Speaker

Alex Wellerstein

Alex Wellerstein

Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology and one of the leading historians of nuclear weapons. Wellerstein’s scholarship focuses on the institutional, political, and moral dimensions of nuclear decision-making — how governments have controlled, or failed to control, weapons of mass destruction since 1945.

His background is in the history of secrecy and classification around the Manhattan Project, and he runs the online resource NUKEMAP, which models the effects of nuclear detonations on real cities. That combination — archival rigour and public communication — defines his work: he is as comfortable publishing declassified primary sources on his website as writing for specialist journals.

His 2024 book The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age argues that Harry Truman never formally ordered the bombing of Hiroshima, almost certainly misunderstood the nature of the targets as ‘purely military’, and spent the remainder of his presidency constructing the institutional and normative architecture to prevent future use — the origins of what historians now call the nuclear taboo.

Core positions

Wellerstein challenges both the orthodox and revisionist accounts of Hiroshima. He rejects the orthodox version (deliberate decision to save invasion casualties) because the evidence shows no deliberation took place: the bombing programme was already running on military autopilot. He also rejects the revisionist version (the bombs were primarily aimed at the Soviets) as an over-rationalisation that, like the orthodox account, credits decision-makers with more coherence than the historical record supports.

His alternative is structural and psychological: Truman inherited a machine he did not understand, received a single consequential briefing about targeting that he appears to have misread, and only grasped what had actually happened to Hiroshima two days after the bomb was dropped. The Kyoto exemption — the one targeting intervention Truman did make — is, paradoxically, the origin of the misunderstanding: Stimson framed the Kyoto/Hiroshima distinction in civilian vs military terms, and Truman left believing he had approved attacks on military installations, not cities.

On the nuclear taboo: Wellerstein situates Truman as the historically decisive figure not despite the bombings but because of the psychology they produced in him. A president with genuine moral horror at mass civilian death, distrustful of military autonomy, and holding exclusive launch authority is a very different systemic actor from a president who regards these as ordinary weapons. Wellerstein argues the first condition — Truman — shaped the norm that has held, imperfectly but durably, since 1945.

In the wiki