History PhD Candidate Eric Ross Launches Project on Nuclear Weapons and International Law

History PhD student Eric Ross, Human Security Lab’s newest doctoral research affiliate and a Center for Law, Justice and Societies Fellow this year, successfully defended his doctoral dissertation prospectus this month entitled "Collateral Genocide:  Scientific Ethics and National Security in the Early Atomic Age, 1939-1954.” The project will involve research at a number of archives, tracing the attitudes of Manhattan Project scientists toward the ethics and legality of nuclear weapons in the context of evolving post-WW2 legal regimes around war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

The prospectus abstract, which was also presented at Human Security Lab’s “Global and Human Security Workshop” in December, is below:

The guiding question of my research is how atomic scientists, as a collective, shifted—in less than a decade—from vehement opposition to nuclear weapons, which they once condemned as “genocidal” to active participation in an arms race that saw the creation of tens of thousands of thermonuclear weapons. By the early 1950s, they were contributing to devices each one thousand times more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—so powerful, that the first atomic bombs functioned merely as ignition sparks. How, then, did these scientists come to support U.S. policies that, by 1961, included plans to kill an estimated 600 million people in response to a conventional Soviet invasion of Berlin? This research engages with the evolving nature of mass violence in the 20th century, where genocidal policies increasingly became the purview not only of rogue politicians or military officials but also of bureaucracies and institutions. How might reframing this history through the lens of genocide and mass atrocity challenge traditional—often military or diplomatic—interpretations of nuclear history? How might it complicate conventional understandings of the root causes of mass violence, and of what constitutes complicity and defines a perpetrator in a world shaped by nuclear weapons?