Conant, James B.

Conant, James B. (1893–1978), scientist, educator, and diplomat who played a key role in the development of the atomic bomb.Conant received his Ph.D. in chemistry at Harvard in 1916. During World War I, he joined the Chemical Warfare Service, where he directed the Organic Research Unit in the production of mustard gas. He subsequently taught at Harvard, became chair of the chemistry department, and in 1933, the university's president. In the depth of the depression, his dealings with conservative and radical groups on campus led him to take positions in national politics. He generally opposed New Deal programs, but also the isolationist views that dominated in his own Republican Party.

When World War II broke out, Conant advocated aid to the democracies and worked through the National Defense Research Committee to enlist U.S. scientists in war preparations. Later, with the Office of Scientific Research and Development, he played a key role in coordinating atomic research with Great Britain and setting up the Manhattan Project. His June 1945 suggestion to drop the newly completed atomic bomb on a Japanese war plant and its populated environs in order to shorten the war was taken up by President Harry S. Truman, who targeted Hiroshima, a sizable city, an army headquarters, a rail center, and a major producer of material. From 1946 to 1962, Conant served as adviser to the Atomic Energy Commission.

The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 convinced him of the magnitude of the Soviet threat, and he soon headed the Committee on the Present Danger, which urged the United States to station up to 1 million troops in Europe under NATO command. An appreciative President Dwight D. Eisenhower named Conant U.S. high commissioner for occupied western Germany in 1953, and, after the occupation ended in 1955, first U.S. ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany. During his four years in Bonn, Conant aided in the transformation of Germany into a democratic state and a dependable military ally against communism.

After his return to the United States, Conant devoted his reforming energies primarily to the field of education, heading a Carnegie Foundation study of American secondary schools (1957–62) and publishing a number of important works on education.
[See also Atomic Scientists; Bush, Vannevar; Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bombings of; Science, Technology, War, and the Military.]

Bibliography

James B. Conant , My Several Lives: Memoirs of a Social Inventor, 1970.
James Hershberg , James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age, 1993.

Manfred Jonas