The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

“It is a profound and necessary truth,” Robert Oppenheimer would say, “that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”

I think of a world without nuclear weapons not as a utopian dream but simply as a world where delivery times have been deliberately lengthened to months or even years,

As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woe, the shape of things to come.

None, at least, sufficient to convince the network of only about one thousand men and women throughout the world in 1895 who called themselves physicists and the larger, associated network of chemists.

(Thirty-six years later, when he was created Baron Rutherford of Nelson, he sent his mother a cable in her turn: “Now Lord Rutherford, more your honour than mine.”

The man who put his hand on the lever by which a parsimonious nature regulates so jealously the output of this store of energy would possess a weapon by which he could destroy the earth if he chose.

Rutherford’s and Soddy’s discussions of radioactive change therefore inspired the science fiction novel that eventually started Leo Szilard thinking about chain reactions and atomic bombs.

Arthur Koestler remembers that food was scarce, especially if you tried to buy it with the regime’s ration cards and nearly worthless paper money,

the same paper would purchase an abundance of Commune-sponsored vanilla ice cream, which his family therefore consumed for breakfast, lunch and dinner. He mentions this curiosity, he remarks, “because it was typical of the happy-go-lucky, dilettantish, and even surrealistic ways in which the Commune was run.” It was, Koestler thought, “all rather endearing—at least when compared to the lunacy and savagery which was to descend upon Europe in years to come.”412

They returned in the autumn; by then Admiral Nicholas Horthy had ridden into Budapest on a white horse behind a new national army to install a violent fascist regime, the first in Europe.

In 1516 a rich silver lode was discovered in Joachimsthal (St. Joachim’s dale), in the territory of the Count von Schlick, who immediately appropriated the mine. In 1519 coins were first struck from its silver at his command. Joachimsthaler, the name for the new coins, shortened to thaler, became “dollar” in English before 1600. Thereby the U.S. dollar descends from the silver of Joachimsthal.

He was six feet tall, on an extremely narrow frame; he never in his life weighed more than 125 pounds and at times of illness or stress could waste to 115.

make stenches in three different labs, listen to Allard gossip about Racine, serve tea and talk learnedly to a few lost souls, go off for the weekend to distill the low grade energy into laughter and exhaustion, read Greek, commit faux pas, search my desk for letters, and wish I were dead.

Yet he thought “the academic standard here would de-people Harvard overnight.”

Then, contradicting Smith’s prediction, he flew at Fergusson’s throat and tried to strangle him. Fergusson easily set him aside. Back

Everyone went to Como except Einstein, who refused to lend his prestige to Fascism.483 Everyone went because quantum theory was beleaguered and Niels Bohr was scheduled to speak in its defense.

He had already begun to answer the lecturer’s questions when he realized he was being questioned for a physics course. Since he was too timid to explain, he decided that the physics lecturer impressed him and he would read for physics.

Szilard was pursuing more than artificial radioactivity. He was pursuing chain reactions, power generation, atomic bombs. He had not yet found patentable form for these excursions.

The nucleus is violently shaken up by the blow, especially if the collision results in the capture of the neutron. A large increase in energy occurs and must be dissipated, and this may happen in a variety of ways, all of them interesting.

They mixed Ra-III with dilute mesothorium and precipitated and fractionated the two substances together. Then the chemical evidence was certain, whatever it might mean in physical terms: the mesothorium remained in solution when the barium carrier crystallized out but Ra-III went off with the barium, distributing itself uniformly and indivisibly throughout the small pure crystals.

If the large uranium nucleus split into two smaller nuclei, the smaller nuclei would weigh less in total than their common parent. How much less? That was a calculation she could easily work: about one-fifth the mass of a proton less. Process one-fifth of the mass of a proton through E = mc2. “One fifth of a proton mass,” Frisch exclaims, “was just equivalent to 200 MeV. So here was the source for that energy; it all fitted!”

When Tuve had first proposed the Van de Graaff to the zoning board of the prosperous Chevy Chase neighborhood the board had turned him down. Smashing atoms smacked of industrial process and the neighborhood had its property values to consider.

It occurred to Szilard then that his old friend Albert Einstein knew the Queen of Belgium.

The one thing most scientists are really afraid of is to make fools of themselves. Einstein was free from such a fear and this above all is what made his position unique on this occasion.”

