Why did the U.S. get the atomic bomb ahead of Germany and other nations? The U. S. had the quantity and quality of scientists and the massive industrial and material resources required. Just as important was the signature American can-do and will-do attitude. There were many people involved in this project. The books that we’re about to review include many names, events, secrets, and much more that may surprise you. The story is a broad one with many versions told by different people. However, this project wasn’t a secret for long and there is so much to discover about it after the time that has passed. Why Was the Manhattan Project Called That?

If that is not enough to whet your appetite for this magnificent book, then consider that much of the work performed by these scientists was performed by Jewish scientists in central Europe in the late 1920s and 30s. They lived and worked in the shadow of the growing menace of fascism and National Socialism. Part of their story – and Rhodes’ story – involves amazing acts of heroism, that enabled important contributors to avoid the terrors of the Nazi Death Camps. MM: In 1995, the National Building Museum presented an exhibition revealing the impact of wartime building innovations on postwar American life. This catalogue includes passages touching on the cities built for the Manhattan Project. Categories Like most of you, I've heard and mulled over the arguments about whether America should or shouldn't have dropped the atomic bombs on Japan to hasten the end of World War II. Historians, scholars, philosophers, armchair know-it-alls, etc., have all had a go at it. It's not so easy a question to answer definitively, despite what would seem to be an open-and-shut case on the side of the moral and right thing to do.MM: The editor of this book is head of the Atomic Heritage Foundation, dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Age. This compendium includes writings by and about many of the key figures responsible for the project. 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. Most intriguing to me was the fascination of Oppenheimer and others with atomic bomb research as a research problem and the interesting mental rationale this involved in separating the thrill of the research from the moral implications of the use of these weapons. Not all could sustain this. Joseph Rotblat left the project when he realized the Germans would not build the bomb and became a disarmament advocate. Leo Szilard organized scientists to appeal to the President not to use this weapon. This book is a must-read if you want to know the inside thoughts and actions of the scientists and people working on the Manhattan Project. This incredible book includes a massive number of essays, documents, articles, eyewitness accounts, and so much more from this time. 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.

The challenge in writing a book on the bomb is not a dearth of material, but the volumes of books already on the subject. There are biographies on many of the key figures involved in making the bomb. There are histories that talk about specific stories or events that occurred during the story. Scientific manuals talking about the technical aspect of making the bomb alone could fill a small library. This does not include the studies discussing the affects after the bomb was dropped. There are thousands of books on the Atomic Bomb, but only one has earned a Pulitzer Prize in History. Perhaps no scientific development has shaped the course of modern history as much as the harnessing of nuclear energy. Yet the twentieth century might have turned out differently had greater influence over this technology been exercised by Great Britain, whose scientists were at the forefront of research into nuclear weapons at the beginning of World War II. For thousands of years man's capacity to destroy was limited to spears, arrows and fire. 120 years ago we learned to release chemical energy (e.g. TNT), and 70 years ago we learned to be 100 million times+ more efficient by harnessing the nuclear strong force energy with atomic weapons, first through fission and then fusion. We've also miniaturized these brilliant inventions and learned to mount them on ICBMs traveling at Mach 20. Unfortunately, we live in a universe where the laws of physics feature a strong asymmetry in how difficult it is to create and to destroy. This observation is also not reserved to nuclear weapons - more generally, technology monotonically increases the possible destructive damage per person per dollar. This is my favorite resolution to the Fermi paradox. This was a highly detailed account of the creation of the atomic bomb. Richard Rhodes set the standard for this subject in my opinion. The story was told from multiple angles with scientific, historical, and biographical but it all connects to deliver an epic story. The science behind nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, and radiochemistry were discussed to great length. Explained in detail was the history and weaponization of uranium (isotopes U235 and U238, uranium enrichment and uranium hexafluoride, uranium oxide, etc.). History was explained to include 19-20th century Europe and the scientific community, the rise of Hitler and antisemitism, WW1 and the escalation to WW2, and various other related topics.This is a sort of a Cliff Notes or Reader's Digest compilation of atomic history texts. Richard Rhodes writes the introduction, and at no point does he suggest why you need this book if you've already read his far more comprehensive The Making Of The Atomic Bomb - he probably thinks you don't. If I hadn't just come through it, I probably would have been a bit perplexed. A lot of the key figures remain sketchy, their motivations shadowy, their processes vague.