Reddit Reddit reviews The Making of the Atomic Bomb

We found 42 Reddit comments about The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

History
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American History
United States History
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Simon Schuster
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42 Reddit comments about The Making of the Atomic Bomb:

u/gaussprime · 38 pointsr/todayilearned

I really can't recommend Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb enough. Teller in particular is amazing, so much so that he was the inspiration for Dr. Strangelove.

That book, and the precursor, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, are great reads if you want to understand both the science and the politics behind the bomb projects. They're written by a historian, so they're not too crazy into the math, but they will explain to you the issues, such as why you need U235 to make a bomb rather than U238.

u/omaca · 37 pointsr/MapPorn

Not exactly

The German scientists who were working on the Nazi nuclear program were taken prisoner by the British and kept incarcerated in Britain. Their rooms were bugged, and they were secretly recorded discussing in disbelief the news of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. They knew the science and theory, but many of them didn't believe it was possible.

You are correct they didn't have sufficient uranium. Indeed, thanks to the Allied special forces and air-raids, and Norwegian resistance fighters, the only access to heavy water was destroyed and the largest shipment of heavy water itself was sunk (ironically).

I highly recommend Richard Rhodes The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It won a Pulitzer Prize in its own right. An utterly fascinating book and extremely well written.

u/Tangurena · 28 pointsr/AskHistorians

> In my view, the second certainly wasn't

According to Rhodes [1], the Japanese command knew what affected Hiroshima was an atomic bomb [2] but concluded that since it took 4 years to build the first atom bomb, it would take the Allies 4 years to build the next. The folks at the top kept believing that they could force the Allies to a negotiated peace and that westerners were too weak - hence the suicidal efforts in Okinawa/Saipan and kamikaze to demoralize Allied troops.

The Yalta conference required Stalin to enter war against Japan within 90 days of the end of the German campaign. Depending on how you do the math and count timezones, Russia declared war against Japan and entered combat on day 89, 90 or 91.

According to Cook in Japan at War there were 4,335,500 Japanese soldiers at the time of the surrender with about 3,500,000 stationed outside the "home islands" (mostly stuck in Korea and Manchuria). This was a lot more than the Allies thought that Japan had.

Notes:
1 - I forget whether it was in Dark Sun (most likely because it was the followup written after the fall of the Soviet Union which opened up a lot of their secret archives) or The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
2 - The Japanese had 2 atom bomb projects: a chemical separation project in Tokyo and a gaseous diffusion project in what is now called North Korea around the Chosin Reservoir.

u/markevens · 24 pointsr/AskHistorians

> I don't really know much about how general people around Europe would have reacted towards Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however I can help a little with how the scientists of the German Atom Bomb project reacted.

> The scientists who had though to have been working on the German Nuclear Program had been detained during Operation Epsilon and then interned in a bugged house in England. During that time, the reaction these scientists had towards the Bombing of Hiroshima was recorded.

> Obviously, they all have differing opinions on the subject, some for example, such as Otto Hahn, who had discovered Nuclear Fission and won the Noble Prize in 1944, but otherwise had no part in the program, was glad that the Germans never achieved making the bomb (he even considered suicide, believing himself responsible.) Others however, where dismayed they had failed.

> They all seem to wonder why Germany didn't manage to build the bomb, comparing that project to the thousands of people working on the V1 and V2 rockets, as well as talking about the relationship between Germany, and the Scientists, compared with how America treated there project, because they say the Germans didn't trust the Scientists working on the project, and the project would have been difficult to push through because of this, especially as they say the German Government wanted immediate results, not having to wait a long time until the project was complete.

> They also had conversations about what went wrong with the theory behind the German Project (and Heisenberg soon worked out how to build the bomb, after hearing of the dropping of the American Bomb).

> If you want to read more about it, main source is Operation Epsilon: The Farm Hall Transcripts, which has an extract here which says which books you can read the whole transcript in.

