A little while back, I wrote a review of American Prometheus, aka Oppenheimer: The Book, in which I noted that it contained remarkably little science for a book about a famous scientist. This was also maybe my biggest complaint about the movie, but makes a lot more sense having read the biography that inspired Nolan to make it.
At the time, I noted that I was starting to read another massive and award-winning history of the Manhattan Project, Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb. This is something I’ve long known as a classic book in the field— the paper copy I picked up in December is a special 25th anniversary edition— I actually remember hearing Rhodes speak at NIST about the sequel, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, back when that came out. (In the early parts of that he makes an accusation, based on then-newly-declassified documents from the former USSR, that somebody at the precursor to NIST leaked atomic secrets to the Soviets, so the Q&A period of his event was dominated by old guys who were outraged that he would impugn the patriotism of the even older guys who trained them…) I had never read either, though, because as previously noted I tend not to read all that much non-fiction about science outside of work.
Where American Prometheus is tightly focused on Robert Oppenheimer’s personal journey, to the exclusion of much else (even his science), The Making of the Atomic Bomb is an expansive and inclusive history— I might even risk the overused characterization “sweeping.” It starts well before the war, covering the late-1800’s childhoods of Rutherford and Einstein, among others, and has a cast of seemingly thousands. Almost every person with a speaking part, as it were, gets a brief biographical sketch, some of them much more than that. It covers not only the successful American effort to make a bomb, but also gives substantial space to the unsuccessful German effort (and the Allied efforts to thwart it), and even the very tentative Japanese investigations into fission energy.
Best of all, from my perspective, it has a ton of science in it. Rhodes isn’t afraid to get a bit into the weeds, as in this bit (selected almost at random) where Enrico Fermi needs a neutron source for his experiments, and decides to make one using the radon in the waste gas from a colleague’s radium source:
To the basement of the physics institute on the Via Panisperna, in his grey lab coat, in mid-March, Fermi thus carried a snippet of glass tubing no larger than the first joit of his little finger. It was flame-sealed at one end and partly filled with powdered beryllium [which emits neutrons when struck by alpha particles emitted by the radon]. He set the sealed end of the capsule into a container of liquid air. The radon, directed from the outlet of the extraction plant into the capsule, condensed on the walls in the -200C cold. Fermi then had to attempt quickly to heat and draw closed the other end of the capsule, without cracking the glass, before the radon evaporated and escaped. When he succeeded, he finished preparing the neutron source by dropping it into a two-foot length of glass tubing of larger diameter and sealing it into the far end so that it could be handled at a distance safe from dangerous exposure to its gamma rays. For all the tedious preparation its useful life was brief.
This level of vivid detail is provided in most of the experimental sections of the book. It also could not be more My Kind of Thing— I love stories of elaborate lab technique, and the ingenuity of people making amazing things at the limits of the technology available to them.
It’s not just lab porn, though— the book also offers pretty comprehensive coverage of the political and bureaucratic maneuvering involved in getting the atomic bomb program off the ground. There’s a surprising amount of this— the usual story of the war makes it sound like they went directly from the Einstein letter to the Manhattan Project, but in fact it took years to get the effort taken seriously. There are also some entertaining mis-steps, my favorite of which involves a telegram from Lise Meitner containing the phrase “MAUD RAY KENT” which gets interpreted as code but was, in fact, just passing greetings on to a former nanny to the Bohr family. One of the UK groups gets dubbed the “MAUD” committee as a result of the initial misunderstanding.
To the extent that there’s a single main character providing a through line to the story, it’s probably Leo Szilard, who has a flash of inspiration in 1933 about the potential for a bomb based on a nuclear chain reaction, then spends the next several years running around like his hair’s on fire trying first to get people to build the thing (to head off the Nazis), and then trying to prevent its use. This involves an impressive range of politics in the UK and US.
(Szilard would, in many ways, be an interesting figure for an Oppenheimer-like treatment. He was one of “The Martians,” a group of Hungarian physicists (including John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, and Edward Teller) of roughly the same age who all rose to prominence in the 1930’s and 40’s after fleeing the Nazis. And his trajectory from active promoter of building a bomb to actively trying to head off the arms race is vaguely parallel to Robert Oppenheimer’s, but much more active.)
The main weakness of the book as a read for fun is that it can be a bit overwhelming— there are a dizzying array of people and organizations involved on both sides of the Atlantic, and it can be difficult to keep track. This is particularly acute in one of the later chapters that details a wide range of unsuccessful attempts to interest the American and British governments in a proposal (which Rhodes credits to Niels Bohr) to inform the Soviets of the bomb and establish some international control of atomic weapons. This goes nowhere, as any child of the Cold War knows, so it’s a lot of details about people running to and fro having meetings with various Washington power brokers that ultimately get ignored. There’s a very “Skip to the end…” feeling to some of this material, but it slots reasonably well into the overall history, as Rhodes puts it in a spot where most of the physicsists are cooling their heels waiting for the massive engineering works in Oak Ridge and Hanford to churn out enough fissionable material to make a bomb.
Anyway, this is a justly famous book, and I highly recommend it, more so than American Prometheus. It’s much better suited to my interests, as it does a better job weaving actual science into the story of the development of the bomb. Its expansive nature, alas, means it’s much less cinematic, but if anybody wants to work on a pitch for a $100 million Szilard (to open the same weekend as Barbie 2, naturally) I’ll be happy to help out.
So, yeah, that’s a review of a book that everybody who’s interested most likely already knows is good, but you know, part of this blog is just to record my thoughts as I go. If you like this sort of thing, here’s a button:
And if you want to comment on any of it, plug other books about this era, or try to recruit me for Szilard! The Musical, the comments will be open:
I've probably read Rhodes's book 20x. As I am forever pitching it to my friends: a serious work of history that reads like a thriller.
Glad to hear you liked it, too.
Best ever popular book on science of any flavour.