The death of physicist Harold Agnew marks the end of the original coterie of American scientists who devoted their lives to building atomic weapons. Forever gung-ho about The Bomb, he was a tireless voice for the brassbound edition of history that justifies its actual use against Japanese cities in 1945 (“they deserved it . . . there are no innocent civilians in war” –the mindset of genocide) and its threatened use against the rest of the world ever since. As a “science adviser” to Ronald Reagan he hawked the science fictional Star Wars anti-missile system. As the president of General Atomics (which started as a division of defense contractor General Dynamics) when it was owned by Gulf Oil, he cashed in on the burgeoning military-industrial complex. That students and faculty at Berkeley once tried him in absentia as a war criminal was faint evidence of a quite populous parallel universe that would not have showered him with accolades and riches. It may take another century before Americans face honestly his chief legacy of stuffing the nuclear arsenal. He died at the ripe old age of 92 of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a blood cancer whose long latency and morbidity periods kept it off the government list of radiogenic diseases for which nuclear weapons workers could be compensated. Homo homini lupus est.
Not his lunchbox: Smiling with the Nagasaki bomb’s plutonium core, 1945