Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day July 1945, a petition is drafted and circulated throughout the Truman

administration it is written by physicist Leo Salard and signed by 70

scientists working on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the laboratory

and the metallurgical laboratory in Chicago, Illinois, the petition ultimately was a plea to consider

the moral consequences of nuclear development

and the growing plan to drop a nuclear weapon on Japan to try and bring an end to World

War II. The petition argued that if the bomb were dropped, the United States would, quote,

bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.

This is, of course course such a fraught moment in history politically, technologically, morally.

There were all sorts of voices arguing for the moral justification for dropping the

bomb, the moral justification for not dropping the bomb.

We will get into all that, but suffice to say the Salard petition did not prevent the

deployment of nuclear weapons.

The petition actually reportedly never made its way to

Truman's desk it was only declassified about 15 years later and of course later

that summer August 6th a weapon was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, and then Nagasaki, Japan a few days later.

So let's talk about the Silard petition, and of course we wanted to do this in part because of the new movie Oppenheimer, which is about the development of nuclear weapons.

I got a chance to see it recently and the Salard petition plays a pretty critical role in the movie.

The whole movie though, does a really impressive job I thought of painting

the moral picture and the moral wrestling that the scientists in particular involved in developing

...