Making of the Atomic Bomb (The Making of the Nuclear Age Book 1)

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Told in rich human, political, and scientific detail that any reader can follow, The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a thought-provoking and masterful work. Read more Read less. Browse a new selection of discounted Kindle Books each month. What other items do customers buy after viewing this item? Now It Can Be Told: The Life of J. Product description Review Carl Sagan A stirring intellectual adventure The author recounts the story of how the atomic bomb was developed, from the discovery at the turn of century of the vast energy locked inside the atom, to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan during the Second World War.

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Write a customer review. See all customer images. Read reviews that mention atomic bomb leo szilard manhattan project richard rhodes nuclear physics chain reaction well written making of the atomic world war ever read essential reading hiroshima and nagasaki los alamos dark sun nuclear weapons come across niels bohr kindle edition heavy going main players. Showing of 96 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Kindle Edition Verified Purchase.

This must be the definitive account of how the atomic bomb was developed. Rhodes reveals the operations and battlefield maneuver of all three levels of warfare critical to the production of fissile nuclear material, and provides a bright interpretation of well known battles, that, if slightly different, would have drastically changed the timeline of production for components of the A-bomb, for Allies and Axis. He also respectfully underscores the ethical considerations of US policy toward the use of fission weapon on civilians. There is a great chapter about Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the Japanese civilian perspective, and, again, perfectly balances what would otherwise be a tough scientific read.

View all 18 comments. Nov 10, Matt rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: He met a young woman, Amelia Frank, and the two were soon married. Then she got ill. I tried to conceal it from her that she had cancer and that there was no hope for her surviving. She was in a hospital in Madison and then she went to see her parents and I went with her The Austrian physicist Eugene Wigner emigrated to the United States and eventually found a teaching job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

She was in a hospital in Madison and then she went to see her parents and I went with her but I didn't want to stay with her parents, of course, because I was, after all, a stranger to her parents. I went for a little while away to Michigan And she told me essentially that she knows that she is close to death. She said, 'Should I tell you where the suitcases are? I tried to conceal it from her because I felt that it would be better if a reasonably young person does not realize that she is doomed. Of course, we are all doomed. To me, this excerpt encapsulates Rhodes' Pulitzer Prize winning opus.

The theme of doom runs like a through-line in this story, which is not surprising, considering the end result of the making of the atomic bomb was the atomization of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, and the pushing to the brink of the world entire. But it also brings the story to its human dimensions. If I were giving this book a blurb, I'd say "It's the most humanistic physics textbook you'll ever read!

Even if you were terrible in physics, as I was, you will be able to understand the science behind this most horrible of all inventions. Moreover, you will delve deep into the lives of the mostly men who dreamed it, designed it, built it, guarded it, dropped it, were saved by it, and were turned to dust by it. You meet them all: They didn't look like people of this world They had a very special way of walking - very slowly I myself was one of them. Bohr is featured heavily in the first third of this book, which limns a clear history of physics.

Bohr's contributions to atomic research included the Bohr model of the atom what a coincidence that he discovered something named after him! The latter portions of the book are dominated by the American Prometheus himself, Oppenheimer. He was a brilliant man in his own right, but his main contribution to the Manhattan Project was to manage the greatest collection of scientific minds the world perhaps has ever seen.

He was also a gift to future historians: When the Trinity test took place at Alamogordo, it was Oppenheimer who famously quoted the ancient Hindu text of the Bhagavad Gita: It's divided into three parts: It is this last part that will stick with you the longest. In telling of the bombings, Rhodes makes an effective stylistic decision: He lets Tibbets and his boys talk about dropping Little Boy, then he quotes the Manhattan Project Study on the bombing "Because the heat in the flash comes in such a short time, there is not time for any cooling to take place and the temperature of a person's skin can be raised degrees Fahrenheit in the first millisecond at a distance of 2.

Then he lets the survivors speak in their own words. It is chilling; a haunting scene plucked from Stradano's depiction of Dante's hell. Every so often, one book or another appears to debate whether or not the bomb should have been dropped it's no use debating whether it should have been built; the damnable thing about science, like life, is that it moves forward on its own power.

