Article ID: CBB001251860

Jacob Bronowski: A Humanist Intellectual for an Atomic Age, 1946--1956 (2012)

unapi

Desmarais, Ralph (Author)


British Journal for the History of Science
Volume: 45, no. 4
Issue: 4
Pages: 573-589


Publication Date: 2012
Edition Details: Part of special issue: British Nuclear Culture
Language: English

Jacob (`Bruno') Bronowski (1908--1974), on the basis of having examined the effects of the atomic bombing of Japan in late 1945, became one of Britain's most vocal and best-known scientific intellectuals engaged in the cultural politics of the early atomic era. Witnessing Hiroshima helped transform him from pure mathematician--poet to scientific administrator; from obscurity to fame on the BBC airwaves and in print; and, crucially, from literary intellectual who promoted the superior truthfulness of poetry and poets to scientific humanist insisting that science and scientists were the standard-bearers of truth. A cornerstone of Bronowski's humanist ideology was that Hiroshima and the bomb had become symbols of the public's distrust of science, whereas, in reality, science was merely a scapegoat for society's loss of moral compass; more correctly, he stressed, science and scientists epitomized positive moral values. When discussing atomic energy, especially after 1949, Bronowski not only downplayed the bomb's significance but was deliberately vague regarding Britain's atomic weapon development programme; this lack of candour was compounded by Bronowski's evasiveness regarding his own prior involvement with wartime bombing. The net effect was a substantial contribution to British scientific intellectuals' influential yet frequently misleading accounts of the relations between science and war in the early atomic era.

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Article Hogg, Jonathan; Laucht, Christoph (2012) Introduction: British Nuclear Culture. British Journal for the History of Science (pp. 479-493). unapi

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Authors & Contributors
Hogg, Jonathan
Ciglioni, Laura
Jolivette, Catherine
McRae, Kenneth D
Desmarais, R J
Weart, Spencer R.
Concepts
Nuclear weapons; atomic weapons
Science and war; science and the military
Science and culture
Public understanding of science
Science and politics
Cold War
Time Periods
20th century
20th century, late
Places
Great Britain
United States
Germany
Soviet Union
Russia
Italy
Institutions
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
Federation of American Scientists
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