It is hard to see how there could be a more definitive account of the Manhattan project than this one. The pages overflow with all kinds of trivia and there are so many characters that float in and out of its pages that it reads like a real life "War and Peace". I found it very difficult to keep track of them all but the narrative moved along smoothly enough despite this. For the majority of the book, my main reaction was one of astonishment at the level of scientific and engineering ingenuity displayed by the many scientists who worked in the rapidly maturing field of nuclear physics. The tone turned ominous slowly as the Los Alamos physicists worked towards the bomb in earnest and the book does a phenomenal job of transporting us to that time and place. I was white knuckled with tension as the seconds winded down towards T-0 of the trinity test. Things then got decidedly uglier as the bomb moved from the relatively scientific setting it had lived in thus far to the messy, violent war theater of the Asia Pacific. The very short concluding section is about the after-effects of the Hiroshima bombing told in the words of the survivors themselves. This section physically nauseated me and gave me a splitting headache.

Even though the book does a good job of paralleling the development of the bomb with the events of WWII, a political account this most definitely is not. The book restricts itself to factual statements regarding the US administration's decision to bomb Hiroshima. I was looking forward to understanding why the second bomb had to be dropped given the lethal efficiency of the first was there for all to see - was it motivated at least in part to test the new implosion based bomb design? Unfortunately, the book glosses over this point. The book also tows the official line for justifying the bombs. Of course it saved American lives but other countries (including India!!!) had more casualties than either UK or USA and with the added threat of Soviet Union about to declare war on Japan, it is quite possible that Japan could have been coerced into an unconditional surrender without a land based invasion. Perhaps, to paraphrase Willard, debating whether the bombs were necessary is as pointless as handing speeding tickets at Indy 500. Both sides committed so many atrocities and had become so numb to the loss of human life that the bombs, when they arrived on the scene, stood out not for the staggering number of deaths they would cause but for the incredible efficiency with which they would do so.

In all, an encyclopaedic account that will leave me spending many many hours on Wikipedia in the months to come. ( )

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5653048601

When I finished reading through the final chapter’s last pages, I wondered: what’s the most important book ever written? I did a quick Google and found that all the suggested lists used the word “influential” instead, not what I wanted. I put quotes around the query and was not too pleased to find a bunch of christian websites using SEO to convince Google to serve an answer: the Bible.

I’m not going to suggest that The Making of the Atomic Bomb is the most important book ever written. I think it’s up on the list, in the top quarter, at least. It is probably one of the most important books I’ve read. Many Americans know a vague sketch of the Manhattan Project; I expect very few could trace its history back to Leo Szilard reading Ernest Rutherford calling the idea of liberating atomic energy “moonshine.”

The book is a tome, and there’s no way around it. Some readers will think the history too far-flung, too detailed, and too long. I scratched my head through passages of the book and had to read and reread a few of them. Yet, this is a literary work of high quality. The whole book is a gentle but consistently rising crescendo.

The final two chapters - Trinity and Tongues of Fire - are astounding. It may be the best non-fiction writing I have had the pleasure and discomfort of reading. In Trinity, Rhodes walks us on a nearly second-by-second countdown to the terrible culmination of centuries of scientific work. Tongues of Flame elevates numerous accounts of survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, deploying language to try and communicate the incommunicable.

There are so many roads one could go down following this. I found Colonel Stimson compelling. I’ve known the tale of his removal of Kyoto from the list of _targets for a long, long time - but I always understood the reasoning as little more than his honeymooning there (a tale the movie OPPENHEIMER recounts). This book paints a much more nuanced view of Stimson as someone horrified by the bomb (and horrified by the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo) and as a statesman straddling generations and losing purchase in an evolving world.

It took me a long time to get through this book, but I’m glad I did. Astounding. ( )

I was looking forward to finding out about the years of constructing the bomb. This book starts a lot farther back than that. It gives information about the background of people significant in developing the background knowledge necessary to know how to do it.

It also make it clear that many of the people developing the necessary theories were Jewish and living in an area where Hitler made it dangerous. Travails in getting out out the country are described.

Alas, I did not finish this book because it was a Kindle Unlimited loan and I no longer have a KU subscription ( )

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." - Bhagavad Gita

The quote from the Bhagavad Gita was Oppenheimer's reaction to the test bomb, the Trinity, carried out on July 15, 1945. Up until that time, the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project were not completely sure if the bomb would work. Shortly before the test, Fermi "offered to take wagers from his fellow scientists on whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so whether it would merely destroy the world." (p. 665)

The book chronicles verbose detail, the scientific discoveries, historical events, and political decisions that led to the new and most cruel bomb" (Emperor Hirohito) to ignite over Japan in August of 1945. The horror it unleashed is described in the last chapter. Survivors are quoted and their accounts are painful to read.
"In my mind's eye, like a waking dream, I could see the tongues of fire at work on the bodies of men." - Masugi Ibuse, "Black Rain

Many of the scientists were horrified at the bomb's use, but as one survivor asked, "Those scientists who invented the bomb, wrote a young woman who was a fourth-grade student at Horsima- "what did they think would happen if they dropped it?"
( )

Hard to imagine a world without the A-Bomb. Also hard to imagine how a small group of Jewish scientist emigres convinced the US Government to make the biggest investment in weaponry ever based on a belief that the Nazi's would get there first. But they did, and the Nazi's didn't. Thank goodness. ( )