The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb by Its Creators, Eyewitnesses and Historians: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians

Product Information

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. This book tells their story for the first time. Using diaries, interviews, and previously classified documents, Denise Kiernan brings these women to life and reveals their enduring legacy. 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 Rhodes' research is beyond comprehensive but his writing is for the most part quite dry. He's interested in accuracy and facts, not so much artistry and feeling. Towards the end his prose gets a lot more florid as all the fallout from the bombs charges both the time in history and the prose with poignancy. It's where we cut from the decades of scientific work to the eventual victims of those great leaps that the prose naturally becomes heavy with that unforgettable and immense, personal cost.

The pilot who commanded the mission was Colonel Paul W.Tibbets,a name I remember with distaste.For him,the mission was "impersonal." He proudly named the plane,"The Enola Gay" after his mother.Scientists working under Oppenheimer had developed two distinct types of bombs: a uranium-based design called “the Little Boy” and a plutonium-based weapon called “the Fat Man.” With both designs in the works at Los Alamos, they became an important part of U.S. strategy aimed at bringing an end to World War II. The Potsdam Conference In 1993, Rhodes published Nuclear Renewal: Common Sense about Energy detailing the history of the nuclear power industry in the United States, and future promises of nuclear power. In 1995 he published a sequel to The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, which told the story of the atomic espionage during World War II, the debates over whether the hydrogen bomb ought to be produced, and the eventual creation of the bomb and its consequences for the arms race. In 2007, Rhodes published Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race, a chronicle of the arms buildups during the Cold War, especially focusing on Mikhail Gorbachev and the Reagan administration. The Twilight of the Bombs, the fourth and final volume in his series on nuclear history, was published in 2010. The book documents, among other topics, the post-Cold War nuclear history of the world, nuclear proliferation, and nuclear terrorism. We won’t spoil any of these crucial secrets, as that may be one of the most exciting moments of this book. The bottom line is if you’re looking for one of the most popular Manhattan Project books out there, then you’ve found the perfect choice. This is the true story of the women of Oak Ridge, and the roles they played in building the atomic bomb.

And finally,the unease felt by some of the scientists including Oppenheimer,about what they had unleashed on the world."I am become death,the destroyer of worlds." Too little remorse,too late.

What's New

by Peter Watson The justification for the atomic bomb was simple: it would defeat Hitler and end the Second World War faster, saving lives. The reality was different. The nuclear fission technology perfected by the Manhattan Project engineers has since become the basis for the development of nuclear reactors, power generators, as well as other innovations, including medical imaging systems and radiation therapies for various forms of cancer. Sources Biographies of many important people and their accomplishments were discussed at great length: Ernest Rutherford (early atomic model), Marie Curie (radioactivity), Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg (quantum mechanics and electrons), Enrico Fermi (neutron bombardment, nuclear chain reactions, and atomic fission), J. Robert Oppenheimer (the theoretical physicist who put it all together at Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico and the Manhattan Project), and many others who all contributed to the field of nuclear energy, theoretical physics, and quantum theory. Even the psychological profiles of these individuals was discussed: J. Robert Oppenheimer was, perhaps, the smartest, best educated, and most literary of the whole bunch and did a brilliant job of managing The Manhattan Project. Eventually, though, it got more readable. I still could have done with less technical physics bits, but... apparently that can't be helped. Oh well.

The fireball," writes Leona Marshall Libby, "expanded to three miles in diameter. Observers, all evacuated to 40 miles or more away, saw millions of gallons of [atoll] lagoon water, turned to steam, appear as a giant bubble. When the steam had evaporated, they saw that the island of Elugelab, where the bomb [building] had been, had vanished, vaporized also. In its place, a crater 1/2 mile deep and 2 miles wide had been torn in the reef." Bernstein, Barton J. (1990). "An Analysis of 'Two Cultures': Writing about the Making and the Using of the Atomic Bombs". The Public Historian. 12 (2): 83–107. doi: 10.2307/3378693. JSTOR 3378693. Each of these best-selling Manhattan Project books is worthwhile reading and can tell you a lot about this historical event. However, this is a book that may give you the most insights, as General Leslie R. Groves tells us much more of what he witnessed while the project was progressing. Leslie shares and talks about the involvement of foreign governments, the construction of huge plants, crucial press complications, and the stress of racing to build an atomic bomb before the Nazis. The Truth Finally Revealed 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. At first, it was called the Manhattan Engineer District, but it was layered shortened to the name we all know now. We will leave the rest up to the 10 books about the Manhattan Projects that will teach you all you need to know.Meanwhile, the military leaders of the Manhattan Project had identified Hiroshima, Japan, as an ideal target for an atomic bomb, given its size and the fact that there were no known American prisoners of war in the area. A forceful demonstration of the technology developed in New Mexico was deemed necessary to encourage the Japanese to surrender. Matthew Bunn notes Rhodes descriptions of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, writing that they are "excruciating, densely layered with gruesome but telling first-hand accounts of the horrors the bombs inflicted"; he called the book "a wide-ranging tale of the physics and engineering of the bomb, the personalities involved, and the larger story of how society came to think about war". [13] I did notice Rhodes really had a fetish with Szilard and that seemingly translated into his next book Dark Sun about the Hydrogen bomb. There's no doubt Szilard was also a giant in this period but he was slightly more auxiliary when it came to these atomic bombs. I wonder if maybe the attention lathered on Szilard would have been better focused on some of the other dozen scientists who had such big contributions but perhaps Szilard's ego demands the attention. But at Hiroshima and Nagasaki the "city of the dead" is finally transformed from a metaphor into a literal reality.”