Change, Hope and The Bomb

viii, [2], 168, [6] p. 20 cm. This book was based on a the author's presentations as part of the Stanford LIttle Lecture Series at Princeton University. From Wikipedia: "David Eli Lilienthal (July 8, 1899 January 15, 1981) was an American public official best known for leading the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Atomic Energy Commission. He was co-author with Dean Acheson (later Secretary of State) of the 1946 Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy which outlined possible methods for international control of nuclear weapons.Lilienthal's credentials for overseeing the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) were earned as a member of the Wisconsin Public Service Commission under Wisconsin's innovative governor Philip La Follette. Lilienthal performed very well in that post, and he was aided in joining the TVA by the persistent lobbying of his old law professor Frankfurter. The TVA was established in the view that the Federal government ought to bring cheap hydroelectric power into rural areas which had not access to it. In the darkest days of the Great Depression, many of the TVA's allies were thinking well beyond hydroelectric power; they favored sweeping Federal powers to modernize the region's infrastructure through electricity, attract industry, and improve the economic and social lives of rural people. Accordingly, the TVA established extensive education programs, and a library service that distributed books in rural hamlets that lacked a library. Opponents led by Wendell Willkie said the TVA was hostile to private enterprise and socialistic. In January 1946, U.S. Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson asked Lilienthal to chair a five-member panel of consultants to a committee composed of himself and four others advising President Harry S. Truman and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes about the position of the United States at the United Nations on the new menace of nuclear weapons. As Lilienthal described the purpose of Acheson's request: Those charged with foreign policy--the Secretary of State (Byrnes) and the President--did not have either the facts nor an understanding of what was involved in the atomic energy issue, the most serious cloud hanging over the world. Comments.have been made and are being made.without a knowledge of what the hell it is all about--literally! The result was a controversial 60-page Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy, better known as the Acheson-Lilienthal Report. Released in March 1946, it proposed that the United States offer to turn over its monopoly on nuclear weapons to an international agency in return for a system of strict inspections and control of fissile materials. Lilienthal was fascinated and appalled by the information he soon absorbed about the power of the atomic bomb. On January 28, 1946, he wrote in his journal: No fairy tale that I read in utter rapture and enchantment as a child, no spy mystery, no "horror" story, can remotely compare with the scientific recital I listened to for six or seven hours today.I feel that I have been admitted, through the strangest accident of fate, behind the scenes in the most awful and inspiring drama since some primitive man looked for the very first time upon fire. David E. Lilienthal (right) met with General Leslie R. Groves (left), Director of the Manhattan Project, at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on October 1, 1946, to discuss the transfer of responsibility for atomic energy to the new Atomic Energy Commission, which President Harry S. Truman nominated Lilienthal to chair. From October 28, 1946 to February 15, 1950, Lilienthal chaired the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and was one of the pioneers of civilian control of the American atomic energy program. He hoped to administer a program which would "harness the atom" for peaceful purposes, principally atomic power. The AEC was responsible for managing atomic energy development for the military as well as for civilian use, and Lilienthal was responsible for ensuri.…