Im delighted to welcome jennett conat who is an played author and the doctor of ryan con nat the director of the Manhattan Project, one of the best sellers. And the shell be speaking tonight about her new book the great secret the classified world war 2 that launched the war on cancer. I want to thank the museum for inviting me to be we youve. Alas its virtually. My first zoom presentation so bear with me. Ive had a lot of coffee and im thinking i should have had a lot of wine but here we go ill start off with a quote from winston churchill. He had way with words. He once observed men occasionally stomach pel across the truth stumble across the truth but most of them. Pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened. Lieutenant colonel Stewart Francis alexander, the remarkable hero of my become did not hurry off. In fact he refused to leave the scene of a military disaster even when churchill himself warned him to he stayed, he paid attention, he investigated, and as a result, h
It would soon be unleashed on the japanese cities of hiroshima and nagasaki. The Truman Library institute provided this video. We are at the 75th anniversary of the potsdam conference. Big numbers like a 75th anniversary or a 100th anniversary are always occasions for looking back and for drawing attention. I think theres another reason to look back at potsdam as we are in our own day and age reentering a world of Great Power Competition and reentering a world where geopolitics seems to have come back to the fore of international thinking and International Relations thinking. So its well worth us comiing back to this subject, so im especially glad to have a chance to talk to you about it. I wish it was in person, again, in kansas city. I wish that we were able to do this facetoface, but we will do the very best that we can. The key thing here that i want to return to throughout this presentation is shown by this photograph here of Winston Churchill, harry truman and josef stalin smilin
I am glad to have a chance to talk to you about it. I was it was in person in kansas city. I wish that we were able to do this facetoface, but we will do the very best that we can. The key thing here that i want to return to throughout this presentation is shown by this photograph here of Winston Churchill, harry truman, and Joseph Stalin smiling and shaking hands. And the point that i really want to reiterate here is that these three men and most of the advisors around them did not believe that what they were doing at potsdam was laying the seeds of a cold war. We know from the scholarship of the 1960s, 1970s and beyond, a lot of historians read potsdam backwards. That is to say they read it as a start of the cold war. But these three men and their staff came to potsdam not to begin a cold war amongst themselves, but celebrate, really, the end of the war with germany, figure out what the post world war was going to look like, and plan for the final victory over japan in the pacific th
I think there is another reason to look back at potsdam, as we are reentering a world of Great Power Competition and reentering a world where geopolitics seems to have come back to the fore of International Relations thinking. So it is well worth us coming back to this subject. I am glad to have a chance to talk to you about it. I wish it was in person in kansas city. I wish that we were able to do this facetoface, but we will do the very best that we can. The key thing here that i want to return to throughout this presentation is shown by this photograph here of Winston Churchill, harry truman, and Joseph Stalin smiling and shaking hands. And the point that i really want to reiterate here is that these three men and most of the advisors around them did not believe that what they were doing at potsdam was laying the seeds of a cold war. We know from the scholarship of the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond, a lot of historians read potsdam backwards. That is to say they read it as a start of the
Conference and theyre always occasions for looking back and drawing attention and theres another reason to look back at potsdam as we are reentering a world of Great Power Competition and reentering a world where geopolitics seems to have come back to the fore of international thinking and International Relations thinking. So it is well worth us coming back to this subject. So im especially glad to have a chance to talk to you about it. I wish it was in person again in kansas city. I wish that we weraible to do this face to face, but we will do the very best that we can. The key thing here that i want to return to throughout this presentation is shown by this photograph here of Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin and smiling and shaking hands and the point i want to reiterate here is that these three men and most of the advisers around them did not believe that what they were doing at potsdam was laying the seeds of a cold war. We know from the scholarship of the 1960s, 70s and beyond, a