The Making of the Atomic Bomb |  | Author: Richard Rhodes
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
List Price: $21.00
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Rating:  171 reviews
Sales Rank: 8481
Media: Paperback
Pages: 928
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.5
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.1 x 1.9
ISBN: 0684813785
Dewey Decimal Number: 623.4511909
EAN: 9780684813783
ASIN: 0684813785
Publication Date: August 1, 1995
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
If the first 270 pages of this book had been published separately, they would have made up a lively, insightful, beautifully written history of theoretical physics and the men and women who plumbed the mysteries of the atom. Along with the following 600 pages, they become a sweeping epic, filled with terror and pity, of the ultimate scientific quest: the development of the ultimate weapon. Rhodes is a peerless explainer of difficult concepts; he is even better at chronicling the personalities who made the discoveries that led to the Bomb. Niels Bohr dominates the first half of the book as J. Robert Oppenheimer does the second; both men were gifted philosophers of science as well as brilliant physicists. The central irony of this book, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, is that the greatest minds of the century contributed to the greatest destructive force in history.
Product Description
Here for the first time, in rich, human, political, and scientific detail, is the complete story of how the bomb was developed, from the turn-of-the-century discovery of the vast energy locked inside the atom to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan. Few great discoveries have evolved so swiftly -- or have been so misunderstood. From the theoretical discussions of nuclear energy to the bright glare of Trinity there was a span of hardly more than twenty-five years. What began as merely an interesting speculative problem in physics grew into the Manhattan Project, and then into the Bomb with frightening rapidity, while scientists known only to their peers -- Szilard, Teller, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Meitner, Fermi, Lawrence, and yon Neumann -- stepped from their ivory towers into the limelight. Richard Rhodes takes us on that journey step by step, minute by minute, and gives us the definitive story of man's most awesome discovery and invention. The Making of the Atomic Bomb has been compared in its sweep and importance to William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It is at once a narrative tour de force and a document as powerful as its subject.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 171
 landmark of 20th century historical writing May 25, 2010
Unknown Comic
definitive. exhaustive. gripping. without a doubt one of the one hundred nonfiction books of the 20th century, and i don't think in this case that is empty hyperbole.
 The "War and Peace" of Our Only Nuclear War March 23, 2010
Alfonso Mangione (Chicago, IL United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I think this book is a touch overrated.
Having said that, I couldn't put it down.
"The Making of the Atomic Bomb" is an incredibly well-researched book; it's thought-provoking and deep, yet lively and literary. And make no mistake, it is well worth reading; its greatest sections and passages are as absorbing and exciting as anything I've ever read. (As a precocious 4th grader prone to fleeing the world by burying my nose in a book, I used to read about the Manhattan Project, reading eagerly about the incredible feats of engineering and physics that went into the atomic bombs, and less so about the horrible things that resulted from them; reading this, I felt like my 4th-grade-self, walking around Chicago with my nose in a book, letting the drab sights and sounds of the real world fade into insignificance as I explored the livelier world within.) And given the primary research Rhodes has done, especially the interviews with many of the physicists and chemists who literally manufactured history in a hastily-assembled laboratory in the New Mexico desert, it seems impossible that anyone could put together even a comparably comprehensive history without copiously copping from this one. Nothing else compares; it is the "War and Peace" of our only nuclear war.