Certain factions are glad we dropped it. Because it saved American lives possibly. Certain factions think this it's another in a long line of American-bred genocides, starting with the Indians, running through the Philippines, and culminating in the wholesale crisping of half a million Japanese women and children. They say it wasn't necessary debatable. Rhodes doesn't make any judgments.

He lets the Japanese survivors have their say. But he also tells the story of the American troops preparing for the potential invasion of Japan.

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He quotes one young American officer's remembrance: Rhodes gives a taste of this in the epilogue, though you'll have to read his sequel Dark Sun to hear the moral debate that soon sprang up. It is Oppenheimer, always quotable, who sums it up, and provides this book its epitaph: View all 16 comments. It is a word that can easily lose its power if diffused into too many works by too many authors.

However, I can say unabashedly that this book, this history, is a masterpiece of narrative history. It is powerful, inspirational, sad, detailed, thrilling, chilling. It has hundreds of characters. Some like the early physicists almost seem like lucky gods born at the right time. These giants seemed to fall into the right spot in history with all the brain cells needed. But on top of this, they were amazing men and women; kind and nobel.

They seem to possess not just the smarts to deal with post-Newtonian physics, but a certain amount of poetry and philosophy. They seem like the Founding Fathers and mothers of the 20th century and the modern age. There are also the smaller gods. The gods of war. Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, etc. Richard Rhodes covers them all. He explores the development of nuclear physics without losing the reader, he follows the development of the bomb and the enrichment of uranium and production of plutonium. He details the work and the failures in Japan and German. He provides a fair assessment of the environment and the horror of World War 2.

He literally leaves few stones unturned. The bombs when they come seem both anticipated and surprising. I felt a pressure in my shoulders and neck as I read about the Trinity tests and the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But Rhodes doesn't let the reader off the hook. He spend almost 20 pages detailing the oral histories of those who saw the effects of the bombs first hand in Hiroshima.

Those who lived to tell the horrible tale. If there are heroes in this tale, they are always heroes with a dark asterisk, or Quixotic heroes. Bohr trying to convince politicians to take risks with peace, to convince war leaders to think beyond the dropping of a bomb. Szilard trying desperately to convince scientists to remain quiet in the beginning to avoid Germany finding out, and later working to convince England and the US to include the Soviet Union to avoid an arms race.

There is Oppenheimer and his struggles with the fate that his gifts provided for him to midwifing this rough beast into existence. It is a noble and a sad and a horrific and a beautiful book all at once and it deserved all of the awards Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award it won. I have read hundreds of nonfiction books and thousand of books, and only a dozen may be better. And I'm still not done. I want to add more View all 6 comments.

Jul 17, Clinton rated it it was amazing Shelves: If you want to impress women, read French poetry. If you want to impress my dad, read something with a title like A Hero Will Rise: Oh, and John Wayne. If you want to impress a geeky engineer, read The Making of the Atomic Bomb. I can't imagine a more complete and authoritative work about one of mankind's most important inventions.

When people speak of great human accompl If you want to impress women, read French poetry. When people speak of great human accomplishments in the 20th century, they invariably reference von Braun and the race to the moon. This book shows that the development of the atomic bomb was, while morally questionable, arguably just as amazing in its engineering and scientific prowess. Rhodes does not ignore any aspect of the process. This book is a scientific history, a political history, a biography, and a technical manual.

He begins in the 19th century at the advent of nuclear physics, and walks through the lives of its significant contributors. He goes into often excrutiating details about the development of the first nuclear reactors, the early life of Oppenheimer, and the development of the amazing military-industrial complex required to create the small amount of material needed for the three atom bombs detonated during World War II one test unit and the two used over Japan.

Rhodes makes the people involved seem human and manages to mostly avoid social commentary, merely presenting the facts as they were. This is truly an amazing book. If you read it, I suggest keeping a running list of names: I plan on reading this book again sometime, although it did take me three months to get through it the first time.

View all 3 comments. Dec 13, Andrej Karpathy rated it it was amazing. For thousands of years man's capacity to destroy was limited to spears, arrows and fire. We've also miniaturized these brilliant inventions and learned to mount them on ICBMs traveling at Mach Unfortunately, we live in a universe where the laws of physics fe For thousands of years man's capacity to destroy was limited to spears, arrows and fire.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Unfortunately, we live in a universe where the laws of physics feature a strong asymmetry in how difficult it is to create and to destroy. This observation is also not reserved to nuclear weapons - more generally, technology monotonically increases the possible destructive damage per person per dollar. This is my favorite resolution to the Fermi paradox. Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" is a wonderful and exhaustingly detailed case study of the development of a transformative technology - the atomic bomb.

