NUCLEAR FICTION NEWSLETTER #8

The Guilt Trope in Manhattan Project Novels

Guilty Scientist

The movie Oppenheimer, as well as almost every novel written about the Manhattan Project, includes an iconic scientist character who spends his or her post-Hiroshima life in guilt-ridden angst at having contributed to the birth of the bomb. I agree with the importance of taking responsibility for weapons development, but I believe that only a minority of those who work on nuclear weapons, then and now, end up consumed by regrets. (For a modern take on the nuclear weapons industry and the mirage of mutually-assured deterrence, read Sara Scoles’ excellent book, Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons, 2024).

I think my father’s view of his work on the bomb was far more typical. As I have noted before in this Substack, my father played a very minor role as an electronics researcher in the development of radioactive isotopes at Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project. He and my mother were both told about the atomic bomb when he was recruited. Later, he was one of sixty-seven scientists at Oak Ridge who signed a petition asking Truman not to use the atomic bomb on Japan without a prior demonstration of its power. He continued after the war to work as an electronics engineer on defense-related government grants.

My parents’ experiences at Oak Ridge were never a taboo topic in our house, but the occasion I remember best is at age seventeen, watching the newly declassified films of the horrendous civilian casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including burns, scarring, radiation sickness, and suffering of the hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors). It took until 1969 for our government to allow the Public Broadcasting Service to air the short documentary of footage from 1945 and 1946. Another excellent book, Lesley Blume’s (2020) Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World, documents the struggles of reporters like John Hersey to inform the American people of the real consequences of nuclear weapons. See also Greg Mitchell’s 2021 documentary, Atomic Cover-up.

After watching that film with my Dad I asked him how he felt now about working on the atomic bomb. It is also relevant that in 1969, he was in the midst of a large contract with Toshiba, and had made several trips to Japan. He befriended the Japanese engineers, visited the peace monuments in Hiroshima, and fell in love with Japanese culture. However, he felt the United States had no choice in carrying out the Manhattan Project. The entire motivation was to make sure we had an atomic bomb before the Nazis developed one. Until close to the German surrender, American scientists believed that physicists like Werner Heisenberg were working to give Hitler an atomic weapon. Even after victory in Europe, the massive casualties among the Allies in the Pacific gave a continued rationale for nuclear bomb testing.

My father believed that using the bomb on Japan may have saved as many as a million United States troops who would have died invading Japan. We now know that to be a gross overestimate, but in the 1940s, citizens were much more credulous of government pronouncements. He was angry about the bombing of Nagasaki, and believed that General Groves and others used it mainly to see how a plutonium-based bomb would perform in destroying a city, after using the uranium-based bomb on Hiroshima. He also was not a fan of Edward Teller, “father” of the hydrogen bomb and thought he was the model for Dr. Strangelove. In the last few years of his life, my father enjoyed giving talks about the Manhattan Project to senior citizen groups. He focused on educating people about the technical nature of the work, however, and the triumph of creating a new weapon in such a short period of time. I am not sure how much time he spent on the moral implications.

In Oppenheimer, we see the striking (and totally fictional!) scene of the population of Los Alamos stomping and clapping to honor Oppie’s success. Only one physicist goes off to throw up in the bushes. And of course, there is the final dream scene of Oppie orbiting the earth and watching World War III take place. But guilt was the exception, not the rule.

A very recent article in the New York Times honors a scientist, Dr. Richard Garwin, who played a major role in solving the problem of how to design a hydrogen bomb. Although he subsequently had a very long and distinguished career, he rarely spoke about his achievement. In 1984 a journalist asked if he felt guilty and he replied: “I think it would be a better world if the hydrogen bomb had never existed. But I knew the bombs would be used for deterrence.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/science/richard-l-garwin-dead.html) Among Garwin’s greatest accomplishments, in my opinion, were his consistent contributions to nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/science/richard-garwin-hydrogen-bomb.html?searchResultPosition=2). He also was a highly talented physicist, but he took seriously his idol Fermi’s regret at not having tried to influence public policy.

One of my favorite Manhattan Project adjacent novels is Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac (2023). Despite being Chilean so that Spanish was, presumably, his first language, Labatut uses lyrical prose with multiple points of view with distinct voices to give the reader a picture of the extraordinary mind of John von Neumann. Von Neumann was at Los Alamos working on the physics of the atomic bomb but even more importantly, he had a huge role in designing modern computers. Towards the end of his life, his work set the stage for the age of artificial intelligence that is now disrupting our society. For most of his time on earth, von Neumann had little guilt. He was fascinated with numbers and technology and even advocated a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union to win the Cold War. As he was dying of cancer, von Neumann suddenly turned to spirituality, but his vision of eternity was a world of self-replicating and evolving machines that could learn like humans, until they far surpassed the biological beings that seeded them.

As I have been writing my novel Fission: A Novel of Atomic Heartbreak (SheWrites Press, January, 2026), I have systematically read every other novel I could find that is set in the Manhattan Project. Most include at least one character who is wracked by guilt about having contributed to the birth of the bomb. It is just too juicy a trope to leave out—as is creating a fictional character whose fate mirrors the deaths of Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin in accidents with the plutonium “demon core.”

In a future Newsletter, I will review some of my favorite Manhattan Project novels (and like Thumper the bunny in Bambi will skip over my least favorite ones). How did I handle these issues in Fission? Since the main characters, Doris and Rob, are a married couple, I let Rob mirror my father’s pragmatic approach and gave the misgivings to Doris. It is Doris who asks if the atomic bomb will be worse than the firestorms from bombing Dresden and Tokyo. Doris devours John Hersey’s report about the aftermath of Hiroshima and has nightmares about a bomb destroying her family. However, guilt is not her most salient concern. Like the great majority of us, she focuses on her own, small life.