“I entered history as Szilard’s chauffeur,” Teller aphorizes the experience.

We realized that, should atomic weapons be developed, no two nations would be able to live in peace with each other unless their military forces were controlled by a common higher authority. We expected that these controls, if they were effective enough to abolish atomic warfare, would be effective enough to abolish also all other forms of war.

When Spanish Fascists bombed Barcelona in March 1938, Secretary of State Cordell Hull had condemned the atrocity publicly: “No theory of war can justify such conduct,” he told reporters. “ . . . I feel that I am speaking for the whole American people.”

In June the Senate passed a resolution condemning the “inhuman bombing of civilian populations.”

hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings who have no responsibility for, and who are not even remotely participating in, the hostilities which have now broken out, will lose their lives.

I am therefore addressing this urgent appeal to every Government which may be engaged in hostilities publicly to affirm its determination that its armed forces shall in no event, and under no circumstances, undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities,

Wars waged with atom bombs as regularly recurring events, that is to say, nuclear wars as institutions, do not seem reconcilable with the survival of the participating nations. But the atom bomb exists. It exists in the minds of some men.

some on both sides would be working also paradoxically believing they were preparing a new force that would ultimately bring peace to the world.

Now he told Roosevelt the story of the young American inventor who wrote a letter to Napoleon.1213 The inventor proposed to build the emperor a fleet of ships that carried no sail but could attack England in any weather. He had it in his power to deliver Napoleon’s armies to England in a few hours without fear of wind or storm, he wrote, and he was prepared to submit his plans. Napoleon scoffed: ships without sails? “Bah! Away with your visionists!”1214 The young inventor, Sachs concluded, was Robert Fulton. Roosevelt

Sachs cautioned the President to listen carefully: what he had now to impart was at least the equivalent of the steamboat inventor’s proposal to Napoleon.

the first authoritative report to a head of state of the possibility of using nuclear energy to make a weapon of war.

My friends blamed me because the great enterprise of nuclear energy was to start with such a pittance,” Teller reminisces; “they haven’t forgiven me yet.”

He went on in this vein for a long time until suddenly Wigner, the most polite of us, interrupted him. [Wigner] said in his high-pitched voice that it was very interesting for him to hear this. He always thought that weapons were very important and that this is what costs money, and this is why the Army needs such a large appropriation. But he was very interested to hear that he was wrong: it’s not weapons but the morale which wins the wars. And if this is correct, perhaps one should take a second look at the budget of the Army, and maybe the budget could be cut.

The President had read the report, Watson wrote, and wanted to keep it on file. On file is where it remained, mute and inactive, well into 1940.

However intense their sympathies, the war was still a European war.

Loomis had recently contributed $30,000 to a private fund simply to make it easier for Lawrence to travel around the country—and

Afterward, walking back to Pupin—“out of the blue,” Teller says—Fermi wondered aloud if an atomic bomb might serve to heat a mass of deuterium sufficiently to begin thermonuclear fusion.1465 Such a mechanism, a bomb fusing hydrogen to helium, should be three orders of magnitude as energetic as a fission bomb and far cheaper in terms of equivalent explosive force. For Fermi the idea was a throwaway. Teller found it a surpassing challenge and took it to heart.

That distinction apparently belongs to Japanese physicist Tokutaro Hagiwara of the faculty of science of the University of Kyoto.

“the results of the involuntary conference in Chicago to which [I] had been exposed.”

Roosevelt had instinctively reserved nuclear weapons policy to himself.

One man, Franklin Roosevelt, decided that commitment—secretly, without consulting Congress or courts. It seemed to be a military decision and he was Commander in Chief.

“Many of the men I had known went off to work on radar and other aspects of military research,” he testified later. “I was not without envy of them.”

The two accounts are not incompatible, but both leave out a crucial fact: that Heisenberg passed to Bohr a drawing of the experimental heavywater reactor he was working to build.

Bush had called the Washington meeting on a weekend to accommodate busy men. They had assembled on Saturday, December 6, 1941.

This dispatch is to be considered a war warning.

Mitsubishi Munitions contributed decisively to the success of the first massive surprise blow of the Pacific War by the patriotic effort of its torpedo factory on Kyushu, the southernmost Japanese island, three miles up the Urakami River from the bay in the old port city of Nagasaki.