And yet, this feels like a science experiment where one has settled on a hypothesis prior to doing the research, and has ignored or minimized those results that threatened the hypothesis. Rhodes takes us through virtually all of 20th century atomic physics, but he's assembled it in a structure that resembles one of those black hole coin wells one sees at the science center; everything starts out slow and lazy and happy, but eventually things get more energetic and more frentic; valuable time is lost, and valuable money disappears into an abyss of war and militarism. Also, if it shares "War and Peace's" strengths, it also shares its flaws; rather than sticking around to observe things and let events speak for themselves, the author spends many of the closing pages on maddening flights of philosophical fancy centered around the potential for worldwide Armageddon that the atomic bomb unleashed. When Rhodes was writing and researching this book--from 1981 to 1986, according to the endnotes--such fears surely seemed lively and compelling, topical and true, matters of monumental import to the whole human race; now they feel quaint and outdated. (In these post 9/11 days of endless hot wars, one almost feels nostalgic for the Cold War. Armageddon clocks ticking down the minutes to midnight? ICBMs on alert in North Dakota, waiting for the launch signals that would send them off on flaming arcs over the polar ice cap where they would no doubt pass fleets of Soviet ICBMs headed in the opposite direction, but held at bay only by the prospect of Mutual Assured Destruction? I'll take that over fanatical and resourceful terrorists with a divine mandate any day. Our current world makes MAD feel sane.) At any rate, one realizes at the end that Rhodes' musings are not mere detours at the end of a masterful narrative; they have also warped its course, for in between his excellent chronicling of the bomb's development, Rhodes gets pulled off by other vectors, particularly by Neils Bohr's utopian musings about making nuclear weapons research subject to the same standards of openness and free disclosure that prevail in the rest of scientific discourse.
And it's a shame, because in the vast majority of the narrative Rhodes proves himself to be an incredibly talented writer and reporter, with a telling eye for facts and details, and an ease with complicated scientific concepts and analogies that, in turn, sets the reader at ease. I have read many other books on similar subjects and studied nuclear physics at the college level; still, I found myself learning new things from Rhodes' lucid and cogent descriptions of, say, the way a uranium atom fissions almost like a raindrop, or the way a cyclotron spins and separates atomic particles. And he weaves these descriptions into memorable scenes and stories; his descriptions of the construction and operation of the first nuclear reactor, a round-ish pile of graphite bricks and uranium trussed up by wooden scaffolding and nestled in a squash court at the University of Chicago, for instance, are lyrical and unforgettable. It is fascinating to read about the world's top nuclear physicists engaging in an experiment that was by turns precise and haphazard; engrossing to envision Enrico Fermi plotting neutron fluxes and calculating reaction coefficients while many of his staff members were wearing leftover raccoon coats to warm themselves against the Chicago winter because they had built the world's first nuclear reactor in an unheated building.
Rhodes turns these dead physicists into live characters by keeping his eyes open for the characteristic anecdotes, and his ear tuned for the telling quotes. During the Manhattan Project, for instance, General Leslie Groves, frustrated at wartime copper shortages that threatened to derail the construction of uranium-separating cyclotrons, decided to borrow thousands of tons of silver from the Treasury to build them instead; his assistant was told: "Colonel, in the Treasury we do not speak of tons of silver; our unit is the troy ounce." Eventually they ended up with over 10,000 tons of silver, though; Rhodes judiciously uses this fact, and others, to convey the sheer magnitude of America's nuclear effort. Thanks to the Manhattan Project, a whole city sprung up in Tennessee to support the uranium processing efforts; a city with tens of thousands of people which nonetheless remained off the map. And meanwhile the government was establishing the Hanford reservation in Washington State--an area a third the size of Rhode Island. The upshot of all of these efforts, Rhodes tells us, was that the U.S. essentially constructed a nuclear industry from scratch and grew it, in three short years, to be the size of the automobile industry.
And yet, of course, it was not about industry alone, but about dropping the product of that industry on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here, too, I must take issue with the author; he expounds at length on Hiroshima, to the point that one almost becomes numb to its horrors, and yet he skimps on describing Nagasaki. The bomb used there was the more complicated and technically challenging of the two. (The tricky details of its construction end up taking far more space in the narrative than those for the relatively simple gun-type Hiroshima bomb; despite his revulsion at its use, Rhodes clearly admires the complicated engineering challenge it represented.) The mission which dropped it nearly ended up an unqualified and costly failure after it met with a string of bad luck. (Or good luck, at least, for the citizens of Kokura, the Japanese city which was saved from dubious immortality and near-total destruction by virtue of unexpectedly cloudy weather that sent the second nuclear mission on to its secondary target; it is doubtful that bad weather has ever been more beneficial for a city and its populace.) And yet the last use of nuclear weapons in anger merits barely more than a page in this lengthy narrative, which is unfair to the reader, unfair to the story, and unfair to the hapless citizens of Nagasaki, whose fluke-filled fate deserves to be better remembered than as a glorified footnote.
