Mathematician, Marxist and modernist: early biographical background

Born in Łódź, Poland, in 1908, Jacob Bronowski had moved with his family to Germany during the First World War, and then to London in 1920, where he learned English. Mathematically gifted, he gained a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge (1928), and was awarded a PhD (1935) in pure mathematics (topology).Footnote ⁷ In 1934 Bronowski took on a mathematics assistant lectureship at University College Hull, where he taught until 1943.Footnote ⁸

Two aspects of Bronowski's intellectual trajectory during his Cambridge and Hull years are noteworthy in light of his future public-intellectual career. First, as a staunch anti-fascist from 1933 onwards,Footnote ⁹ Bronowski grew increasingly active in the radical left movement at Hull, where he lectured on Marxism to the college's Socialist Group.Footnote ¹⁰ He was widely regarded as a pro-Soviet sympathizer and from January 1940 onwards was repeatedly investigated by Britain's Security Service as a possible Communist Party member.Footnote ¹¹ His continuing commitment to the left is evident in his 1944 book on William Blake, which garnered accolades from John Strachey, W.H. Auden, E.P. Thompson and A.L. Morton; the art historian Anthony Blunt privately expressed his admiration.Footnote ¹² Bronowski appears to have shed his political radicalism by war's end, although he remained under MI5 scrutiny until 1958.Footnote ¹³ The second aspect is that Bronowski was not a scientist, but an academic mathematician with a secondary career in literary criticism extolling the truth-telling virtues of poetry. Moreover, while some fellow students in his Cambridge literary circle had been inspired by I.A. Richards's science-informed literary theories, Bronowski eschewed scientific content and method entirely.Footnote ¹⁴ Instead, as Bronowski claimed in his first major published work, The Poet's Defence,

Bronowski's wartime experiences and early post-war journey to Hiroshima would transform this position. He was to become a civil servant rather than an academic, a scientist–administrator rather than a mathematician, and an intellectual apologist not for poetry but for science.

The making of a scientist and public intellectual

In early 1943 Bronowski was seconded from his Hull lectureship to work in the statistical section (R.E.8) of the Ministry of Home Security's Research and Experiments Department; he became a section head a year later.Footnote ¹⁶ Located at the Princes Risborough research station near Oxford, this section had been formed under the direction of the physicist J.D. Bernal in November 1941 ‘to assess the general effect of air attack on structures’.Footnote ¹⁷ For Bronowski, this entailed statistical research to optimize incendiary and high-explosive bomb ratios for the destruction of German industrial targets, the details of which will be addressed later in this paper. On 22 August 1945, a fortnight after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one of Bronowski's R.E.8 colleagues prepared a memorandum recommending that a team of ‘expert R.E.8. personnel … undertake a ground survey of these incidents whilst the evidence is still fresh’. Both cities contained ‘sufficient modern buildings … to estimate reliably the effectiveness of the [atomic] weapon against this type of structure’.Footnote ¹⁸ Following discussions between British chiefs of staff and the Home Office – the latter ‘anxious to obtain data which may affect civil defence organisation generally and air raid design in particular’ – a fifteen-man survey team was formed. Comprising both civilian scientists and engineers and armed services' representatives, it would be jointly led by Professor W.N. Thomas (honorary group captain) and Jacob Bronowski (honorary wing commander).Footnote ¹⁹

After a brief stint in Washington to liaise with their American counterparts, the team spent the month of November 1945 in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. At the latter site, in correspondence with the principal of Hull University College – where he planned to resume his teaching career on return – Bronowski wrote, ‘I found these two places unutterably more horrible than even I could have foreseen … I shall come to talk only in hyperboles’.Footnote ²⁰ The ensuing official survey report, written by Bronowski in the early months of 1946, was necessarily more prosaic: ‘The figure of 50,000 dead from one atomic bomb in average British urban conditions is probably the most important which this report contains. It shows that much the most serious effect of the atomic bomb is in producing casualties.’Footnote ²¹