After having read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" (a historical work on The Bomb that won the author the Pulitzer) and seeing how many resources the USA was putting into The Bomb, I don't believe Germany could have ever done it during war time. They were making good progress on an energy producing reactor, but a deliverable bomb was far beyond their war-time means.

u/lobster_johnson · 21 pointsr/AskHistorians

Another book worth mentioning: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Won the Pulitzer prize, an instant classic, and perhaps one of the finest non-fiction books ever written. It paints the story of the bomb on a very broad, panoramic canvas, tracing the entire process of turning an outlandish, futuristic idea (all the way back to the musings of H. G. Well) into a real weapon with fatal and geopolitical consequences, through a complex landscape of politics, history, philosophy and psychology. Along the way it drip-feeds a course in elementary particle physics so that the technical details are easy to understand even for a layman — in fact, the first half of the book is pretty much the story of the atomic physics, from the discovery of the atom to modern quantum mechanics. The book is also superbly written; quirkily, occasionally lyrical, and very adept at making its characters come alive with plenty of juicy dramatic tension. (My only criticism about the book: Not enough Feynman!)

u/eleask · 16 pointsr/AdviceAnimals

Well, they may not know about radiation exposure effects (even though they know something about it. The absolute madman Louis Slotin took a dive near a reactor to fix it, and his colleagues were "shocked", and Japan itself tried to start a nuclear project, failing due to the fact, well, that only the United States had the capability of invest on it: developing nuclear bomb was expensive as hell), but they surely knew that it was different. They saw just a couple of planes, and then hell broke loose, and the aftermath of the explosion was a bit worst than the one of a firestorm. Mind that a fire bombing is not meant to create a shock wave as an atomic bomb does.
And after all of this, after the bombing of Nagasaki, the emperor (I won't ever remember his name) stated:

"The enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization."

"a new and most cruel bomb": average Japanese may not care about the difference between a firebomb and an atomic bomb, but I can assure you that upstairs, they were concerned about the use of the new weapon.

As an ending note, if you love to read, and if you don't care about lengthy readings, Richard Rhodes wrote a couple of very well documented books about the matter:

u/Opheltes · 15 pointsr/linux

> Einstein appointed himself with plenty, including persuading the US government to develop nuclear weapons.

This is not accurate. Einstein himself had to be persuaded to write that letter by his good friend Leo Szilard. Szilard was the first person to conceive of a nuclear chain reaction that could be used to build a nuclear bomb, but he didn't have the name recognition that Einstein did. So Szilard drove over to Einstein's house and they co-wrote the letter.

Source.

u/Hypothesis_Null · 11 pointsr/history

Happily, and I hope I didn't come off as too abrasive. As I said, you seemed to be asking the question in very good faith.

If you or anyone is interested - not so much in the political decision or if or how to use the bombs - but just in the effort of making of them: The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a massive book (often considered 'definitive') that goes through the Manhattan project in great detail. The only other project that really compares to it is the Moon Landing.

u/Max-Ray · 10 pointsr/worldnews

I'd recommend to anyone who's interested to read "Making the Atomic Bomb". One of the aspects that I didn't know about was one of the physicists(I can't recall which one) going to both Churchill and Roosevelt pleading to tell the Russians about it, saying that by not telling them it would instigate an arms race.

It also highlights Gen. Lemay's cold, calculating process of not bombing certain targets so they could get a good reading on destruction levels when the bomb was used. By contrast it also gives much history on the international level of research going on before WW2 and the discovery of fission and decay of elements. It shows that someone was going to develop the bomb because everyone was doing research in the field.

u/Thecna2 · 10 pointsr/AskHistorians

Well they had a very well organised spy ring stages deep inside the Manhattan Project. The executed people over it. Its quite well known.

Richard Rhodes: The making of the Atomic Bomb
http://www.amazon.com/The-Making-Atomic-Bomb-Anniversary/dp/1451677618

The spies...
cut/paste from wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_spies
------------------------------------------

  1. Morris Cohen – American, "Thanks to Cohen, designers of the Soviet atomic bomb got piles of technical documentation straight from the secret laboratory in Los Alamos," the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda said. Morris and his wife, Lona, served eight years in prison, less than half of their sentences before being released in a prisoner swap with The Soviet Union. He died without revealing the name of the American scientist who helped pass vital information about the United States atomic bomb project.[13]


