Featured Fellow: Eric Ross (2025-2026 Leon and Joanne V. C. Knopoff Research Fellow)

The Library & Museum at the American Philosophical Society supports a diverse community of scholars working on a wide-range of projects in fields including early American history, history of science and technology, and Native American and Indigenous Studies, among others. Read on to learn more about some of our fellows and their research at the APS. Additional information about our fellowship programming and other funding opportunities can be found here.

Briefly describe your research project.

My dissertation offers a critical analysis of scientific agency in the early atomic age, focusing on the consequential decade between the development of the first atomic bombs and the decision to pursue thermonuclear weapons. In contrast to orthodox Cold War narratives that depict the arms race as an almost inexorable or structurally predetermined process, the project foregrounds the profound contingencies that defined this period. To do so, it treats atomic scientists not as passive or naïve instruments of state power but as critical historical actors whose judgments, interventions, and accommodations shaped the trajectory of the nuclear age.

Ultimately, it advances an argument that the expansion of nuclear armaments was not dictated by geopolitical necessity, nor by scientific inevitability. It was the product of human choices made within specific institutional, ideological, and political contexts that normalized the creation and maintenance of weapons designed for unprecedented destruction.

What collections did you use while working at the APS?

The Henry DeWolf Smyth Papers, Stanislaw Ulam, Edward Condon, and John Wheeler Papers.

What’s the most interesting or exciting thing you found in the collections?

It is striking to observe the immediacy and near unanimity with which atomic scientists recognized the existential challenges inaugurated by the atomic age. They were not only remarkable scientific technicians but also incisive political and cultural diagnosticians who reckoned with the profound moral and historical rupture opened by the atomic bombings.

In the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many scientists spoke publicly against the futility of secrecy, the obsolescence of traditional notions of national sovereignty, and the self-defeating logic of preparing for a future war that could never be fought. Their critique intensified during the 1950 debate over the Hydrogen bomb, which prominent figures condemned as a “weapon of genocide” that would further erode the moral standing of the United States and was, in their view, militarily irrational and strategically counterproductive.

Yet by this time, the Atomic Energy Commission was also calling for the deeper conscription of scientific labor into the expanding nuclear security state. Most scientists, despite their misgivings, complied. They did so with full awareness of the destructive implications of their work and with the knowledge, as Oppenheimer acknowledged, that “you cannot make an atomic bomb without scientists.”

This dynamic reflects a central tenet of modernity and mass violence. The creation of what Henry DeWolf Smyth in August 1945 described as “monstrous weapons” was not the result of monstrous individuals. Rather, it was enabled by institutions and structures capable of mobilizing the labor of ordinary people to extraordinarily violent ends. As Smyth observed, the bomb “was created not by the devilish inspiration of some warped genius but by the arduous labor of thousands of normal men and women working for the safety of their country.”

Do you have any tips or suggestions for future fellows or researchers?

Talk to the archivists about your research. They are incredibly knowledgeable (and friendly!) and can point you toward collections and materials you may not have considered or known were available to you.

Any suggestions for must-see places or things to do in Philadelphia?

Philadelphia has really great restaurants, definitely be sure to budget to explore and eat out from time to time.

Eric Ross is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research examines the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear policy through the lens of mass violence, with a particular focus on how atomic scientists navigated questions of agency, complicity, and resistance in the early atomic age.