I'll summarize the book to give an idea of what it's about and highlight some parts I found interesting. The story of the bomb begins circa against the backdrop of an imminent second world war with a series of rapid discoveries that showed that if you shoot a neutron into a Uranium isotope atom, the atom rapidly becomes unstable, breaks up and gives off 1 a lot of energy and 2 an average of 2.

A number of scientists immediately realized that if you "chain" this effect you'd make a bomb.

Making an atomic bomb therefore amounts to 1 isolating the U isotope from natural Uranium which is mostly Alternatively, a completely separate path was discovered: Not knowing which path to take, the US ended up pursuing both a U bomb "Little Boy" and a Plutonium bomb "Fat Man" with their entirely separate industrial processes. This terrifying display of technological superiority forced Japan to accept an unconditional surrender and ended the second world war.

It was quite interesting to follow the political commitment of each world power in response to the scientific developments. The US established a committee in to investigate the potential of building a nuclear bomb but it crawled at a snail's speed for 3 years until almost half of the second world war was over, mostly due to the incompetence of key individuals e. Lyman Briggs, who sat on the UK's MAUD report, or possibly Enrico Fermi who in an early meeting with Admiral Hopper cited the necessary critical mass as possibly being on the order of a small sun when he knew better.

However, with the intervention of Oliphant et al. As for the other countries, paraphrasing, the UK was like: Also, our anti-semitism cost us half of all nuclear physicists so that wasn't ideal. Niels Bohr has said that "[building the bomb] can never be done unless you turn the United States into one huge factory". Luckily, it wasn't nearly as bad. In its peak it employed about , people about 0. Once the infrastructure was in place it was possible to produce several atomic bombs per month.

The bombs were not ready in time for the defeat of Germany in , but Truman decided to use the bombs on Japan to 1 prevent further loss of American lives in face of Japan that was deeply dug in and clearly unwilling to surrender and, as is hinted at, 2 to justify the costs of the project. The Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima and killed an estimated 70K people eventually K by 5 years.

What I did not realize was that these casualties were large but not astronomical. For example, a single day of bombing Tokyo with conventional explosives killed K people and injured 1M. What I also didn't know is that Liutenant General Leslie Groves who was in charge of the Manhattan Project was strongly in favor of dropping one of the bombs on Kyoto, the serene "Rome of Japan" established back in Luckily, his plan was vetoed by the Secretary of War Stimson who refused to bomb the city due to its cultural significance.

What the hell, Leslie?

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Unfortunately, it is clearly the case that the scientists were quickly marginalized and, in effect, told to shut up and just help build the bomb. From the very start, Roosevelt explicitly wanted policy considerations restricted to a small group that excluded any scientists. As some of the more prominent examples of scientists trying to influence policy, Bohr advocated for establishing an "Open World Consortium" and sharing information about the bomb with the Soviet Union, but this idea was promptly shut down by Churchill.

In this case it's not clear what effect it would have had and, in any case, the Soviets already knew a lot through espionage. Bohr also held the seemingly naive notion that scientists should continue publishing all nuclear research during the second world war as he felt that science should be completely open and rise above national disputes. Szilard strongly opposed this openness internationally, but advocated for more openness within the Manhattan project for sake of efficiency. This outraged Groves who was obsessed with secrecy.

In fact, Szilard was almost arrested, suspected to be a spy, and placed under a comical surveillance that mostly uncovered his frequent visits to a chocolate store. As a last curious historical note, World War 2 came at exactly the time when the very last conventional war could be fought. Given the advances in nuclear physics, starting a conflict a few years after would have been impossible due to the danger of all-out nuclear war in which everyone loses.

This book provides the answer - the US nuclear weapon program was so far ahead of the German program that even if the war dragged on longer, Germany would have been reduced to irradiated ash. It is almost impossible to do justice to this tome, so let me conclude by saying that the story includes awesome nuclear physics, science superheros, fanatical supervillans, massive factories appearing in the desert, political intrigue, British commandos on secret missions, explosions, oh and - it all actually happened.