Bronowski would stay in government service, having resigned his Hull mathematics lectureship in July 1946. He was appointed senior principal scientific officer, effective January 1947, at the Ministry of Works, where he led mathematical and statistical investigations applied to the building industries.Footnote ²² In the interim, he had been considered for a scientific position with the Directorate of Atomic Energy, and in December 1947 was a candidate for ‘a senior appointment in a very secret and confidential post’ in the Air Ministry.Footnote ²³ In May 1950 Bronowski left the civil service to become director of the Coal Board's central research establishment at Stoke Orchard, near Cheltenham;Footnote ²⁴ during his fourteen-year stint Bronowski's chief responsibilities were to increase fuel efficiency through development and production of economically viable smokeless coal ‘briquettes’.Footnote ²⁵ Bronowski's stature as a leading scientific administrator in a major nationalized industry facilitated his access to elite circles, including the upper reaches of the Labour Party,Footnote ²⁶ while also affording him opportunities to participate in debates on Britain's future energy requirements – especially the role of atomic energy.

Bronowski's prior involvement with the bomb was to be equally crucial in his career as a public intellectual. In June 1946 the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) had learned that the Home Office was planning to release Bronowski's report on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the mass media,Footnote ²⁷ and accepted their offer to have Bronowski ‘give a descriptive eye-witness talk’, on the condition that he ‘proved suitable as a broadcaster’.Footnote ²⁸ In the event, Bronowski's broadcast – aired live on the night of Sunday, 30 June 1946 – was regarded by BBC management as ‘one of the most interesting and best delivered talks’.Footnote ²⁹ Over the next few years the BBC invited Bronowski to participate in a succession of radio talks and features in which he repeatedly warned of atomic energy's uniquely destructive capacity. Representative examples include his contribution to the BBC's celebrated factual series Atomic Energy Week (March 1947),Footnote ³⁰ and his radio play Journey to Japan (1948).Footnote ³¹

The most remarkable instance of Bronowski's broadcast warnings, however, was his harshly critical review of P.M.S. Blackett's 1948 book Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy.Footnote ³² Blackett, the 1948 Nobel physics laureate, had argued that Western analysts were wrong in believing that future atomic bombing would be more militarily decisive than conventional bombing campaigns had been during the war. In his estimation, the political consequences of their exaggerated fear of atomic weapons were twofold: their inability to reach agreement with the Soviet Union on international control of atomic energy, and the likelihood that the United States would soon launch a ‘preventive’ nuclear attack against the Soviets, thereby sparking a war between the superpowers. Initially reluctant to address Blackett's book, since ‘the scientific points at issue are not only technical but concern the technique of war’, Bronowski relented after reading David Bradley's best-selling work on the 1946 Operation Crossroads nuclear test.Footnote ³³ The BBC consented to his proposal to review both works together, and Bronowski's talk – Bikini or Bluff? What Is the Truth about the Dangers of Atomic Bombing – was aired on the Third Programme on 17 March 1949.Footnote ³⁴ Introducing Blackett as ‘after all, a man with a dramatic turn of mind’, Bronowski chose to ignore his political arguments, ‘because you would still have only the opinions of two amateurs’. Instead, since ‘the nature of an atomic war [is] the subject on which I think my opinion is worth having’, Bronowski presented a predictable series of technical counterarguments: the atomic weapon is uniquely destructive since it ‘holds a power against the industrial life of a country which no collection of small bombs ever had’, it kills more people than conventional weapons, and (invoking Bradley's book) its radioactive fallout constitutes an unprecedented lethal peril. Blackett and Consequences would endure far harsher and more abusive criticism,Footnote ³⁵ but it is noteworthy that Bronowski, a man of the left like Blackett, was apparently unmoved by the latter's ultimate concern that a ‘preventive war’ would result in Britain's loss of political independence and all hopes for its democratic socialist future.

Bronowski's inaugural ‘Hiroshima’ broadcast also resulted in his being asked to take part in programmes of many other types. In October 1946 Bronowski first appeared on the BBC's famed Brains Trust radio programme, with his expertise identified as ‘mathematics and literature’;Footnote ³⁶ within six months he was ranked higher in popularity than its regular panellist, the philosopher Cyril Joad.Footnote ³⁷ Bronowski was soon presenting radio talks ranging from How Does the Scientist Know? (1951), dealing with the scientific method's philosophical implications, to a literary analysis of William Blake's prophetic books (1951). Meanwhile, the elite Third Programme service produced his award-winning play The Face of Violence (1950) and his radio ‘opera’ sequel My Brother Died (1954).Footnote ³⁸ Bronowski's popularity with BBC management and radio audiences extended beyond his frequent broadcasts on the BBC's domestic services, for he also delivered over eighty talks between 1950 and 1956 on the BBC's foreign radio services. From 1951 onwards, moreover, he made regular appearances on BBC television, including his seven-part series Science in the Making (1954),Footnote ³⁹ and as panel member of the weekly televised Brains Trust programme (1955–1961); as Stefan Collini has remarked, Bronowski was ‘almost the public face of science on British television’ in this period.Footnote ⁴⁰

