Splitting the Atom and Uniting the World: Postwar Atomic Scientists' Campaign for World Government

This thesis examines how American atomic scientists in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War imagined and proposed world government as a tangible response to the dangers of nuclear weapons and energy. Between the end of the war in 1945 and the first successful test of nuclear weapons by the Soviet Union in 1949, which effectively ended the American atomic monopoly and started the Cold War arms race, scientists who were part of the Manhattan Project saw the opportunity to advance and establish a world government led by scientific expertise in response to humanity's harnessing of nuclear energy. While the existing scholarship in the history of science has often portrayed the postwar atomic scientists' movement primarily as a form of activism that emerged from the fear of nuclear war, this thesis argues that the atomic scientists' visions of world government were far from unified. Instead, these campaigns for establishing world government emerged from scientists' heterogeneous understandings of scientific freedom, internationalism, and scientists' social responsibility. Based on extensive archival research and published sources such as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, this thesis reconstructs how prominent postwar physicists like Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Rabinowitch framed the abolition of war and international control of atomic energy as both moral and technical justifications for establishing supranational governance. This thesis shows, first, how pacifist internationalists and pragmatic advocates of international control of nuclear energy advanced competing visions for supranational authority; second, how scientists mobilized the language of social responsibility, scientific authority, and public education in science to legitimize their interventions in domestic and international politics; and third, how appeals to scientific freedom and internationalism both underpinned and destabilized these world-government ideals as Cold War tensions between the United States and Soviet Union intensified. In the end, the atomic scientists' campaign for world government epitomizes the way in which the nuclear age prompted the Manhattan Project physicists to rethink the relationship between scientific expertise, global order, and the political obligations of natural sciences.