Very interesting reading that features Heisenberg, Hahn et al. Oct 28, Hadrian rated it it was amazing Shelves: The grand, encyclopedic, epic story of the atomic bomb program. Includes short biographies of all of the major figures of the program, as well as a firm outline of the political situation which surrounded them. Harrowing detail of when the bomb itself was dropped, and what the creators thought during the while ordeal. Brilliant blend of history and science. Feb 18, George rated it it was amazing Shelves: This book features everything, the science, history of every single discovery and person related to nuclear physics, the politics, the Manhattan project, the dropping of the bomb, testimonies of the people it was dropped on I compliment the author for adding this in, it makes sure to make the point that this is not just a bigger bomb , and polices after the A-bomb was dropped to the first test of the H-bomb.

I have to say this book tested my capacity for retaining so much i Incredibly thorough. I have to say this book tested my capacity for retaining so much information, but I somehow succeeded and learned a great deal, but I admit I will have to reread the part about discovery and creation of plutonium I see what the book Crystal Fire was inspired by, and the same warning I gave in that review still applies even more so in this book. Making of the Atomic Bomb , Pulitzer Prize winner in , was a well-researched and comprehensive history exploring the making of the atomic bomb, beginning with World War I, the genesis of the Manhattan Project and continuing through the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing an end to World War II.

Rhodes divides the book into three parts; the first section exploring the history of nuclear physics from the discovery of radioactivity at the end of the nineteenth century. It also explores t Making of the Atomic Bomb , Pulitzer Prize winner in , was a well-researched and comprehensive history exploring the making of the atomic bomb, beginning with World War I, the genesis of the Manhattan Project and continuing through the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing an end to World War II.

It also explores the background of the scientists, including Bohr, Fermi, Teller, Oppenheimer, Lawrence, and Szilard, who would later come to be an integral part of the Manhattan Project. The second section concentrated on the actual making of the atomic bomb as well as the scope of the Manhattan Project featuring Oppenheimer's unique talent directing the lab at Los Alamos. The third section explores the final steps in preparing the atomic bomb for delivery as well as exploring the fears of many of the scientists.

This book ends with the devastation and utter destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in excruciating detail as well as in vivid photographs. This is an important book for all of us. Sep 13, Kogiopsis rated it it was ok Shelves: This was the textbook for my freshman seminar at college. The class was titled 'The Manhattan Project: Studies in Science and Lessons for Mankind' and while it was not what I expected going in, it was generally pretty good; I liked my professor and my classmates and we had good discussions, so it was a positive experience.

I was not, however, crazy about this as a textbook, at least for the class: Rhodes focuses a lot on the technical aspects of the bomb and only deals with the tremendous ethica This was the textbook for my freshman seminar at college.

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Rhodes focuses a lot on the technical aspects of the bomb and only deals with the tremendous ethical issue it presents in the last one or two chapters, plus an epilogue. Similarly, the class spent more time than I wanted on technical physics, particularly in the beginning, and only had two conversations that even touched on the ethics of Truman's final decision. The text is also rather poorly organized: Add to this the vast number of names, some of them very similar to each other, and what you get is a book which often verges into the realm of 'unreadably esoteric'.

Eventually, though, it got more readable. I still could have done with less technical physics bits, but Home Contact Us Help Free delivery worldwide. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Description Twenty-five years after its initial publication, The Making of the Atomic Bomb remains the definitive history of nuclear weapons and the Manhattan Project. From the turn-of-the-century discovery of nuclear energy to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan, Richard Rhodes's Pulitzer Prize-winning book details the science, the people, and the socio-political realities that led to the development of the atomic bomb.

This sweeping account begins in the 19th century, with the discovery of nuclear fission, and continues to World War Two and the Americans' race to beat Hitler's Nazis. That competition launched the Manhattan Project and the nearly overnight construction of a vast military-industrial complex that culminated in the fateful dropping of the first bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Reading like a character-driven suspense novel, the book introduces the players in this saga of physics, politics, and human psychology--from FDR and Einstein to the visionary scientists who pioneered quantum theory and the application of thermonuclear fission, including Planck, Szilard, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Meitner, von Neumann, and Lawrence.

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