Bronowski's humanist philosophy

Bronowski was Britain's foremost expositor of scientific humanism. This ethos, frequently directed against critics of science and scientists, warrants particular attention in light of his concurrent interventions in early atomic culture (taken up in the section below). His ‘Hiroshima’ producer invited Bronowski to develop a series of talks for the BBC's newly created Third Programme service ‘on the synthesis of mathematics and the humanities’.Footnote ⁴¹ Instead, Bronowski proposed ‘to talk about the unity of the humanities & science, based on the flexibility of science, & centred on actual people or events’; the resulting Invention and Imagination series of talks were broadcast in late 1946.Footnote ⁴²

Two years later Bronowski developed these ideas more fully in his five-part series of talks The Common Sense of Science – aired in the spring of 1948.Footnote ⁴³ Following four talks arguing that scientific practice is a form of culture, Bronowski's concluding piece – ‘Science, the creator or destroyer’ – was a sustained defence against critics who blamed science for its role in wartime devastation.Footnote ⁴⁴ Maintaining that ‘for some time scientists have been a favourite scapegoat’, he conceded that ‘science has obviously multiplied the power of the war-makers’, but nevertheless insisted that ‘warlike science is no more than a by-product of a warlike society’. ‘Science has merely provided the means for good or ill; and society has seized it for ill.’ He argued that society instead must ‘grow familiar with the large ideas of science [which] calls for patience and an effort of attention’. ‘For two hundred years, these ideas have been applied to technical needs; and they have made our world anew … We may not think that is much to put against the eighty thousand dead in Hiroshima, or we may.’ Noting that the sixty thousand killed by German bombs in Britain during the war equated to a mere fortnight in the average life span of her population, Bronowski contrasted this statistic with England's average lifespan increase of twenty years over the past century: ‘That is the price of science, take it or leave it.’ The ideas of science, he insisted, ‘have created life’. In conclusion, Bronowski proposed that science can ‘heal the spiritual cleft which two wars have uncovered’. Science, he said, ‘can create values and will create them precisely as literature does, by looking into the human personality; by discovering what divides and cements it’.Footnote ⁴⁵

In 1951, soon after taking up his post at the Coal Board, Bronowski published these Common Sense of Science talks in expanded book form.Footnote ⁴⁶ One particularly salient new chapter, ‘Truth and value’, elaborated on his theme of scientific values, introducing what would become his recurring leitmotif: the intrinsic truthfulness of science. Bronowski began by stressing that when science ‘throws out some unavoidable challenge, such as in our time has been set by the atomic bomb’, it is blamed for what really amounts to ‘a deeper division between the social habits of our schooldays and new habits of thought’. This deeper division, he argued, stemmed from a sense that social change had been accompanied by a loss of morality, and that science had become society's scapegoat for this loss. But unjustly so: ‘For whatever else may be held against science, this cannot be denied, that it takes for ultimate judgement one criterion alone, that it shall be truthful.’ No other system ‘can claim a more fanatical regard for truth’.Footnote ⁴⁷

Bronowski reiterated his ‘scientific truthfulness’ theme in 1953 in three lectures delivered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, first published as ‘Science and human values’ (1956) in British and American journals.Footnote ⁴⁸ These essays garnered considerable praise from leading atomic physicists who had participated in the Manhattan Project. J. Robert Oppenheimer read it ‘with great interest, pleasure and frequent assent’, and Phillip Morrison wrote,

Published many times later in book form,Footnote ⁵⁰ Bronowski's essays also emphasized practising scientists' own innate truthfulness. In the concluding piece, ‘The sense of human dignity’, Bronowski examined ‘the conditions for the success of science’. He invoked the recollection of Georges-Louis Buffon, the eighteenth-century French naturalist and mathematician who, on first encountering ‘the grave men of the Royal Society, heirs to Newton’, had found them ‘a community of scientists seeking the truth together with dignity and humanity. It was, it is, a discovery to form a man's life’. Today, Bronowski maintained, ‘In the society of scientists each man, by the process of exploring for the truth, has earned a dignity more profound than his doctrine.’Footnote ⁵¹ Science, he concluded,