  2. Klaus Fuchs – German-born British theoretical physicist who worked with the British delegation at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. After Fuchs' confession there was a trial that lasted less than 90 minutes, Lord Goddard sentenced him to fourteen years' imprisonment, the maximum for violating the Official Secrets Act. He escaped the charge of espionage because of the lack of independent evidence and because, at the time of the crime, the Soviet Union was not an enemy of Great Britain.[14] In December 1950 he was stripped of his British citizenship. He was released on June 23, 1959, after serving nine years and four months of his sentence at Wakefield prison. He was allowed to emigrate to Dresden, then in the German Democratic Republic.[15][16]


  3. Harry Gold – American, confessed to acting as a courier for Greenglass and Fuchs. He was sentenced in 1951 to thirty years imprisonment. He was paroled in May 1966, after serving just over half of his sentence.[17]


  4. David Greenglass – an American machinist at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. Greenglass confessed that he gave crude schematics of lab experiments to the Russians during World War II. Some aspects of his testimony against his sister and brother-in-law (the Rosenbergs, see below) are now thought to have been fabricated in an effort to keep his own wife, Ruth, from prosecution. Greenglass was sentenced to 15 years in prison, served 10 years, and later reunited with his wife.[18]

  5. Theodore Hall – a young American physicist at Los Alamos, whose identity as a spy was not revealed until very late in the 20th century. He was never tried for his espionage work, though he seems to have admitted to it in later years to reporters and to his family.[19]
    George Koval – The American born son of a Belorussian emigrant family that returned to the Soviet Union where he was inducted into the Red Army and recruited into the GRU intelligence service. He infiltrated the US Army and became a radiation health officer in the Special Engineering Detachment. Acting under the code name DELMAR he obtained information from Oak Ridge and the Dayton Project about the Urchin (detonator) used on the Fat Man plutonium bomb. His work was not known to the west until he was posthumously recognized as a hero of the Russian Federation by Vladimir Putin in 2007.


  6. Irving Lerner – An American film director, he was caught photographing the cyclotron at the University of California, Berkeley in 1944.[20] After the war he was blacklisted.


  7. Allan Nunn May – A British citizen, he was one of the first Soviet spies uncovered during the cold war. He worked on the Manhattan Project and was betrayed by a Soviet defector in Canada. His was uncovered in 1946 and it led the United States to restrict the sharing of atomic secrets with Britain. On May 1, 1946, he was sentenced to ten years hard labour. He was released in 1952, after serving six and a half years.[21]


  8. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg – Americans who were involved in coordinating and recruiting an espionage network that included Ethel's brother, David Greenglass. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were tried for conspiracy to commit espionage, since the prosecution seemed to feel that there was not enough evidence to convict on espionage. Treason charges were not applicable, since the United States and the Soviet Union were allies at the time. The Rosenbergs denied all the charges but were convicted in a trial in which the prosecutor Roy Cohn said he was in daily secret contact with the judge, Irving Kaufman. Despite an international movement demanding clemency, and appeals to President Dwight D. Eisenhower by leading European intellectuals and the Pope, the Rosenbergs were executed at the height of the Korean War. President Eisenhower wrote to his son, serving in Korea, that if he spared Ethel (presumably for the sake of her children), then the Soviets would simply recruit their spies from among women.[22][23][24]

  9. Saville Sax – American acted as the courier for Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall.[19]

  10. Morton Sobell – American engineer tried and convicted along with the Rosenbergs, was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment but released from Alcatraz in 1969, after serving 17 years and 9 months.[25] After proclaiming his innocence for over half a century, Sobell admitted spying for the Soviets, and implicated Julius Rosenberg, in an interview with the New York Times published on September 11, 2008
    ---------------------------------------------

    The Soviets used to fly 'supply' missions out of somewhere in the midwest I think, they used to load up the data in that plane and fly it across weekly to Russia via Alaska/Siberia (if I recall correctly). The US intelligence services were mainly oblivious, they were allies after all.
u/just_addwater · 7 pointsr/WarCollege

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes!

