It may seem ironic that a direct descendant of the founder of Salem, ‘City of Peace’ should have played such a prominent role in the decision to drop two atomic bombs during the closing stages of World War II.
The first resulted in an estimated 66,000 to 140,000 deaths at Hiroshima on 6 August 1946. Eighty years ago today, a second bomb, dropped on Nagasaki is thought to have resulted in 50,000 to 100,000 deaths.
James Bryant Conant undertook work on several family trees in an effort to understand the hereditary forces that had helped make him who and what he was according to his granddaughter Jennet Conant, author of the book Man of the Hour: James B. Conant, Warrior Scientist, published in 2017.
The Devon & Exeter Gazette of 19 September 1941 recorded the visit he made to East Budleigh in search of his ancestor's home, near what is now Pear Tree Cottage on Hayes Lane.
Born on 26 March, 1893, James Conant could trace his lineage back to Lot Conant, son of Roger and, wrote his granddaughter, ‘secretly nursed an interest in genealogy, intrigued by the idea that something of Roger’s indomitable will may have been handed down the generations’.
He may have felt that his birthplace of Dorchester, Massachusetts, had significance; it was after all as an employee of the Dorchester Company in England that Roger had set out with his family for the New World.
Encouraged by his science teacher, James Conant studied Chemistry at Harvard College. During World War I, he served in the US Army, where he worked on the development of poison gases.
Later he worked on lewisite, a gas designed as a chemical weapon, once
manufactured in the United States,
Japan, Germany and the Soviet Union, which has no commercial,
industrial, or scientific applications apart from deliberately injuring and
killing people.
In 1933, Conant became the president of Harvard University with an egalitarian vision of education and a reformist agenda which he implemented vigorously. He was appointed to the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) in 1940, becoming its chairman in 1941. In this capacity, he oversaw vital wartime research projects, including the development of synthetic rubber and the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bombs.
On July 16, 1945, he was among the
dignitaries present at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range for
the Trinity nuclear test, the first detonation
of an atomic bomb, and was part of the Interim Committee that advised President Harry S. Truman to use atomic bombs on Japan.
Conant was an architect of postwar atomic energy
policy. In 1945 he went on a mission to Moscow, where he advocated
international control of atomic weapons. As a war scientist, wrote his
granddaughter, he knew he had much to answer for. ‘Atomic energy’s potentialities for
destruction were so awesome as to far outweigh any possible gains that
might accrue from America’s technical triumph in the summer of 1945. Writing as
an old man, he acknowledged that these new weapons of aggression had added to
the frightful insecurity of the world, and he did not think future generations
would be inclined to thank him for it. Yet the nuclear standoff had continued
for years—no mean accomplishment given the number and variety of armed conflicts—which
suggested that the stakes had become too high and the risks too great. Perhaps
there might still be time to moderate the vicious arms race, though that
remained for history to decide. The verdict of history, he
wrote, has not yet been given.’
Quotes are from https://www.everand.com/book/357567218/Man-of-the-Hour-James-B-Conant-Warrior-Scientist
Photos: Atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, taken by Charles Levy; Professor James Bryant Conant, Winner William Nichols Medal, 1932 (Both from Wikipedia)
If you are interested in the history of early America, and Roger Conant as a peacemaker in troubled times you can join the Devon Peacemaker Festival Facebook group at