The ‘values’ of atomic energy

Beginning in early 1950, Bronowski virtually abandoned his earlier dire warnings about the bomb's uniquely destructive power in favour of stressing the peaceful benefits which atomic energy promised. The earliest instance of this shift was his BBC Far Eastern Service talk, ‘Atomic energy and peace’, broadcast in February 1950, when he complied with the producer's request to ‘develop [the idea] … that atomic energy need not necessarily be used for destructive purposes but can, in fact, help to save life and build a securer and better future’.Footnote ⁵³ It is salient that Bronowski adopted an even more politically activist role in promoting peaceful atomic energy soon after joining the Coal Board a few months later – a stance possibly explained by his concern that Britain's diminishing coal reserves threatened her industrial competitiveness: it was imperative, he argued, that atomic energy be immediately exploited for industrial power – with coal research confined to home heating, his chief responsibility.Footnote ⁵⁴ This move was accompanied by an increasing lack of candour about Britain's own bomb development programme, which contrasted sharply with the ‘truthfulness’ claims underpinning his scientific humanism.

Bronowski's stress on the peaceful uses of atomic energy began in November 1950 in a Times letter calling for international cooperation to equip undeveloped nations with peaceful atomic energy – an effort he continued for the next six years. Nations, he argued, should ‘cooperate to plan and build, in one of the world's underdeveloped areas, a station to make atomic power on a massive scale in order to irrigate or develop that area’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Bronowski soon elaborated the political significance of his plan in the concluding article of a Daily Herald series in which ‘five eminent men’ were invited ‘to make constructive suggestions for avoiding war’. For the inhabitants of these underdeveloped nations, he maintained, ‘Communism … is not a denial but … a just aspiration [since] it expresses … the same human urge for equality and decent living which Socialism and the Welfare State mean to us.’ Bronowski's plan would ‘prove that we have something to give to mankind which did not die, but was born over Hiroshima five years ago’.Footnote ⁵⁶

In parallel with these international proposals, Bronowski repeatedly promoted Britain's domestic atomic energy research programme. Astonishingly, by his accounts, Britain's programme did not involve nuclear weapons development – even though, widely reported in the press, such a programme had been confirmed by the minister of defence in the House of Commons in May 1948.Footnote ⁵⁷ In a 1951 Observer article, Bronowski wrote,

He failed, however, to note that the primary purpose of the Windscale piles located in Cumbria, north-west England, was to produce plutonium for Britain's atomic bomb development programme. Bronowski compounded this omission with explicit denial. In a late 1951 radio play he wrote for transmission on the BBC's North American Service,Footnote ⁵⁹ Bronowski acted the part of ‘Narrator’, who discusses atomic energy with two fictional friends. At one point, ‘Narrator’ remarks, ‘Ah! That's the 64-dollar question … We don't even make any atomic bombs in England; our atomic stations do more work for peace than for War; but does the public know? They are still just saying what they said 5 years ago – “Scientists – I'd like to drown the lot!”.’Footnote ⁶⁰ Bronowski repeated this false claim on 13 May 1952 in a commissioned script to the BBC Persian Service: ‘Why has not Britain manufactured atom bombs, in spite of the great number of scientists this country possesses?’Footnote ⁶¹ The following day Downing Street confirmed Operation Hurricane, Britain's long-planned first nuclear test.Footnote ⁶²

Detonated off the Monte Bello islands on 10 October 1952, Operation Hurricane drew little public reaction; somewhat more attention was paid to the American thermonuclear explosion a month later, and to the Soviet hydrogen bomb test in August 1953. But it was the US hydrogen bomb test at Bikini atoll in March 1954, and the subsequent news of Japanese fishermen killed by radiation poisoning, that aroused serious public outcry. Organized opposition to the bomb in Britain soon followed: by the late 1950s increasing calls for unilateral disarmament would precipitate divisions within the opposition Labour Party, and help launch the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).Footnote ⁶³ Bronowski's responses to these events took several forms, all indicative of his reluctance to join these opposition voices. From December 1953, for example, when making frequent guest appearances on Birmingham-based Behind the News radio broadcasts, Bronowski again repeatedly stressed the peaceful uses of atomic energy.Footnote ⁶⁴ And in February 1955, following the British government's announced decision to develop the hydrogen bomb, he declined to discuss its political ramifications: ‘My first choice [for a topic] remains the peaceful atomic future, and its implications for world-enrichment.’Footnote ⁶⁵ Two years later Bronowski declined to join National Committee for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons Tests, the precursor to CND, claiming that ‘he could voice his opposition “more effectively on informal occasions than at a formal public meeting”.’Footnote ⁶⁶

