released 01 jun 09 / last mod 01 jun 09 / greg goebel / public domain
* Richard Rhodes' 1992 book THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB is history of US nuclear weapons development program of World War II.
The story begins in the early decades of the 20th century, when physicists began to realize that the atom was not indivisible, that it had an internal structure that could be altered, and that enormous energies were inherent in the atom's structure. Few thought that those energies could be tapped, but in 1933 Leo Szilard, a Jewish Hungarian physicist who had fled Hitler's Germany to England, realized that such energies could be released by a "chain reaction", with the breakdown of one atom into fragment that smashed more atoms into fragments, which smashed even more atoms, and so on -- the result, if uncontrolled, being an explosion of unprecedented violence.
Szilard tinkered with the notion of the chain reaction during the 1930s and lobbied the authorities about the idea, both with mixed results. However, experiments by other physicists, notably the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, began to make Szilard's concept more credible, and by the end of the 1930s there was a faction in the physics community that believed an "atomic bomb" might well be possible. By that time, World War II was in progress; Szilard and Fermi both took refuge in the United States and worked together on the atomic bomb.
Szilard was worried that the Nazis, who had access to high-class physicists like Werner Heisenberg, might get the atomic bomb first. Szilard, determined to get the authorities interested in the idea, met with the prestigious physicist Albert Einstein, who was an old friend, and coached Einstein on a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt on the potential of the atomic bomb. The letter did make its way to the White House, but though the president was interested in pursuing the matter, government bureaucracy ensured that progress towards the atomic bomb was slow for the time being.
However, several expatriate German physicists in Britain performed detailed theoretical studies that, somewhat to their shock, showed the atomic bomb was both possible and practical, though it would take enormous resources to develop. Boosted by a report on the British investigation and by grass-roots lobbying, by late 1941 the American atomic bomb program began to shift into high gear. In late 1942, Fermi had demonstrated a controlled chain reaction with an "atomic pile" at the University of Chicago, demonstrating that it was indeed possible to obtain energy from the atom. In the meantime, although the Nazis had started an atomic bomb program, it was drifting to an effective halt from official indifference and lack of focus.
In 1943, work began at a secret facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, with the program directed by General Leslie Groves and the technical work directed by physicist Robert Oppenheimer. A vast industrial network was created, with huge industrial plants at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington. After intensive work, the first atomic bomb, codenamed TRINITY, was detonated in the summer of 1945. Although there were concerns among some of the physicists in the program about the use of the atomic bomb, later that summer one was used to destroy the Japanese city of Hiroshima, with a second then destroying the city of Nagasaki. That ended World War II, but it initiated a new era of nuclear tensions.
* This book won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and it's easy to see why. It is well-written and extremely well researched. It does come across as a bit overblown at times, and it certainly gives readers far more detail than most will be able to retain, making it something of a slog -- but that's the downside of writing the definitive work on a subject.
Highly recommended. Those who would like to know more about the subject may be interested in the outline notes I made from this book.
