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The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Lansing Lamont's Day of Trinity was the first book I read about the Manhattan Project. In what turns out to be a decent if uncritical look at the pursuit of atomic weaponry, Lansing was given exclusive access throughout the life of the Manhattan Project. In reading the book you feel like you have a fly-on-the-wall view of the process of producing the first uranium and plutonium bombs.
Lamont's telling is a bit thin though, not going into the motivations of the scientists and only barely touching on the geopolitical situation at the time. This not to say that it is craven, but it is overly sympathetic and a bit too rah-rah about atomic weaponry and their usefulness.
In the book, Mr. Rhodes takes the time to explore the base motivations of the scientists. Ever wonder exactly what motivated Teller's bloodthirstiness? What inspired the scientists to continue driving toward the atomic prize even after the fall of Germany? Rhodes has spent the time researching exactly what made the major players tick.
This is all well and good, but probably the most enjoyable thing about the book is how it's not really a story about the men so much as the science they pursued. The book is not really about the bombs, either, but more the history of physics and physicists.
Always keeping the science accessible and exciting, he manages to explain concisely the process of discovery and experimentation and how the significant events of history affected both the project's progress.
The way that Mr. Rhodes tracks the movements of physicists from anti-semitic Germany to Los Alamos, Chicago and other centers of the nuclear arms program is especially compelling and lends keen insight into the motivations of the physicists involved.
One of the most important (and stomach churning) things about the book is how it shows how cheap human life became in the first half of the 20th century. I think that it is important, when considering the horror of dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that people have the proper historical context before coming to one conclusion or another about the morality of the dropping of the bomb. This book gives that context.
This is not to say that this is a perfect book. Reaching as it does from the mid 1800s through to the dawn of Teller's super-bomb, the book's scope means that some discoveries and scientists don't get the in-depth coverage that Bohr, Szilard and Oppenheimer do, and he doesn't talk much at all about the espionage that surrounded nuclear development. Nor in my mind does he fully answer the question of why the scientists remained motivated to produce the weapons after Germany had been conquered.
Those caveats aside, this is a terrific book well worth checking out if you are interested in the birth of modern physics, the men and women behind it, or the most powerful weapon that has ever been used on humans.
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First off, if this is a troll, good job, you got me...;)
Of the 85,000 feet of film shot in Japan depicting the massive chaos and suffering the bomb inflicted, ZERO made it onto television because of a STRICT GOVERNMENT PRESS BAN until the 1980s.
I want to see something regarding the press ban. If you mean that the government owned the footage and didn't release it, they're not obligated. If you mean supression of privately owned footage after the 50's, I want to see a source.
All this was hidden from congress, the vice president, and many other high ranking gov. officials. It was strictly censored from the media as well.
No shit it was. If you haven't noticed, Congress is about as secure with secrets as a gaggle of schoolgirls. They've gotten many of our operatives killed overseas by blabbing about classified material. So the fact that congress is off the distribution list for something as secret (well, supposedly) as the ATOMIC BOMB...well, duh. As for the media, you have GOT to be kidding. It was wartime. It was an experimental weapon. Yeah, it was concealed, as anything else would have been downright irresponsible.
So, your beef is that EVERYTHING in a democracy should be absolutely open, with no secrets, right? Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way, nor should it. We vote for the people we theoretically trust to deal with such matters, or to appoint others who can. Naturally, it doesn't always work, but keeping atomic research secret during WWII was pretty much a necessity. I do believe, of course, that our government has FAR overused secrecy as a tool, too often to cover its own ass. But I don't at all believe that this was an example - you can find MUCH more egregious examples (where are those Kennedy files, anyway? No, the REAL ones, Mr. Warren...)
Sorry, but war kind of necessitates secrecy. Otherwise, you tend to lose them.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
It is common to see judgments on the use of the atomic bomb from a "holier that thou" perspective and with full use of the benefit of hindsight.
I don't envy Harry Truman. He had to make a choice between likely tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of GI lives if Japan was invaded or hundreds of thousand Japanase casualties if the bomb was used.
It was a horrible, subhuman choice to make, which is what war makes us into.
I must voice my disagreement. I don't feel that Rhodes captured the same excitement of fundamentally world-changing events. The first atomic bomb was revolution. Subsequent advances in power constituted evolution.
As to the German program, it was certainly fascinating, but got coverage in both The Making of the Atomic Bomb and in Copenhagen. Essential reading for people interested in the atomic bomb or physics. Oh, and Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman was indeed most excellent. It is a genuinely entertaining look into the mind of a great modern genius.
----
So a bar walks into a physicist -- oops! wrong reference frame.
Canada's a state? That's news to them, I'm sure. . .
Oh, and incidentally: only the ignorant claim the United States is a democracy. A little education in American government makes clear, the United States is a representative republic.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Mayhap the reviewer needs to take a look at history for a bit.