Excellent Pulitzer Prize winning history of the Manhattan program.

u/feelslikemagic · 6 pointsr/todayilearned

Szilard is featured prominently in Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which is probably the best and most accessible history of the Manhattan Project ever written. It also has the greatest opening paragraph of any book, ever:

>In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilárd waited irritably one gray Depression morning for the stoplight to change. A trace of rain had fallen during the night; Tuesday, September 12, 1933, dawned cool, humid and dull. Drizzling rain would begin again in early afternoon. When Szilárd told the story later he never mentioned his destination that morning. He may have had none; he often walked to think. In any case another destination intervened. The stoplight changed to green. Szilárd stepped off the curb. As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woes, the shape of things to come.

u/gatowman · 6 pointsr/Truckers

Study, I dunno. I like to listen to books about nuclear science, nuclear power, weapons, accidents and the like while I'm driving. I don't do many fiction books.

While it may not be studying, learning about the world around you can help expand your mind and keep it active while you're focusing on the road. I've listened to these books a few times over by now.

Link 1
Link 2
Link 3
Link 4
Link 5
Link 6

u/Ibrey · 6 pointsr/Catholicism

Truman approved the bombing of Hiroshima in the erroneous belief that it was a military base and not a city with a military base in it.

Truman gave a radio address on August 9, 1945 in which he said:

> The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians. But that attack is only a warning of things to come. If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on her war industries and, unfortunately, thousands of civilian lives will be lost. I urge Japanese civilians to leave industrial cities immediately, and save themselves from destruction.

Truman wrote this speech himself. He tells us in a note in his handwriting dated "Aug 10 '45",

> While all this has been going on, I've been trying to get ready a radio address to the nation on the Berlin conference. Made the first draft on the ship coming back. Discussed it with Byrnes, Rosenman, Ben Cohen, Leahy and Charlie Ross. Rewrote it four times and then the Japs offered to surrender and it had to be done again. As first put up it contained 4500 words and a thousand had to be taken out. It caused me a week of headaches but finally seemed to go over all right when it was said over the radio at 10 P.M. tonight.

A photograph even shows him writing it.

In earlier drafts of this speech, Truman used even stronger language, asserting Hiroshima was "purely a military base." Truman also wrote to Sen. Russell on August 9, in response to a telegram in which Russell had urged that Tokyo be "utterly destroyed," that bombing civilians was still only something that might happen in the future:

> For myself, I certainly regret the necessity of wiping out whole populations because of the "pigheadedness’ of the leaders of a nation and for your information, I am not going to do it unless it is absolutely necessary. It is my opinion that after the Russians enter into war the Japanese will very shortly fold up.

> My object is to save as many American lives as possible but I also have a humane feeling for the women and children in Japan.

Truman was likely misled by the advice of Henry Stimson.

Stimson had a meeting with General Groves on the morning of May 30 to discuss the targets of the atomic bombs, with the target committee's leading choice being Kyoto. Kyoto was a major rail link between Tokyo and Osaka, contained factories manufacturing armaments, was a "typical Jap city" whose wooden houses would easily burn, was a highly culturally significant city whose destruction would have a great psychological impact, and was home to intellectuals who would appreciate the significance of the new bomb. Groves later recalled that Stimson told him bluntly, "I don't want Kyoto bombed." On June 1, Stimson wrote in his diary that he had told General Arnold "there was one city that they must not bomb without my permission and that was Kyoto."

Stimson took his concern for Kyoto straight to the top. On July 24, 1945, he met with Truman and wrote in his diary,

> We had a few words more about the S-1 program, and I again gave him my reasons for eliminating one of the proposed targets. He again reiterated with the utmost emphasis his own concurring belief on that subject, and he was particularly emphatic in agreeing with my suggestion that if elimination was not done, the bitterness which would be caused by such a wanton act might make it impossible during the long post-war period to reconcile the Japanese to us in that area rather than to the Russians. It might thus, I pointed out, be the means of preventing what our policy demanded, namely a sympathetic Japan to the United States in case there should be any aggression by Russia in Manchuria

What did Truman take away from this meeting? He wrote in his diary,

> This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10^(th). I have told the Sec. of War, Mr Stimson to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old Capitol [Kyoto] or the new.

> He + I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I'm sure they will not do that but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler's crowd or Stalin's did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.

Truman appears to have come away with the impression that Kyoto was a civilian target and the other options were military ones, when in reality every place on the target committee's list was a city inhabited primarily by civilians.

On August 10, 1945, Henry A. Wallace wrote in his diary of that morning's Cabinet meeting,

> Truman said he had given orders to stop atomic bombing. He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn't like the idea of killing, as he said, "all those kids."

