Author won a Pulitzer for Oppenheimer bio

RESEARCHED AND WROTE ABOUT NUCLEAR WEAPONS

WHAT WE NEED IS THE INTERNATIONAL CONTROL OF ATOMIC ENERGY.

WE NEED TO ELIMINATE THE POSSIBILITY THAT NUCLEAR WEAPONS

WILL BE PART OF ARSENALS.” — COLD WAR HISTORIAN MARTIN SHERWIN

TO INTERVIEWER CHARLIE ROSE IN 1985

Martin Sherwin, a Cold War and nuclear weapons historian who won the Pulitzer Prize for co-writing American Prometheus, an exhaustive biography of Manhattan Project director Robert Oppenheimer that he worked on for a quarter-century, died Oct. 6 at his home in Washington. He was 84.

The cause was lung cancer, said his wife, Susan Sherwin.

Dr. Sherwin devoted practically his entire academic career to writing about nuclear weapons, including their development at the remote New Mexico mesa of Los Alamos, the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the close of the Second World War, and the near-fatal Cold War standoff of October 1962, when the United States dispatched ballistic missiles to Turkey and Italy, prompting the Soviet Union to follow suit in Cuba.

He argued that a third world war was only narrowly averted that month, in large part by chance, and that the threat of nuclear catastrophe remained. Better safety controls and communications systems were essential, along with a reduction of warheads. “What we need is the international control of atomic energy,” he told interviewer Charlie Rose in 2005. “We need to eliminate the possibility that nuclear weapons will be part of arsenals.”

Sherwin wrote three books, including the arms-race and Cuban missile crisis history Gambling With Armageddon (2020), while teaching at universities including Princeton, Tufts and George Mason, where he had been a professor since 2007. He became known as a tenacious and sometimes obsessive researcher while travelling to archives across the United States and Europe, and he could be similarly exacting about his prose.

“He used to tell this story about John Kenneth Galbraith, who would say on his sixth rewriting, ‘I think I’ve got it,’ “his wife recalled in a phone interview. “He could never stop editing or changing something if he felt he could make it better.”

Sherwin’s methodical approach contributed to the long wait for American Prometheus (2005), a 700-page biography that he wrote with author Kai Bird. Together, they traced the life of Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” who grew up in a wealthy German Jewish family in New York, oversaw the Los Alamos Laboratory during the Second World War, became an outspoken opponent of nuclear proliferation and lost his security clearance in 1954, following Mccarthy-era accusations of disloyalty and Communist ties.

“American Prometheus is a work of voluminous scholarship and lucid insight,” New York Times book critic Janet Maslin wrote, “unifying its multi-faceted portrait with a keen grasp of Oppenheimer’s essential nature. ... It traces Oppenheimer’s arrogance to the kind of upbringing that would give him his own sloop at age 16 (he named it for a chemical compound) and lead one of the oral examiners of his doctoral thesis to say: ‘I got out of there just in time. He was beginning to ask me questions.’”

On Oct. 8, Universal Pictures announced that filmmaker Christopher Nolan is adapting the book into a movie starring Cillian Murphy, with a scheduled release date in July 2023.

The biography began in 1980 as a solo project for Sherwin, whose first book, the atomic bomb history A World Destroyed (1975), was a finalist for the National Book Award. “I told my editor it would be finished in five or six years,” he said in a 2006 talk at Tufts, but soon realized that writing a biography was “immensely more difficult than writing a history.”

To immerse himself in Oppenheimer’s life, he rode on horseback to the physicist’s New Mexico cabin, as Oppenheimer often did, and interviewed dozens of the scientist’s friends and colleagues. After nearly two decades of work, he sought out a co-author to energize the project in 1999, enlisting his friend Bird over dinner in Boston.

“I forget what we ate,” Bird said in an interview, “but I am sure we each had a vodka martini and Marty introduced me to Oppenheimer’s favourite toast: ‘To the confusion of our enemies!’” He added that although Sherwin insisted there was plenty of research left to be done, “it turned out Marty had collected about 50,000 pages of archival documents, covering all aspects of Oppenheimer’s life.”

“As the months rolled by he would call me up and say, ‘Oh Kai, I was rummaging around in this closet in my house in Cambridge and found another box of Oppenheimer material.’ He’d forgotten what he’d done, and had sort of gotten biographer’s disease, which is not uncommon. You keep thinking there’s more people to interview, more documents to find.”

The two authors shared writing duties, trading drafts of individual chapters for about five years, before finishing the book. The literary honours they received, including a National Book Critics Circle Award, seemed to make it easier to look back on the biography’s decades-long conception.

“It doesn’t seem so long right now,” Sherwin told The Washington Post when he won the Pulitzer

in 2006. “Only 25 years!”

The older of two children, Martin Jay Sherwin was born in Brooklyn on July 2, 1937. His mother was a homemaker, and his father worked for a children’s outerwear company.

Enrolling at Dartmouth College, Sherwin rowed on the crew team and planned to go to medical school. But he soon changed course, trying subjects including geology; a summer he spent doing field work at a uranium mine may have piqued his interest in the development of nuclear weapons. He eventually landed on history, and after graduating in 1959, he served in the U.S. Navy for four years and received a PHD in 1971 from the University of California at Los Angeles.

Sherwin joined the faculty at Tufts in 1980. Later that decade, he put his Oppenheimer research on hold to launch the university’s Nuclear Age History and Humanities Center, which sponsored research but was best known for its Global Classroom Project. Led jointly by Sherwin and Evgeny Velikhov, a Russian physicist, the project used satellite television to link students and scholars at Tufts and Moscow State University.

Sherwin also was an adviser for documentaries including War and Peace in the Nuclear Age (1989), a 13-part PBS series. He was also a devoted golfer: He brought his clubs with him while travelling to academic conferences, leading friends to joke that his Oppenheimer book was delayed because he was always on the golf range.

He and his wife of 57 years, the former Susan Smukler, split their time between Washington and Aspen, Colo., where at age 80 he took a class to improve his mogul skiing. In addition to his wife, survivors include a son, Alex Sherwin, of Brooklyn; a sister; and four grandchildren. His daughter, Andrea Sherwin, died of cancer in 2010. Sherwin was writing Gambling With Armageddon at the time and dedicated it to her.

IT DOESN’T SEEM SO LONG RIGHT NOW ... ONLY 25 YEARS!