Conant Receives Atomic Pioneer Award For Work While President of Harvard

James B. Conant '13, President Emcritus of Harvard University, has been cited by the Atomic Energy Commission for his work in the development of the atomic bomb.

President Nixon presented one of three Atomic Pioneer Awards to Conant at the Whilte House on February 27. Giving it, he praised Conant's participation in the development of the bomb and his role in the atomic energy program after World War II.

In 1940, while President of Harvard, Conant became the chairman of the National Defense Research Committee, a group of scientists supervising the development of the atomic bomb.

As committee chairman, Conant served as a liaison between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the scientists working on the bomb. When Harry S. Truman became President, the committee unanimously recommended that the atomic bomb be dropped without warning on Japan.

"At the time I felt that the decision of the President to drop the bomb was correct," Conant said yesterday. "Colonel Stimpson, then Secretary of War, got the opinion of the committee on whether there was any other way to demonstrate successfully the terrible power of the atomic bomb to end the war. I thought there was no other way, and I have no regrets about that decision."

After the war, Conant was appointed to the General Advisory Commission, where he, along with J. Robert Oppenheimer and other committee members, advised against the development of the hydrogen bomb.

"We were overruled, and today Iam inclined to agree that we were wrong," Conant said. "When we made the recommendation, we thought there was a very small chance that the bomb would work. A new development [introduced by Edward M. Teller] made it a much more straightforward thing. I at least had hoped that the President and Secretary Acheson might have used the threat of developing an atomic bomb to force weapons control negotiations with the Russians, but looking back, that may have been a utopian point of view."

A specialist in organic chemistry, Conant worked as an Army major during World War 1 on manufacturing a poison gas. "Chemical warfare strikes me as having a nuisance value, not as being a very effective weapon. Both sides are better off not using it."

Conant approved of President Nixon's speech condemning the use of chemical and biological warfare. "I never liked biological warfare," he commented, "perhaps because I didn't know much about it. But I was always worried that, if rumors were correct, we would have epidemics that couldn't be stopped-which would be worse than an atomic bomb."

Conant, who was President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, is known for his writings on education, which include the book. American High Schools Today, His autobiography. My Several Lives, was published last week. Now 76 years old, he hopes in the future to write another book on education and a small book-"of interest only to historians"-on his experiences as United States High Commisioner and then Ambassador to West Germany, from 1953 to 1957.