From the Bookshelf of Science and Inquiry…

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Richard Rhodes

Start date: December 1, 2018

Finish date: December 31, 2018

Discussion: Book Club 2018

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December 2018 - Atomic Bomb
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Dec 26, 2018 David Rubenstein rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: physics, history, politics, science

It was with some trepidation that I started to read this book. It is such a lengthy book, and I didn't anticipate enjoying it very much. I thought that it would be emphasize mundane details about the Manhattan Project. But, I was happily surprised by the scope of the book. The Manhattan Project actually takes up less than a third of its pages.

The first third of the book is about the discovery of modern physics, and the lives of scientists who played a major part in the discovery. The book examin It was with some trepidation that I started to read this book. It is such a lengthy book, and I didn't anticipate enjoying it very much. I thought that it would be emphasize mundane details about the Manhattan Project. But, I was happily surprised by the scope of the book. The Manhattan Project actually takes up less than a third of its pages.

The first third of the book is about the discovery of modern physics, and the lives of scientists who played a major part in the discovery. The book examines the peeling back of the onion of modern physics, much in the way of a detective story. Modern physics involves the structure of the atom, quantum mechanics, and relativity. Both the physics and the personal lives of the revolutionary scientists are described, in great detail. Richard Rhodes has a talent for weaving together the threads of a complex story. These threads follow lines of reasoning, experiments and theoretical work.

The second third of the book describes how scientists came to the realization that fission is possible, using a chain reaction with neutrons. This portion of the book also describes the darkening of Europe due to the rise of the Nazis. Some of the book was devoted to the rise of Antisemitism in Germany, and the resultant flight of Jewish scientists out of the continent. This phase of the book is important, as it helps explain the number of Jewish scientists who worked on the atomic bomb.

The last third of the book described the Manhattan Project; not so much the project itself, but the realization in Great Britain and the United States, that it was necessary to develop an atomic bomb. It was known that Germany and Japan were working on the bomb, and if either country beat the Allies to its development, that would spell out a very bad ending to the war.

I learned a tremendous amount from this book, and there were several aspects of the book that truly stick in my mind. The role of serendipity played a part in the discovery of Enrico Fermi and his colleagues. The found that slow neutrons increase radioactivity more than fast ones, while doing an experiment on a wooden table. Then the repeated the experiment on a marble table and noticed a marked reduction in radioactivity! This led to a greater understanding that neutron speeds, inhibited by the presence of hydrogen in the wooden table, were an important factor in creating chain reactions.

Several characters played a very central part in the book; of course, General Leslie Groves, Leo Szilard and Robert Oppenheimer played central roles in the story. But, the most interesting character was the Danish scientist Niels Bohr. He won the Nobel Prize for his work in understanding the strucutre of the atom and quantum mechanics. Besides this, he was politically active. He went to President Roosevelt and to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, to try to convince them to share the atomic bomb with the Soviet Union. He was concerned about the political balance of power after World War II. His ideas were dismissed by both leaders. He also played a key role in saving thousands of Jews in Denmark, by persuading the King of Sweden to allow them to escape into Sweden, to avoid capture by the Nazis.

Some readers question why this book needs to be so long, so detailed, and sometimes describing events that appear to be so tangential to the main story. But this epic book brings the various threads together, and in retrospect these threads all seem vital to the story line. He weaves together the personalities of the scientists, their experiments and discoveries, and the politics on national and international scales, that were so important at the time. Richard Rhodes explains why both the United States and Great Britain found it necessary to develop, and finally to drop the atomic bombs on Japan.

The book brings so many anecdotes with important messages to the main story line. The making of the atomic bomb did not occur in a single place at a single time. It evolved over continents and half a century. The technical problems were formidable, and the political issues perhaps equally difficult.

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