Martin J. Sherwin, Pulitzer-winning scholar, dead at 84,

NEW YORK (AP) — Martin J. Sherwin, a leading scholar of atomic weapons who in “A World Destroyed” challenged support for the U.S. bombing of Japan and spent more than two decades researching the pioneering physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer for the Pulitzer Prize-winning “American Prometheus,” has died.

Sherwin died Wednesday at his home in Washington, D.C., according to his friend Andrew Hartman, a professor of history at Illinois State University. He was 84 and had been battling lung cancer. Kai Bird, a close friend and the co-author of “American Prometheus,” called him “probably the preeminent historian of the nuclear age.”

“When we started working on ‘American Prometheus’ he told me he had lots of research, but a few gaps,” Bird told The Associated Press on Saturday. “When I began going through all the materials I couldn’t find any gaps.”

Sherwin was a New York City native whose interest in nuclear research dated back to his undergraduate years at Dartmouth College, when he spent a summer working at a uranium mine out West. Sherwin’s ties to the arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union became frighteningly personal during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis,. He was a junior officer in the Navy and was told of plans to evacuate from their base in San Diego to a remote location in Baja California, Mexico.

“The rationale was to disperse military aircraft beyond the reach of Soviet missiles,” he wrote in “Gambling With Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis,” which came out last year. “Some junior officers — all of us bachelors — joked that the beaches of Baja ‘would be a delightful place to die.’”

He was best known for “American Prometheus,” published in 2005 and winner of the Pulitzer for biography. The book was widely praised as a...