Take a photo of a barcode or cover
mburnamfink 's review for:
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
by Richard Rhodes, Holter Graham
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos lab, chief designer of the atomic bomb, and a polymath with mystic and leftist inclinations, had the perfect quote for the first artificial dawn of an atomic explosion. There are many ways in which we die: disease, age, accident, violence. And many ways in which we might all die; suddenly in the wake of some cosmological catastrophe or slowly starving on a dying planet. With the atom bomb, it was now possible for a single individual, at the top of a chain of technological and political commitments, to kill almost everyone in the space of an afternoon. The bombs were only used in anger twice, punctuation to end the global slaughter of the Second World War. Since then, history has existed under the shadow of a potential mushroom cloud. This book is the story of how we got there.
Rhodes takes almost the first half of the book to establish the basic science and personalities of the atomic bomb. The first half of the 20th century was a golden age for physics which will likely never be equaled, as imaginative theorists and skilled experimenters probed the basic building blocks of the universe. Rutherford and Bohr nailed down, for the first time in evidence rather than speculation, the basic building blocks of matter. Atoms had most of their mass in a small nucleus, and owed their chemical properties to the quantum behavior of electron shells. The neutron was added to the list of fundamental particles. New elements were created by neutron bombardment, and by the late 1930s it was widely known that uranium would fission on bombardment, splitting into two lighter elements, and releasing a large deal of energy. There positive glee of work in this field, at this time, comes through in Rhodes' able biographical sketches of the scientists involved, particularly Bohr, Fermi, and Szilard.
Szilard was the first to think of the potential of a fission chain reaction. If some substance, on absorbing a neutron split and released two or more neutrons, could produce a great deal of energy in millionths of a second. It would be a bomb of stupendous power, a city-smasher. Politically perceptive, Szilard had been helping Jewish physicists flee the Nazis for years. He had hoped for an H.G. Wells inspired international coalition to peacefully control this new power, but in 1939 if the bomb was too be invented, best by the Americans or British rather than Hitler.
The next section, building the bomb, is less fun. Bohr predicted that you would need to turn all of America into a factory to build a bomb, and that is what the Manhattan project did, mobilizing thousands of scientists, $2 billion, and massive plants to do the hard work of separating fissile U-235 and Plutonium from natural uranium. Bureaucratic confusion and balky precision engineering made the task anything but easy. The other powers pursued the bomb. The British sent over their best to help with the Manhattan project. Germany's team, lead by Heisenberg, never had the necessary priority in the Reich, and were stalled by clever British-Norwegian sabotage directed at a heavy water production facility required for the Nazi reactor design. Japan never had access to the raw material to move beyond theory.
The last section is grimmer yet. The design of the bomb was an exercise in precision, in delicately engineered explosive lenses to make the implosion to critical mass happen smoothly in nanoseconds. Tibbetts' B-29 bomber group trained to a razor's edge to accomplish the mission of deploying the 'gadget'. Roosevelt, on approving the Manhattan project, had instinctively reserved the bomb to himself as President. In 1945, Vice President Truman had not been read into the project until he succeeded to the presidency. The bomb was used on Hiroshima because it could be, because the Japanese still resisted, and because something had to be shown for the effort invested. It was a crime, a mass-murder in an instant. Rhodes does not flinch from the horror of Hiroshima.
Personally, I think we need to distinguish between the bomb's use at the end of the Second World War, where it seems a matter of degree compared to area bombing rather than kind, and its use now, where that would signal breaking the nuclear taboo. This does not absolve the scientists who built the bomb of their responsibility. Nature's secrets were all around, and once fission had been theorized it was probably only a matter of time before someone figured out how to make it work, but these people made a choice to build Death a supersonic jet bomber to replicate his tired old horse.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a penetrating look at the most consequential scientific and political moment of the 20th century. I'd give it six stars, if I could. It is also my 1000th review on Goodreads!
Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos lab, chief designer of the atomic bomb, and a polymath with mystic and leftist inclinations, had the perfect quote for the first artificial dawn of an atomic explosion. There are many ways in which we die: disease, age, accident, violence. And many ways in which we might all die; suddenly in the wake of some cosmological catastrophe or slowly starving on a dying planet. With the atom bomb, it was now possible for a single individual, at the top of a chain of technological and political commitments, to kill almost everyone in the space of an afternoon. The bombs were only used in anger twice, punctuation to end the global slaughter of the Second World War. Since then, history has existed under the shadow of a potential mushroom cloud. This book is the story of how we got there.
Rhodes takes almost the first half of the book to establish the basic science and personalities of the atomic bomb. The first half of the 20th century was a golden age for physics which will likely never be equaled, as imaginative theorists and skilled experimenters probed the basic building blocks of the universe. Rutherford and Bohr nailed down, for the first time in evidence rather than speculation, the basic building blocks of matter. Atoms had most of their mass in a small nucleus, and owed their chemical properties to the quantum behavior of electron shells. The neutron was added to the list of fundamental particles. New elements were created by neutron bombardment, and by the late 1930s it was widely known that uranium would fission on bombardment, splitting into two lighter elements, and releasing a large deal of energy. There positive glee of work in this field, at this time, comes through in Rhodes' able biographical sketches of the scientists involved, particularly Bohr, Fermi, and Szilard.
Szilard was the first to think of the potential of a fission chain reaction. If some substance, on absorbing a neutron split and released two or more neutrons, could produce a great deal of energy in millionths of a second. It would be a bomb of stupendous power, a city-smasher. Politically perceptive, Szilard had been helping Jewish physicists flee the Nazis for years. He had hoped for an H.G. Wells inspired international coalition to peacefully control this new power, but in 1939 if the bomb was too be invented, best by the Americans or British rather than Hitler.
The next section, building the bomb, is less fun. Bohr predicted that you would need to turn all of America into a factory to build a bomb, and that is what the Manhattan project did, mobilizing thousands of scientists, $2 billion, and massive plants to do the hard work of separating fissile U-235 and Plutonium from natural uranium. Bureaucratic confusion and balky precision engineering made the task anything but easy. The other powers pursued the bomb. The British sent over their best to help with the Manhattan project. Germany's team, lead by Heisenberg, never had the necessary priority in the Reich, and were stalled by clever British-Norwegian sabotage directed at a heavy water production facility required for the Nazi reactor design. Japan never had access to the raw material to move beyond theory.
The last section is grimmer yet. The design of the bomb was an exercise in precision, in delicately engineered explosive lenses to make the implosion to critical mass happen smoothly in nanoseconds. Tibbetts' B-29 bomber group trained to a razor's edge to accomplish the mission of deploying the 'gadget'. Roosevelt, on approving the Manhattan project, had instinctively reserved the bomb to himself as President. In 1945, Vice President Truman had not been read into the project until he succeeded to the presidency. The bomb was used on Hiroshima because it could be, because the Japanese still resisted, and because something had to be shown for the effort invested. It was a crime, a mass-murder in an instant. Rhodes does not flinch from the horror of Hiroshima.
Personally, I think we need to distinguish between the bomb's use at the end of the Second World War, where it seems a matter of degree compared to area bombing rather than kind, and its use now, where that would signal breaking the nuclear taboo. This does not absolve the scientists who built the bomb of their responsibility. Nature's secrets were all around, and once fission had been theorized it was probably only a matter of time before someone figured out how to make it work, but these people made a choice to build Death a supersonic jet bomber to replicate his tired old horse.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a penetrating look at the most consequential scientific and political moment of the 20th century. I'd give it six stars, if I could. It is also my 1000th review on Goodreads!