Prior to the modern era, human life was cheap. Incredibly cheap. Armies fought essentially by throwing "cannon fodder" at each other in a hope to win by overwhelming the other side's meat grinder. Industry fired employees for damaging the machines by getting thier limbs caught up in the gearworks--why not, the employees were by far less expensive than the machine!
Quite simply, the farther back in time you go, back to the dawn of our civilization, the cheaper human life gets. The 20th century didn't "cheapen" human life--we put a value on it far above that of any other time in history.
The first atomic bomb was 3 orders of magnitude larger than the largest conventional weapons.
The biggest thermonuclear bombs were another 3 orders of magnitude larger than the first atomic bomb. The increase in capabilities was just as significant, but it's hard for people to absorb that because the pictures of the explosions lack scaling context and look superficially similar.
Moving from being able to wreck a few cities with A-bombs to threatening the very existence of civilization itself (mosly through monumental releases of fallout and soot) seems revolutionary to me.
Other than the obvious demoralizing effect that it, hopefully, would have on the enemy, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were very lightly defended. Due to the preciousness of the two original bombs, the US did not want to risk flying the Enola Gay into whithering the AAA fire they would have encountered over most industrial and military targets. They were relatively convenient targets.
Moral? Many thousands of American lives were saved by avoiding an invasion of mainland Japan. The Japanese started the fight. We finished it while trying to minimize our loss of life. Moral enough for me.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Rubbish. The number of Chinese and southeast Asian civilians slaughtered directly by Japan, or killed as a result of Japanese occupation between 1937 and 1945, numbers in the millions. Through summer 1945, it is estimated that 100,000 civilians -- in China, Malaysia, Indonesia and Burma -- a month were dying, thanks to Japan, and that number was expected to continue indefinitely. Moreover, Japan itself was very likely to face an internal food crisis in winter 1945-1946 which would have exacted a heavy toll on her own population.
The atom bombs weren't dropped to "punish" Japan, and to state that the ~200K people -- military as well as civilian -- that they killed far exceeded the death toll wrought by Japan is flat out wrong.
The bombs were dropped in the hope of forcing Japan to a quick and full surrender. The nightmare at that time was an invasion of Japan, with military and civilian casualties proportional ly large compared to those on Okinawa, followed by the need to defeat individual Japanese forces in mainland Asia.
As awful as ~200K deaths is, the alternatives were worse.
I suggest you learn the Pacific/Asian war was more than Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima.
We are a representative democracy. A democracy is a government where the ultimate power resides with the people. A direct democracy is a government where all policy decisions are voted on by the general populous. A representative democracy is a republic.
I have to disagree. The US government is most certainly a republic. In fact, the Constitution guarantees "to every state in this Union a Republican form of government."
The founders of our government were very particular in the form of government that they created. If you read James Madison's Essay 10 in The Federalist Papers, you'll see exactly what his feelings were on democracy, representative or direct. Those feelings are well expressed in the Constitution.
You mentioned that a democracy is a government where the ultimate power resides with the people. That is not correct...for a democracy or a republic (although it is more correct for a republic than a democracy). I know that what you mean is the concept of "majority rule". On a local level, this is probably correct, particularly regarding the initiative process, but at a federal level (which is what this thread is discussing), your definition of a republic (a government where elected officials create the laws) applies.
If the US's government was truely a representative democracy, then our elected representatives would have to vote based on the will of the majority of their constituency. While this probably happens most of the time because our elected officials' political philosophies tend to reflect the majority of their constituenies, I think you'll find plenty of cases where it doesn't happen. And there's no rule that says it must.
It's interesting to note, also, that the notion of the US as a democracy did not come into being until around the time of the Great Depression. Prior to that, nobody had any question regarding the type of government that we have.
Finally, I'll point out the dictionary definition of a republic: "A government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law."
Thus, the voting citizens of the nation posess the supreme power and the executive and legislative branches are responsible to them.
-h-
Innocent people numbering in the millions.
It was brutal, it was ugly, it sure would have been nice if Japan had gone some other way in the 1930s, but there it was. Tens of thousands dying monthly due to their aggression; their own citizens at risk of starving; their government so corrupt that they insist it's better for their citizens to die than serve their country as productive adults.
There is no plausible scenario for ending that war that does not result in thousands of Japanese civilians dying. If not by being trapped in an invasion by both the US and the Soviet Union, then by starvation; if not by starvation, then being firebombed; if not by firebombs, then by atomic bombs.
You mean like making completely false statements concerning the casualties of the aggressor nation, compared to the casualties of the peoples it victimized?
I don't see how that - a complete and apparently intentional distortion of historical fact - is any less reprehensible than writing off the atomic bombings as unimportant.