Cold War International History Project will sponsor an in-depth discussion of the Manhattan Project and its Cold War legacy. This session will feature William Lanouette and James Hershberg as well as veteran Robert Furman, who directed the first atomic intelligence unit. The panel will be moderated by Cynthia C. Kelly, editor of The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007).

Cynthia C. Kelly is president of the Atomic Heritage Foundation, dedicated to preserving the history of the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Age. In addition to preserving significant Manhattan Project properties, the Foundation produces books and educational materials, museum exhibitions and documentary films.

William Lanouette has written extensively on the politics of nuclear weapons and nuclear power. He was Washington Correspondent for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists before joining the U.S. General Accounting Office in 1991, from which he recently retired. He is the author of Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb (Scribners, 1992; University of Chicago Press, 1994) Robert Furman, a retired Major in the Army Corps of Engineers. After working for General Leslie R. Groves on the Pentagon, he joined him in August 1943 to lead the first atomic intelligence unit. Under the Alsos program, he helped uncover the German bomb effort, recovering uranium ore, equipment, and eventually capturing the German scientists themselves. James G. Hershberg is Associate Professor of History and International Affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University.

Author of James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (Knopf, 1993; Stanford University Press, 1995), his recent scholarship has focused on the Cold War and nuclear issues including the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam and Afghanistan Wars, Iran-contra affair and researching communist archives.