After nearly fifty years the development of nuclear policy is certainly
history, but its primary sources are scattered and often difficult to obtain,
especially for the layman or student. All history involves selecting the sig-
nificant documents in order to make sense of the past. Here we have
focused on neither the technical calculations of nuclear war and its effects
on familiar cities nor the endless proposals for a disarmed world. Rather, we
have gathered together those documents that will best show how our
present policies have evolved in a world that is neither engaged in a nuclear
war nor disarmed, but living in the twilight zone of arms control and regu-
lated nuclear power.

In selecting these historical documents we have applied three general
tests: first, does the document help tell the story of the development of
American nuclear policy in a nontechnical way; second, is the source pri-
mary rather than secondary, written by all actor in the drama rather than
by a member of the audience; third, does the document provide coverage
of the major chapters in the story?

In showing how the vision of a nuclear world preceded the reality by
several decades, we eschewed the physics of Einstein and Bohr for the
science fiction of H. G. Wells. We also included the correspondence of Leo
Szilard, the dynamic Hungarian refugee who engineered the famous Ein-
stein letter to Roosevelt and helped move America from neutrality to de-
fense. Since the original contributions to the theory of the atom bomb were
British, not American, we provided some of the early speculations of British
nuclear physicists between 1940 and 1941. We also sought to show the
reader how the nuclear age began in the minds of men living in a Europe at
war.

The Manhattan Project was America's $2 billion secret project to build
an atomic bomb. Many documents associated with the project have come to
light only in recent years. In Section II we have used the letters of J. Robert
Oppenheimer and the recently declassified minutes of policy committees to
tell the story of how the bomb was designed and built and how the decision
was made to drop the first uranium and plutonium devices on the Japanese
cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

How did a weapon of war become the key to a peacetime industry? In
considering atomic energy after World War II, we focused in Section III on
the legislative enabling acts that established the Atomic Energy Commis-
sion, the short-lived dream of international control of nuclear weapons under
the Baruch Plan, and the "atoms for peace" program of President Dwight
D. Eisenhower. By 1954 the highly classified work on nuclear weapons
paralleled a new development of nuclear energy and power reactors. Knowl-
edge was shared with both private industry and other countries. The fruits
of this program are considered in the later section on nuclear power.

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