[3] Beginning in 1962, Blair was also in editorial charge of all of Curtis Publishing's other magazines in addition to the Post, and held the titles of executive vice president and directory.
[4] One of Blair's first books, The Hydrogen Bomb: The Men, The Menace, The Mechanism (1954), was co-written with Time's Washington bureau chief, James R. Shepley, and provoked considerable controversy at the time with its charges that the U.S. development of the hydrogen bomb had been intentionally delayed by some scientists led by J. Robert Oppenheimer and that the Los Alamos Laboratory had been infiltrated by Communists.
[3][9] While the book was positively reviewed across a large number of newspapers and magazines at the time of publication,[10] several scientists who had worked at Los Alamos on the bomb's development soon issued statements refuting its narrative.
[12] Subsequent scholarship has established that the Shepley and Blair account was largely inaccurate and was guided by stark H-bomb proponent, and Oppenheimer antagonist, Lewis Strauss.
Blair criticizes President Harry S. Truman and his Secretary of Defense, Louis A. Johnson, for failing to maintain the military's readiness in the years immediately following World War II.
[4] It, and several other of this works, were selected by various kinds of book of the month clubs, a target audience that Blair and his wife aimed at.
[19] Weir pointed out the lack of footnotes in the text, Blair's inability to read German and dependence on translations, his failure to consult the German Federal Military Archives or Michael Salawski's book Die deutsche Seekriegsleitung, 1935–1945 as well as his "painfully obvious bias in favor of the U.S. Navy, and expressions of stereotypical sarcasm aimed at the French and Italians.
"[20] Weir said that Blair "missed the point" by failing to appreciate the "technically and strategically revolutionary" nature of the Type XXI U-boat and preferring to focus on "solvable engineering problems".
[21] Weir dismissed Blair's fundamental assumptions and theses on the German Navy as primitive and anachronistic and called Hitler's U-Boat War a "handicapped chronicle".