After that date, Truman no longer says that he has avoided killing innocent civilians with atomic bombs. Now he says that this is just what atomic bombs do. In a December 1945 speech (p. 13), he claims that when he and Stimson talked about whether the bomb should be used, "I couldn't help but think of the necessity of blotting out women and children and non-combatants." In 1948, he said, "this isn’t a military weapon. It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses. So we have got to treat this differently from rifles and cannon and ordinary things like that."

But to get more directly to your question: by that point in the war, any true purely military target that would have been worth nuking had already been bombed. The Army Air Force had literally been ordered to suspend them bombing of certain cities just so there would be some sufficiently impressive targets left for the atomic bombs. A warning shot over an unpopulated area was also considered, but this option was never put before Truman.

u/MiG31_Foxhound · 5 pointsr/CatastrophicFailure

It's quite a lot to bite off, but everything you want is contained in these four books:

https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-25th-Anniversary/dp/1451677618/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Sun-Making-Hydrogen-Bomb-ebook/dp/B008TRUB6O/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

https://www.amazon.com/Arsenals-Folly-Richard-Rhodes-ebook/dp/B000W93DEO/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

https://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Bombs-Challenges-Dangers-Prospects-ebook/dp/B003F3PKXQ/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

Rhodes is the guy for nuclear history. I've read all four, but the last two are, admittedly, somewhat forgettable. They deal with the continuing command issues surrounding nuclear arsenals and the eventual political movement to eradicate (or, as it happened, simply limit) strategic stockpiles.

That being said, the first two, Making of the Bomb and Dark Sun, are utterly indispensible. The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a Pulitzer Prize-winning, 1986 history of the scientific effort to elucidate the physical principles which led to bombs and of the miliitary-scientific-industrial effort to realize the possibility of a weapon. It discusses many interesting characters within this history, such as Ernest Lawrence, Leo Szilard, and of course, Oppenheimer.

I have to be honest with you - I've saved Dark Sun for last for a reason. This is one of the most phenomenally engaging books I've ever read. It has everything: the creation of doomsday weapons of, and I don't use this term loosely, unimaginable destructive potential and the obsessive quasi-fetishization of their refinement and testing on behalf of the United States' and Soviet militaries. Rhodes discusses the post-war split within the scientific community over whether to develop a hydrogen "Super" bomb, whether to share information relating to it with the Soviet Union, and the factional leveraging of security privileges and political favor to exclude those from research who did not take a sufficiently hard stand against cooperation with the USSR.

Dark Sun details bomb physics and the minutia of the testing program in just enough detail to remain compelling and accessible. Rhodes also does his best to humanize Soviet scientific personnel such as Igor Kurchatov, the father of the Soviet bomb, and the strained relationship they shared with their political patrons, such as the Darth Vader-esque Lavrenti Beria.

I hope this answers your question, and I hope that you enjoy these books as much as I did!

u/SnowblindAlbino · 4 pointsr/AskHistorians

On this topic I always recommend people read Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It's really more a history of science/technology but it does cover the German and Japanese bomb programs as they relate to the Manhattan Project.

What I recall is that the general story of the Germans is that they lost some key physicists early on (many of them Jews who emigrated) and that Werner Heisenberg and his crew made an ill-advised decision to pursue a bomb design that required deuterium. Their deuterium came from a single source, a hydroelectric facility in Norway, and the French, Brits, and Norwegians were able to sabotage it often enough to keep the supply limited.

Add to this Hitler's fascination with some other projects-- and late in the war the better salesmanship from the rocket developers --and the German project really never had the resources necessary to win the race against the US.

The Japanese bomb project was really quite modest and probably doomed to failure as their scientists-- unlike the Germans --were isolated from the global community of theoretical physicists and thus lacked the necessary background to develop a bomb. They too lacked support from military/civilian leadership so their program was years behind the Germans, which itself was at least a couple of years behind the Manhattan Project.

