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A review by kyscg
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
5.0
I was first aware of the effects of the twin bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from a Vikram Seth poem almost a decade ago. "A Doctor's Journal Entry for August 6, 1945," writes about the plight of the citizens of Hiroshima immediately after Little Man exploded in the air above their unassuming daily lives. We were made to watch a documentary about the bombing in school. We had to write essays about the inhumanity of the bombing for credit.
A couple of years later, I was introduced to Richard Feynman via his undergraduate level Physics lectures. He talks about his time in Los Alamos in his autobiography. I was reintroduced to the atomic bomb purely from a scientific perspective. The burning and mass murder of an entire city was unimportant in the face of an atom's profound power within its nucleus. And why shouldn't it be? We had come far from the days of Democritus and Aristotle. From Newton to Dalton to Avogadro, all of whom set the atom and the molecule firmly in stone. The electron came to life as a cathode ray when Thomson applied a voltage across two electrodes in a vacuum. Rutherford mentioned an idea for an experiment to Marsden and Geiger, resulting in the famous gold-leaf experiment that showed us the nucleus. Niels Bohr used ideas from Max Plank and Einstein to show how the electrons wouldn't collapse into the nucleus, Rutherford split nitrogen to produce protons, and Chadwick discovered the neutron. And finally, rounding off everything, de Broglie, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg described the complete atom with electron positions as pure probabilities. The atom was whole. All that remained was the task of splitting it.
When you read Feynman's accounts of his time at Los Alamos, you have this impression that he was the main character and that life at Los Alamos revolved around him (or maybe I was too taken by the great man to not see the bigger picture). So it was surprising to me that he's only mentioned thrice in the entire book and only one of those times he's described as doing anything (setting up the radio before the Trinity test). The giants that split the atom were no less impressive than the ones mentioned above. It all started with Henri Becquerel, Marie Curie, Pierre Curie and Rutherford realizing that some nuclei undergo radioactive decay. The energetic Fermi bombarded Uranium with neutrons, leading to Otto Hahn and Lisa Meitner producing Barium from Uranium, which caused Meitner's nephew Frisch to call the process "nuclear fission". Enter Leó Szilárd, who realized that a chain reaction would be possible. After this final hurdle of theoretical understanding was crossed, Szilárd, Teller, and Wigner took Einstein's endorsement and sent the famous letter to Roosevelt. The juggernaut was set into motion, with enigmatic Robert Oppenheimer leading it. Man would learn to harness a tiny bit of the force of nature, and the world would never be the same again.
The writing has the rigour of profound scientific exposition and a thriller novel's pace. I wish I could write like this. Just for the writing, I'd recommend reading the book. The chapter on the bombing is very traumatic to read. I was finally reminded, after all these years, about what I read in Vikram Seth's poem about people walking around like ghosts, their skin hanging off their flesh. Whether or not the US should have dropped the bombs can be argued. I have a controversial take on this, which could border on victim-blaming, that Hirohito should have surrendered earlier. And why couldn't the US have starved Japan via a naval blockade? Was this a case of "Rome conquered the world in self-defence"?
The foreword to the latest edition is very insightful; Rhodes asks, "Why seventy thousand nuclear weapons between us when only a few were more than enough to destroy each other?" One of the great books, in league with all the big ones like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and War and Peace. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, being a scientist myself and having looked up to all the superstars that come together in this book. One last comment I'd like to make is about how fast the Manhattan Project moved; if only we could move at that pace for everything we do.
A couple of years later, I was introduced to Richard Feynman via his undergraduate level Physics lectures. He talks about his time in Los Alamos in his autobiography. I was reintroduced to the atomic bomb purely from a scientific perspective. The burning and mass murder of an entire city was unimportant in the face of an atom's profound power within its nucleus. And why shouldn't it be? We had come far from the days of Democritus and Aristotle. From Newton to Dalton to Avogadro, all of whom set the atom and the molecule firmly in stone. The electron came to life as a cathode ray when Thomson applied a voltage across two electrodes in a vacuum. Rutherford mentioned an idea for an experiment to Marsden and Geiger, resulting in the famous gold-leaf experiment that showed us the nucleus. Niels Bohr used ideas from Max Plank and Einstein to show how the electrons wouldn't collapse into the nucleus, Rutherford split nitrogen to produce protons, and Chadwick discovered the neutron. And finally, rounding off everything, de Broglie, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg described the complete atom with electron positions as pure probabilities. The atom was whole. All that remained was the task of splitting it.
When you read Feynman's accounts of his time at Los Alamos, you have this impression that he was the main character and that life at Los Alamos revolved around him (or maybe I was too taken by the great man to not see the bigger picture). So it was surprising to me that he's only mentioned thrice in the entire book and only one of those times he's described as doing anything (setting up the radio before the Trinity test). The giants that split the atom were no less impressive than the ones mentioned above. It all started with Henri Becquerel, Marie Curie, Pierre Curie and Rutherford realizing that some nuclei undergo radioactive decay. The energetic Fermi bombarded Uranium with neutrons, leading to Otto Hahn and Lisa Meitner producing Barium from Uranium, which caused Meitner's nephew Frisch to call the process "nuclear fission". Enter Leó Szilárd, who realized that a chain reaction would be possible. After this final hurdle of theoretical understanding was crossed, Szilárd, Teller, and Wigner took Einstein's endorsement and sent the famous letter to Roosevelt. The juggernaut was set into motion, with enigmatic Robert Oppenheimer leading it. Man would learn to harness a tiny bit of the force of nature, and the world would never be the same again.
The writing has the rigour of profound scientific exposition and a thriller novel's pace. I wish I could write like this. Just for the writing, I'd recommend reading the book. The chapter on the bombing is very traumatic to read. I was finally reminded, after all these years, about what I read in Vikram Seth's poem about people walking around like ghosts, their skin hanging off their flesh. Whether or not the US should have dropped the bombs can be argued. I have a controversial take on this, which could border on victim-blaming, that Hirohito should have surrendered earlier. And why couldn't the US have starved Japan via a naval blockade? Was this a case of "Rome conquered the world in self-defence"?
The foreword to the latest edition is very insightful; Rhodes asks, "Why seventy thousand nuclear weapons between us when only a few were more than enough to destroy each other?" One of the great books, in league with all the big ones like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and War and Peace. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, being a scientist myself and having looked up to all the superstars that come together in this book. One last comment I'd like to make is about how fast the Manhattan Project moved; if only we could move at that pace for everything we do.