marshallese Educational Initiative, described at a conference in July the impacts of the US nuclear tests in his country:
"The detonation of 67 known nuclear devices scattered radioactive materials across vast areas, resulting in severe long-term health issues for the local population, including increased rates of cancer and other illnesses. The environmental repercussions were equally devastating, with ecosystems disrupted and traditional fishing grounds rendered unsafe, thus threatening the very means by which the Marshallese people sustain their livelihoods … Thyroid issues, cancer, leukemia, and birth defects continue to be widespread in the Marshall Islands today … For the Marshallese people, land represents our matrilineal heritage and is vital to our identity. Displacement has caused cultural disruption, leading to intergenerational trauma."
In the 1950s, the Marshallese appealed to the United Nations for an end to the US tests, to no avail.
All five permanent member states of the UN Security Council, which have the extraordinary responsibility to protect the peace and security of the world, have conducted atmospheric nuclear tests that are estimated to be responsible for about 430,000 additional cancer deaths worldwide by the end of this century.
Genetic harm from nuclear testing was well known early on to bomb scientists and engineers.
Early estimates were summarized in an April 1960 editorial in the California Engineer, an alumni magazine of the University of California, Berkeley, which ran the Los Alamos Laboratory from its inception and remains involved in its management. The authors estimated that there would be “an additional 6,000 babies born with major birth defects” throughout the world due to US atmospheric testing.[2] They went on to say that “you must weigh this acknowledged risk with the demonstrated need of the United States for a nuclear arsenal”—specifically an arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons for use in “brushfire wars” like the Korean War. The authors of that editorial were willing to maim babies around the world, even in non-nuclear countries that could be on the receiving end of US nuclear weapons. The US nuclear arsenal was already monstrously large at the time, with over 18,000 warheads with more than 20,000 megatons of explosive power—equivalent to well over one million Hiroshima bombs.
It’s hard to know what’s worse: the moral presumption that would inflict major birth defects on children for gaining military power; the actual multigenerational health and environmental harm of the US nuclear program; or the determination to control the world, despite the risk of a civilization-ending nuclear arms race if the bomb were used on Japan without informing the Soviet wartime ally. What we do know, however, is that there was a fork in the road in December 1944. We will never know if a post-WWII world without nuclear weapons could have been realized. Rotblat’s was the road not taken.
Editor’s note: This article is adapted from a talk given at the conference “From Trinity to Today: Nuclear Weapons and the Way Forward” organized by the Arms Control Association and Win Without War Education Fund in Washington, D.C., on July 10, 2025.
Notes
[1] Quoted by his biographer G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century. New York: The Free Press, 1997, p. 89.
[2] Quoted in Arjun Makhijani, Manifesto for Global Democracy. Two Essays on Imperialism and the Struggle for Freedom, Apex Press, 2004, pp. 107-108. Available at: http://ieer.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2004/01/ManifestoForGlobalDemocracy2004.pdf