One World or None:

A Report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb

Note (2007): One World or None has recently been republished with a new introduction by Richard Rhodes and is available through Amazon.com and other booksellers.

"In March 1946, seven months after World War II ended in fiery atomic bursts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Federation of American Scientists published One World or None, an eighty-six-page paperback that immediately became a national bestseller."

"It remains a document of intense cultural interest for the way it epitomizes... the political activism of the atomic scientists, the post-Hiroshima interest in world government and international control of atomic energy, the manipulation of fear."

-- Paul Boyer, By The Bomb's Early Light, University of North Carolina Press, 1994

Contents

Front Matter

Introduction by Arthur H. Compton

Foreword: Science and Civilization by Niels Bohr

If the Bomb Gets Out of Hand by Philip Morrison

It's an Old Story with the Stars by Harlow Shapley

Roots of the Atomic Age by Eugene P. Wigner

The New Power by Gale Young

The New Weapon: The Turn of the Screw by J.R. Oppenheimer

Air Force in the Atomic Age by Gen. H.H. Arnold

There is No Defense by Louis N. Ridenhour

The New Technique of Private War by E.U. Condon

How Close is the Danger? by Frederick Seitz and Hans Bethe

An Atomic Arms Race and Its Alternatives by Irving Langmuir

How Does It All Add Up? by Harold C. Urey?

Note

Can We Avert an Arms Race by an Inspection System? by Leo Szilard

International Control of Atomc Energy by Walter Lippmann

The Way Out by Albert Einstein

Survival is at Stake by the Federation of American (Atomic) Scientists

There's Only One Answer to the Atom Bomb, a review of One World or None from the New York Herald Tribune, March 17, 1946

maintained by Steven Aftergood