All those factors considered, the US also had the tremendous advantage of not being a war zone. We could simply fence off a chunk of eastern Washington to develop uranium concentrating processes in secret. Ditto Oak Ridge in TN and of course Los Alamos in NM. No bomber raids and Oppie always had enough vodka on hand to make a Moscow Mule for his guests-- a far cry from trying to develop a weapon in an underground lab with unskilled slave labor, a la the German rocket program.

u/Lmaoboobs · 4 pointsr/WarCollege

Currently: The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran

After this I will probably read

The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan

On War

Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Rise of the Islamic State

On Grand Strategy

A fellow on the combined defense discord layed out his recommendations for books on nukes, so I'll list them here.

On Thermonuclear War By Herman Kahn

On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century by Jeffrey Larsen and Kerry Kartchner

The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, Third Edition by Lawrence Freedman

Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces by Pavel Podvig

Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America's Atomic Age by Francis J. Gavin

Eating Grass: The Making of the Pakistani Bomb by Feroz Khan

Prevention, Pre-emption and the Nuclear Option: From Bush to Obama by Aiden Warren

Nuclear Deterrence in the 21st Century: Lessons from the Cold War for a New Era of Strategic Piracy by Thérèse Delpech

Analyzing Strategic Nuclear Policy by Charles L. Glaser

Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era: Regional Powers and International Conflict by Vipin Narang

Building the H Bomb: A Personal History By Kenneth W Ford

The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy by Matthew Kroenig

Paper Tigers: china's Nuclear Posture by Jeffery Lewis

Arms and Influence by Thomas Schelling

u/QuiteAffable · 3 pointsr/todayilearned
u/euThohl3 · 3 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

Einstein wasn't really involved in the project, though he played a significant role in warning the US government that it was possible and how bad an idea it would have been to let the Nazis get it first. Even though he wasn't involved, he had the name recognition that the president would read something that he sent.

Oppenheimer was basically in charge of all the science during the project.

Feynman did work on it, but he was pretty young at the time, so he wasn't one of the senior people.

There's a really excellent Pulitzer Prize winning book by Richard Rhodes that describes everything, if you're interested.

u/[deleted] · 2 pointsr/engineering
  • The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes. Pulitzer Prize winner, and does a great job explaining the relationship between theoretical physics, experimental physics, and engineering.

  • Moral Machines - Wendall Wallach and Colin Allen. Explains the difficulties of getting any machine or algorithm to behave ethically. Philosophy for engineers.

  • Alan Turing: The Enigma - Andrew Hodges. Turing is just a fascinating guy, and author Hodges is an Oxford mathematician. From a reviewer: "An almost perfect match of biographer and subject."

  • Traffic - Tom Vanderbilt. A very readable, very popular overview of traffic engineering.
u/vlennstrand · 2 pointsr/sweden

Leo Szilard hade ideen och var orolig att Tyskland skulle komma först redan 1933.

~

Allmänt.
En av de bästa böckerna jag någonsin läst:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb

Håller med varje ord i denna recension. Vill tillägga de fantastiska anekdoterna:

  1. När Fermi dirigerar världens första kedjereaktion under en squash läktare i Chicago. En stoppstav hänger i ett rep från taket och en gubbe står med en yxa ...Fermi instruerar utdragande av bromsstav millimeter för millimeter, Geiger räknaren stiger och slår i botten, skiftar område, stiger och slår i botten igen, skiftar på nytt område ... Personer lyssnar på tickandet som går över i ett högfrekvent tjut och är osäkra om de ska stå kvar eller springa därifrån. Fermi är cool och deklarerar experimentet lyckat och avstängning.

  2. Det är en fin hög ("pile") det där, säger en hantlangare när uran anländer inför chicagoexperimentet. En vetenskapsman hör det, blir kritvit, sliter fram och arbetar räknestickan några minuter innan han slappnar av och säger: "Nej, det är det inte". Fotnot, en del av uranet kommer från en kapad tysk ubåt på väg till japan med det senaste i tysk teknologi, inklusive Me 262 delar).

  3. Teoretiske kärnfysikern och judinnan Lise Meitner begrundar ett brev i ett kyligt Göteborg (vädermässigt och något antisemitiskt) efter att precis ha funnit det nödvändigt att lämna Tyskland. Brevet kommer från hennes före detta kollegor och vänner, etniskt tyska vetenskapsmän som inte förstår resultatet av ett experiment de precis genomfört och ber (teoretikern) Meitner hjälpa till att förklara det. Flyktingen Meitner blir på så vis ensam i världen att först förstå att kärnvapen och kärnenergi har lämnat sfären av spekulation och nu är reell och trolig verklighet. Tyskarna (Otto Hahn bla) hade klyvt uranatomen utan att ha förstått det.