During these early years of increasing public opposition to nuclear tests, Bronowski's second form of intervention was to argue – repeatedly – that instead of turning scientists into scapegoats, the lay public ought to take fuller responsibility for scientists' research activities.Footnote ⁶⁷ Yet, as one revealingly representative Observer article by him demonstrates, Bronowski's arguments were enmeshed in a maze of historical half-truths, self-contradictions and special pleading. In ‘Scientists and bombs’ (1954), Bronowski began by recalling the July 1945 Trinity Test, when ‘many … deeply distressed’ scientists ‘sent a round robin to President Truman, urging that the scale and implications of the bomb were too grave, and should be demonstrated in some less deadly way’ – but ‘their scruples were overruled’. Today, he argued, the spectre of Hiroshima ‘vents itself on the figure of the scientist, powerful yet fragile, a scapegoat for a world that fears and conspires its own doom’. The ‘crux of the matter’ is that ‘the responsibility for having research done on uranium or hydrogen, the responsibility for having research done on death, is a communal responsibility’. But, Bronowski maintained, it is not the communal responsibility of the scientist, whose ‘choice is individual’ and who ‘does our bidding as the soldier does’; rather, it is voters who must ‘accept their responsibility … to listen, to weigh, and then to make their own choice’. The only ‘deep responsibility of the nuclear scientist … is to illuminate for all men the choice which his work offers them … and it is the only democratic responsibility that the scientist can take’. For Bronowski, the scientist's sole alternative was the one taken by the convicted atomic spy Klaus Fuchs, who had decided ‘single-handed[ly] what should be done with the work his fellow citizens have asked of him … [thereby] arrogantly betraying his fellows’.Footnote ⁶⁸

Bronowski continued to invoke this dichotomy between the scientist's individual conscience and the community's collective responsibility, even though leading scientific intellectuals had themselves begun to take collective, organized action against the bomb. On 9 July 1955, Bertrand Russell had announced his petition (the later famous ‘Russell–Einstein Manifesto’) inviting all scientists to call on governments to find ways to avert world war.Footnote ⁶⁹ On that same day, Bronowski addressed a London audience organized by the Atomic Scientists' Association on ‘The responsibilities of scientists and public’. Given wide press coverage, Bronowski's remarks – stressing the public's greater duty – echoed those of a year earlier, including his castigation of Klaus Fuchs.Footnote ⁷⁰

Bronowski repeated these and similar arguments throughout 1955–1956,Footnote ⁷¹ but by the late 1950s his views had become wholly out of step with members and supporters of the CND and Pugwash movements. During the 1960s he would continue to espouse a liberal humanist philosophy predicated on scientists' individual conscience and on his trust that scientific knowledge and ‘scientific morality’ would overcome the threat of atomic bombs. But, at the decade's close, Bronowski's individualist ethos surprisingly gave way to a call for ‘the disestablishment of science’ – enjoining scientists to act collectively to take control of the funding and direction of all scientific research.Footnote ⁷² It was, in the words of one contemporary historian of science, ‘a utopian counsel of despair which … is as politically irresponsible as it is impracticable’.Footnote ⁷³

The roots of Bronowski's ‘Hiroshima’

