Doctor Atomic: Wartime Decisions and the Atomic Age

Controversy has never ceased about the United States decisions to use nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki three days later. Were these bombings necessary to end the war? At a 2008 CUNY symposium tied to the opera Doctor Atomic, moderator Gerald Holton, professor of physics and the history of science at Harvard University, discusses a host of questions with Martin J. Sherwin, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer and a professor of history at George Mason University; Harry Lustig, provost emeritus and professor of physics at The City College of New York, who wrote Did the Allies Know that the Germans were Not Building an Atomic Bomb?; and Gar Alperovitz, Bauman professor of political economy at the University of Maryland, author of The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb.