James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age By James Hershberg Knopf, 949 pages, $35 In the autumn of 1950, as a first-year graduate student in Cambridge, Mass., I grew … ...

Two years ago, James B. Conant proposed that the states get together to end what he called “the politics of frustration,” through which “a jumble of influential private and public bodies ...