Bronowski's study of the effects of atomic bombing at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been a key feature in every biographical précis accompanying his published works and radio programme listings. Yet these biographies were unfailingly vague concerning his wartime career leading up to Hiroshima: Bronowski ‘worked in operational research’,Footnote ⁷⁴ ‘his training as a mathematician led him into government research during World War II’,Footnote ⁷⁵ ‘he was asked to study bomb damage and its implications during the war’,Footnote ⁷⁶ or he ‘forecast the economic effects of bombing’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Even Bronowski's 1974 Times obituary merely noted that he had headed ‘a number of statistical units dealing with the economic effects of bombing’ during the war.Footnote ⁷⁸ Years later, Bronowski's detailed curriculum vitae accompanying a published Festschrift simply stated, ‘Government Service (British), 1942–1946’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Bronowski, too, was equally evasive: addressing American audiences on BBC radio in 1951, for example, he said that when war came, ‘before I knew where I was, I was studying aerial views of German heavy water plants and poring over smuggled photographs of secret weapons’. And in his final Ascent of Man book, although mentioning his Hiroshima visit, Bronowski's only reference to his prior war work was having studied a ‘photograph of an explosion’ with John von Neumann.Footnote ⁸⁰ Yet in actuality Bronowski's principal wartime tasks had been to help maximize the effects of bombing on German and Japanese urban targets; it was this expertise, detailed below, which made him uniquely qualified to co-lead the November 1945 British mission to Japan and to report its findings.

By the time Bronowski was seconded to the Ministry of Home Security in early 1943, its R.E.8 Operations Research Department's role had been redirected from civil defence to supporting Bomber Command's strategic bombing campaigns against German cities.Footnote ⁸¹ For Bronowski, this entailed research to optimize incendiary and high-explosive bomb ratios for maximum destructive effect on German industrial targets.Footnote ⁸² But Bronowski's work took a crucial turn in the autumn of 1944, when he transferred to London to assist American preparations for their forthcoming Japanese bombing campaign. There he liaised with the Washington-based Joint Target Group (JTG) responsible for ‘integrating and coordinating pre-attack and post-attack intelligence analyses of air targets in the war against Japan’.Footnote ⁸³ The JTG, lacking extensive information on Japan, would soon rely heavily on British knowledge of bombing Germany; by Bronowski's then-classified account, it was largely from British studies ‘that the group devised its recommendations on the mix of high-explosive and incendiary bombs to be dropped [on Japan] and the fuse sensitivities to be considered for each target’.Footnote ⁸⁴ The value of these analyses increased dramatically from early 1945 onwards, when American campaigns shifted from ‘precision’ daylight bombing of Japanese cities to night-time ‘area’ bombing – the policy long favoured by British Bomber Command against Germany.Footnote ⁸⁵ By May 1945, however, even this approach (in which hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians perished) began to experience diminishing returns. As Bronowski explained, ‘Incendiary raids on Japanese cities have been successful hitherto only when the ground density over the area burnt out has reached 75 tons per square mile.’ His proposed solution, though possibly not adopted, affords a chilling insight to the ‘technological fanaticism’Footnote ⁸⁶ to which operations researchers had succumbed:

Days after writing this report, Bronowski was assigned to Washington, DC as consultant to the JTG. He remained there throughout the incendiary bombing attacks which continued up to and beyond the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The JTG was regarded during this period as the prime agency for American air intelligence, providing ‘material on hand … for assessing the prospective targets and preparing for post-attack surveys of the cities bombed’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Significantly, JTG intelligence was used to optimize not only conventional bombing, but atomic bombing as well.

The nearest Bronowski came to publicly acknowledging the foregoing was in a 1960 American magazine article, ‘Moral for an age of plenty’:Footnote ⁸⁹

Bronowski made this belated partial admission to argue that even though he had ‘resolved to take no further part in the making of weapons of mass destruction’, he did ‘not therefore regard [him]self as morally superior to any … fellow scientists who made a different choice’.Footnote ⁹⁰ To illustrate his ‘morality’ point Bronowski recounted the tragic story of Louis Slotin,Footnote ⁹¹ the former Manhattan Project physicist who had suffered a fatal accident while conducting a bomb-making experiment at Los Alamos in May 1946:

The lesson Bronowski drew from this episode was that even scientists engaged in atomic weapons development exhibit selfless heroism alongside their ‘singleness of mind … in the pursuit of truth’.Footnote ⁹³ Yet this story could have been, and has been, told very differently. Slotin did not commit a virtual ‘act of suicide’ in order to heroically save others' lives; rather, he was conducting an unnecessary and unnecessarily dangerous demonstration that recklessly endangered his fellow scientists and proved fatal to himself.Footnote ⁹⁴ In effect, Bronowski's morality tale, necessitating the brief belated acknowledgement of his wartime role, was one more example of his recurrent mythmaking and ahistorical accounts of the relations between science, scientists and the bomb.