  4. Den tyska atomklyvningen tillkännages (av Nils Bohr?) på Columbia University. Den hade hemlighållits, inte av militära skäl, det kommer snart, men för att säkerställa vetenskaplig preferens, rätt personer skall få äran av upptäckten. En undergraduate springer ner i Columbias källare och upprepar det tyska experimentet innan föredraget är över.

  5. Nils Bohr smugglas till England från Danmark i ett Mosquito bombrum. Hans huvud är för stort för hjälmen och han svimmar av på vägen av syrebrist.

    >The book covers the subect on a number of levels. First is the factual story of the events leading up to the making of the bomb, which in themselves would be fascinating. For example, the fact that in two years the Manhattan Project built an industrial plant larger than the US automobile manufacturing base. That only in December of 1938 was the fission of Uranium first discovered, but the course of events were so rapid as to lead to the Trinity test in July of 1945. As a sometime program manager, but no General Groves, it was a fascinating account of the world's most significant projecct.
    The second level is a very enjoyable history of nuclear physics as the reader is lead through the discovery process from the turn of the century to thermonuclear fusion. That discovery process is the vehicle for the third and fourth levels of the book. The stories and personalities of the scientists, around the world, who added to that knowledge, what shaped and motivated their lives and how they indiviually gained insight, brilliant insight, into the riddle that was physics. I felt I got to know people like Rutherford, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard, and Teller. The fourth level was that the insight was not really individual but collaborative. This book is one of the finest descriptions of the scientific process and how this open, collaborative and communicative process works across boundaries
    .

    >http://www.amazon.com/The-Making-Atomic-Bomb-Anniversary/dp/1451677618
u/cazique · 2 pointsr/The_Donald

I guess I'm not sure what to say about your "climate cult", but scientists and engineers (and the jobs they create) will go to where the culture favors them. That was the US from the 1930s to today. Perhaps you want them to go to France now?

I strongly encourage reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

This book details how the UK, Germany, Holland, France, and Russia all had a few pieces of the puzzle, but only the USA brought the scientists and engineers together to make the first atomic bomb and fucking win WWII. It's a star-spangled version of science and industry, far better than the Moon race.

Denying climate change basically says "fuck everything we have ever learned about science and engineering in the 20th century, let's let a few rich oil fucks make a few last bucks while America rots."

I say fuck that shit, we're better than that, let's continue taking the best scientists of the world and producing the best high-end products. But we can't do that unless this country welcomes the best and the brightest. Which means we cannot be Baghdad Bob about climate change.

u/xerberos · 2 pointsr/todayilearned

I'm pretty sure this is the same incident as OP mentions. One of the researchers believed there was a small possibility that the nuclear detonation would cause a (fusion?) chain reaction in the oxygen in the atmosphere.

It is mentioned somewhere in the book The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. It's a really, really good book by the way, it won the Pulitzer Price. It's very thorough, they don't discover the electron until page 150 or so.

Anyway, the probability was very low, but they still checked the math. It's similar to the extra hearing they had when they started the Large Hadron Collider, because someone thought they could create a black hole that would devour the planet.

u/kempff · 2 pointsr/TheRedPill

If I'm reading you right (pun intended, hyuck hyuck) then I think you would also like Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb, http://www.amazon.com/The-Making-Atomic-Bomb-Anniversary/dp/1451677618

SPOILER ALERT: They all die in the end.

^(Aaand I'm going to hell for that joke.)

u/CardboardSoyuz · 2 pointsr/pics

If you want to learn more about the atomic bomb program in general, I cannot recommend these two books enough -- in many ways they cover the same stuff, but the first one is pretty short and will give you some background to make the second one, which is enormous, a little easier to stick with. My Dad worked in the 1960s for a bunch of physicists who worked on the atomic bomb (and I met a few of them as a kid), so I've always dug on atomic history.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighter_than_a_Thousand_Suns_(book)


and


https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/1451677618

u/mechtech · 2 pointsr/worldnews

https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-25th-Anniversary/dp/1451677618

This is a great book on the topic. It's much more riveting than you would think.

u/catsfive · 2 pointsr/911truth

> That figure is in one of Richard Rhodes books on nuclear weapons. He wrote three books on this subject

Would this be the same Richard Rhodes who wrote "The Making of the Atomic Bomb," which was recently released in a 25th Anniversary Edition Paperback? Obviously, there's no "shelf life" on scientific facts, but are we so niave to think that the book on nuclear weapons was closed in 1991, when the test ban treaty was signed?? No. Secret research into these weapons continued in both the US and Isreal (which, it can be said, has spied so much on the US programme that they can be said to be more advanced at this time).