Short shrift, too, is given to the considerable efforts of Soviet spies at security-heavy Los Alamos; it is possible that much of this information was simply not known when Rhodes wrote, and he did cover this subject in his later "Dark Sun;" still, it means this feels somewhat incomplete.
None of this is to say that one should avoid this book; it's massive enough and weighty enough that one simply can't avoid it if one is even tangentially interested in these topics; indeed, if one were to read only one book on the development and first use of the atomic bomb, this should probably be it. Still, despite its lengthy word count, its thorough research, and its generally excellent writing, this is neither the last word nor the only word on its subject.
One of the important books of the 20th Century March 6, 2010
Bruce Bain (Englewood, CO United States)
0 out of 6 found this review helpful
"The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes is one of the most important books of the 20th Century, and comparable as non-fiction to "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by William L. Shirer.
The ultimate understanding of the early 20th Century, that Chemistry was ultimately an Electrical phenomenon, gave rise to a profound understanding of physical matter.
The three broad criteria of science at the time were:
(a) PLAUSIBILITY
(b) SCIENTIFIC VALUE
(c) ORIGINALITY
The book details the research of Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr into a question "old as Aristotle" which was that of VITALISM versus MECHANISM. It involved an
ongoing debate between philosophical and religious assumptives as to whether or not the Universe exhibited a "purpose" (the question of Teleology), or whether or not the Universe
operates according to mere Chance and automatic function. [The debate still rages, by the way.]
(to be continued)
Should have been boring, but was extremely compelling March 2, 2010
Jeffrey White (Manchester, MI USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The Review Title sums it up best.
Generally, I am not a fan of non-fiction histories. I almost always find this type of work, well... boring.
My review of Colonial Williamsburg: "Oh look! It's another person making a barrel".
Yet this book was engaging throughout. It was long, it might have drifted for very minor portions, but the overall result was 5 stars.
 Impressive in scope, somewhat difficult to read August 2, 2009
Michael Lovett (Lake Wylie, SC)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
As many have said, the amount of research that went into this book, and the resultant detail, was phenomenal.
I'm glad I bought and read the book. It gave me insights and understanding that I didn't have before hand, related to the scientific, social, and political elements of development of the bomb. At times it was so engaging, I had trouble putting it down.
I also enjoyed reading about the early history of atomic/nuclear research with Szilard, Rutherford, et. al. I had no idea beforehand of the massive undertaking needed to produce a workable bomb, and all the associated political problems.
Having said that, it was TOO MUCH WORK to read this book, for two main reasons:
1) Way too much detail on too many levels. For example, it seems like each time a new character was introduced there was anywhere from one to twenty pages background on this person, their family, their political and scientific past, etc. Kudos to the author for doing all this research but the net effect is that the central story kept losing steam each time we'd take one of these long detours into character building. I eventually found myself skipping dozens of pages at a time, trying to get back on track with the main topic. A good book must not stray too far from the main story or the average reader simply loses interest.
2) I found the sentence structure and language used to often be confusing. I had to re-read many sentences to understand what was being said. I'm not referring to the scientific sentences, which one might expect to be challenging for a non-scientist, but to the general prose. A lot of it was fine, but I would say at least once every few pages I was stumped and there a few times that after re-reading the sentence I just didn't get what the author was trying to communicate to me.
Overall, I give the book a positive review because of its unprecedented content and scope, but be aware of what you are buying: a phone book of endless details, with a very interesting central story woven somewhere in between those pages.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 171
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