The Manhattan Project (Revised): The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians

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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 book read like a wonderful novel with nail-biting cliffhangers and spellbinding plots. At its heart is the wonderful energy and passion of inventing an entirely new science. But what makes it so poignant is that it is set in a time of horrible desperation in the heart of World War II. Now It Can Be Told is probably the most thrilling Manhattan Project history book mainly because it was written by a person deep inside the entire operation. This person is known as Leslie R. Groves, the person in charge of the Manhattan Project alongside Robert Oppenheimer. Leslie R. Groves was a General and an engineer, working hard to finish this operation. 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 1939 would have been impossible due to the danger of all-out nuclear war in which everyone loses. I had also often thought about what would have happened if Germany did not execute Operation Barbarossa and open the Eastern front with the Soviet Union, which could have bought it extra time and resources to cause more havoc elsewhere in Europe/North Africa. 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 a fascinating book which necessarily ends on a horrible note. The bomb was dropped. At the same time, I wonder, that if it was not dropped, would we have learned how dangerous it was? Bohr was right: having the bomb created an escalating nuclear arms race. But it also has stopped large-scale wars and bids for world domination via military means. We still have wars - but the nuclear arsenal is a deterrent of large wars. But how dangerous is it, achieving peace while sitting on a pile of destruction?

I've read a lot of books on quantum mechanics over the years, but this book did an amazing job of taking such a perplexing topic and turning it into something approachable and meaningful. I come away from this book with a much more comprehensive understanding of how the geniuses of this industry stumbled their way into an entirely new way of looking at the universe. Every so often, one book or another appears to debate whether or not the bombs should have been dropped. Richard Frank’s Downfall, for instance, does a commendable job making a case for the bombings. Most people don't realize that Oppenheimer and Einstein worked in Germany during the 1930s as scientists. They were forced to leave the country and came to the United States as the Nazis came to power. Originally written in the 1950s, this book is just as applicable as in today's world because of the continued military issues associated with them. Oppenheimer became the leader of the Manhattan project while Einstein continued his work on physics and how to make atomic energy. There's some fantastic profiles of truly great scientists in this book and it's not one of those pop science or psuedo science books where every person is some quirky character described by a few flippant physical characteristics. I probably learned the most about Fermi from this book; he is an absolute giant. I came across Robert Wilson's take on Fermi in another book. The book ends with a poignant look at the mind-boggling world changes their work caused and the heart-rending choices that had to be made, choices that led to the cruel death of hundreds of thousands of people.The main character in this thrilling book is an 11-year-old girl named Dewey Kerrigan. She decides to go searching for her father, a brilliant scientist who is working on a top-secret and extremely dangerous project. Dewey gets on a train and heads for Los Alamos, New Mexico. The hunt for her father will not be an easy one, and it will take some time for her to find him and discover the truth. My God, what have I done?" were the words were spoken by Robert Lewis, the pilot of the Enola Gay after dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. In that second, 100,000 people died, 100,000 injured, who knows how many more from the radiation. Therefore, his question was, and still is, an incredibly poignant question, and this book delves into the effects of the bombing by following the lives of six survivors. In this book, he focuses on their stories and how their world was destroyed in a second. In 1942 the government built a "city" of tens of thousands of workers and scientists. They made the first nuclear reactor and used them to extract plutonium. Many of the usual suspects, such as Oppenheimer and others, are mentioned, but many lesser-known scientists and participants are included. Some of these include women such as Leona Woods, who worked on Enrico Fermi's team. Unlike any of the other books on this list, Olson goes into the environmental disaster that occurred because of the reactors and continues today. It is a deeply researched and amazingly written narrative of this location and these times. The neutron, a particle with nearly the same mass as the positively charged proton that until 1932 was the sole certain component of the atomic nucleus, had no electric charge, which meant it could pass through the surrounding electrical barrier and enter into the nucleus. The neutron would open the atomic nucleus to examination. It might even be a way to force the nucleus to give up some of its enormous energy.”

One of the most saddening parts is the eyewitness accounts of the bombs being dropped on Japan. The book ends with the observations of the moral views of the scientists working on the bombs and the fact that some of them left or begged the president not to use them. Chemists and physicists in the early 1900s tried to develop a model of the atom. In 1911, Ernest Rutherford found the atomic nucleus. Niels Bohr in 1913, developed a model of the atom with electrons in fixed atomic orbitals around the nucleus. In 1925, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and Pascal Jordan developed their theory of matrix mechanics, followed by Erwin Schrödinger’s wave equation. Then in 1926, Wolfgang Pauli developed a three dimensional map of the atomic orbitals around the nucleus. To quote Isaac Asimov, "The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." If thousands, tens of thousands, of wolves wage a fight among themselves – with growls and bloodshed, and a myriad of stinking corpses – we would laugh at them for annihilating their own kind and ridicule their stupidity. Yet, we, the "rational animals", who are above such weapons as claws and fangs, devise arrows, spears, bullets, bombs to do the very same! The development of the atomic bomb provided the nations with just another, even more innovative, form of destruction of our own kind. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is as horrific a crime as the Nazi crimes against peace and humanity; it is a crime against morality and wisdom. This book is one of the most unique and comprehensive tomes on the atomic bomb you will find anywhere. The early parts of the book on nuclear physics history may seem daunting but are explained in concise and digestible sections. It then examines the Nazi's rise to power and the antisemitism and issues during World War II. Because of this, many of the scientists escaped Germany and were able to help the U.S. effort. This book was both my most fascinating and tortuous read in recent memory, it's like trying to take a drink from a firehose.Knowing that he'd need the right man to run the operation, he hired Oppenheimer, who was a man born to wealthy Jewish parents and used to high society, to assemble the scientific team. Kunetka explores how these two men interacted and balanced the demands of their positions while working to develop the first atomic bomb. We have a book of similar topics somewhere within our Manhattan Project book review that talks about the women of Los Alamos. Even though the topics may be similar, this is still a different and very unique book. This one is a bit more in-depth and has much more to tell you regarding the women who were forced to live a life of difficulties and war hardship. It is compelling and terrifying to see what happened to Japan's people and then think of what could have happened to the world if the Nazis had built an atomic bomb first. As you read this book, you are taken on a journey from Oppenheimer's early days as a prodigy at Princeton University to his work on the Manhattan Project during World War II, finally to his controversial trial for treason in 1954. This book is an excellent resource for anyone interested in learning more about one of the most influential figures in modern history. I did notice Rhodes really had a fetish with Szilard and that seemingly translated into his next book Dark Sun about the Hydrogen bomb. There's no doubt Szilard was also a giant in this period but he was slightly more auxiliary when it came to these atomic bombs. I wonder if maybe the attention lathered on Szilard would have been better focused on some of the other dozen scientists who had such big contributions but perhaps Szilard's ego demands the attention.