Political History Commons^™

Atomic Governance: Militarism, Secrecy, And Science In Post-War America, 1945-1958, Mary D. Wammack

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This history of America's post-World War II atomic program examines the institutional impulses that drove its evolution from 1945 through the 1958 moratorium on atmospheric weapons testing. Based on archival research and methodologies borrowed from sociologists and legal theorists, it focuses on the motivations of and decisions made by military officers, program managers and affiliates in the private sector, their relationships, and the alliances they formed with congressmen. This analysis identifies a two-stage process of self-interested decision-making through which the armed forces, seeking to mitigate postwar loss of funding and influence, gained de facto control of the atomic program that …