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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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The H-Bomb stuff is a postscript in this book, but he wrote a follow-up book, Dark Sun, that tells its story in the full detail it deserves.