The Making of the Atomic Bomb

chrisd has taken time off from polls and posting to both read and review Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Read on for his impressions of the book, which he says is "not really a story about the men so much as the science they pursued." The Making of the Atomic Bomb author Richard Rhodes pages 886 Pages publisher Touchstone/Simon and Schuster rating 5 out of 5 uh, somethings reviewer Chris DiBona ISBN 0684813785 summary How the bomb came to be.

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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Comments

Get over it

[siskbc]

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.

Re:Get over it

[Mononoke]

Its not the bomb per se, its the ability of the government to do this anytime it pleases.

It was wartime. Not just "I'm gonna show my Daddy I can kick Saddam's ass." wartime, but real defending-our-very-soil wartime. The rules necessarily have to apply differently during times like that.

(Thus, the reason the current administration wants you to believe in an Iraq war, so they can play by the rules they want to play by, and not what is guaranteed by our Constitution.)

You can't compare the WWII era with what is happening right now.

The value of life...

[Alomex]

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.

Human life became valueable, not cheap

[Planesdragon]

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.

Re:Human life became valueable, not cheap

[praksys]

Prior to the modern era, human life was cheap.

True enough, but surely an over-simplification. In the 19th century you can find lots of examples where human life was not sufficiently valued, but it is very hard to find the sorts of extreme examples, of human life being treated as entirely disposable, that you can find in the 20th century.

One of the really astounding features of attitudes towards the value of human life in the early 20th century is that even liberal democratic states often viewed their own citizens as disposable material. Consider the way that the British conducted war in WWI. Attrition was not just an accidental featrure of WWI, it was actually the strategy adopted by the British (and most other nations). Men would be flung at enemy defenses, just as artillery shells would be flung at the same defenses, until those defenses crumbled. The loss of human life was entirely acceptable, so long as the loss of human life on the other side exceeded the loss on your own side. Prior to WWI warfare had almost never reached such an extreme level of brutality, and had almost never produced such high casualty rates.

That is just one example taken from the policies of a relatively enlightened nation. If you look at some of the other things that went on between 1900 and 1960 you can find far worse - from the industrialised extermination of the holocaust to campaigns of mass starvation in Russia and China.

Attitudes towards the value of human life have had an up-and-down ride. I agree that the general trend has been up, but the first half of the 20th century marked a major departure from that trend.

Re:Dark Sun - not as good

[Waffle Iron]

The first atomic bomb was revolution. Subsequent advances in power constituted evolution.

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.