> Frankly, this argument of uber bombs makes as much sense as the "nano-thermite" does.

No. Absolutely not at all. We are not talking about nukes, or nuclear weapons here. We are talking about neutron bombs, nuclear devices which put out very little explosive force (at least, in that they can be understood or compared to "yield," a la TNT). These are HIGH ENERGY bombs that are DESIGNED, from the ground up, to yield high energy like X-rays and gamma rays. They are better understood as precision nuclear demolition charges. They would fit into the size of a bread box (detonator, clock sync & timing, shielding, etc.) and could be easily synced and timed with other devices (Prager estimates that up to 30 devices were required for EACH WTC tower).

u/mrimperfect · 1 pointr/pics

This book is incredibly insightful when it comes to the science of lethal weapons.

u/Mddcat04 · 1 pointr/dataisbeautiful

The description of Hiroshima from Richard Rhodes 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' is the most terrifying thing I've ever read. That, plus the fact that modern hydrogen bombs are ~1000 times more powerful. Yikes.

u/anonyymi · 1 pointr/todayilearned

There's really interesting book about the subject called The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Highly recommended.

u/goo321 · 1 pointr/AskHistorians

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBDA2E52FB1EF80C9

wikipedia

depending on where you are from, read a book about every major war your country fought. Who's kidding who, wars are the interesting parts.

Biographies or auto-biographies are interesting.

I remember as a kid i liked, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Great_Powers

http://www.amazon.com/The-Making-Atomic-Bomb-Anniversary/dp/1451677618

Recently liked:http://www.amazon.com/Big-Bang-Origin-Universe-P-S/dp/0007162219

u/riversquid · 1 pointr/EngineeringStudents

What I liked about Skunk Works was reading about the engineering challenges and logistics of these important engineering projects. In that vein I think The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes is similar. There are other aspects thrown in, such as the background on some of the researches, the situation before, during, and after the war, and the implications of the bomb development.

If anyone has suggestions for other books like this I am interested.

u/Dynascape · 1 pointr/TotalReddit

Starship Troopers is good stuff.

I've been on a WW2 history kick. Three different books I've been reading a few chapters of each night:

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.

With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by E. B. Sledge.

Fighter Pilot: The Memoirs of Legendary Ace Robin Olds by Christina Olds.

u/TrainsareFascinating · 1 pointr/todayilearned

Richard Rhodes "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" (Pulitzer winner) is widely regarded as the best writing on the Manhattan Project, by far. Highly recommended.

u/WrestlingWoo · 1 pointr/fakehistoryporn

it can't be both?

you can't test your two different style of bombs to compare results and show an overwhelming show of force to Japan?

Do I have a linkable source or recording of somebody saying "man that one was great, let's see what the next one does"? no.

But I have read "making of the atomic bomb" by Richard Rhodes and from the information there, I myself came to the conclusion that there was a desire to test both designs.
it's a good book. I highly recommend it:
https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-25th-Anniversary/dp/1451677618

u/boot20 · 0 pointsr/Futurology

This is a rabbit hole of wrong think. Nuclear weapons were invented for war. In the broader scope, dropping two nuclear bombs on Japan probably saved the lives of both the Japanese and Americans. Also, the world was on the cusp of creating nuclear weapons anyway. Humans have always been good at killing each other and finding more efficient ways to do so.

However, the nuclear weapon project wasn't purely for nuclear weapons. It's far too complicated to explain in a reddit post, but I strongly suggest you read Energy: A Human History and The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It's a far more complex and nuanced issue than we simply created nuclear weapons.

tl;dr - your argument is a logical fallacy and ignores all nuance and complexities.