The Making of the Atomic Bomb – A review

I recently finished reading Richard Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb". This book provides an excellent history of atomic physics and the people involved from the first attempts to determine the structure of the atom to the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The text is an interesting mixture of personal stories, politics, history, chemistry and physics. Most of the chapters start with something about one or more of the physicists and end with progress towards the first bomb tests. If you are an engineer or scientist, this is a great read.

Chapter 19, "Tongues of Fire" describes the bombing of Hiroshima in great detail and includes a lot of personal stories taken from interviews of the survivors. If you have any doubt whatsoever that atomic weapons are terrible tools of mass destruction, just read this chapter. The justification for dropping the two bombs on Japan was weak at best and we see government at its worst when it comes to making decisions during war time.

One of the things I found fascinating was that as the physics evolved through better theory and experimental confirmation, plans to make bombs developed quickly down to an almost exact timetable. Once the knowledge had been obtained as to how to create enough Uranium 235 and Plutonium it became a matter of money and manpower. The US government spent huge amounts of money building reactors to make Plutonium and plants to extract U235 and Plutonium in enough quantities to make the first bombs. It is the sheer scale of the endeavor that is so amazing. Uranium was refined using multiple techniques including cyclotrons which separated the isotopes literally atom by atom building up very very small amounts. The number and size of the cyclotrons that were built is hard to imagine. There was not enough Copper in the US to make the windings of the magnets so silver was borrowed from the mint instead. It's hard to imagine a project of this scale today.

This book is worth reading for its history alone but it's especially worth reading as a reminder of what we can do if we want it badly enough and what the consequences of those kinds of actions can be.