Book Review: The Making of the Atomic Bomb

This morning I finally finished reading The Making of the Atomic Bomb, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Richard Rhodes. It's the story of the development of the atomic bomb, and calling it exhaustive would be doing it a disservice. The book starts in the late 1800s, when atomic theory was just being fleshed out, and goes past the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Along the way, Rhodes does a wonderful job of organizing and analyzing primary sources that really paint a picture of the men (and a few women) involved in theorizing and developing the bomb. What struck me was that they felt so strongly that their work had the potential to really save the world, to end war forever. The idea was that if people saw what the atomic bomb was capable of, there would develop among the nations of the world that it was best just never to use it again. This gave their work during the war on the Manhattan Project a sense of purpose and practicality that's not always present in scientific research.

Of course, the development of the atomic bomb did not end war. But the demonstration of its power still echoes through the years, as evidenced by the concept of mutually assured destruction that (in part) kept the Cold War from turning hot. The Soviets and the Americans knew what would happen if either fired a nuclear weapon at the other. This was Niels Bohr's attitude at the end of World War II:

Bohr visited the statesmen of his day to explain it but chose to be diplomatic rather than blunt. He explained that with the coming of nuclear weapons the world would arrive at an entirely new situation that could not be resolved by war. The situation might be resolved by statesmen sitting down together and negotiating for mutual security. If they did so, the inevitable outcome of such negotiations, given the understandable suspicion on every side, must be an open world.

Of course, Bohr's view was simplistic, but he was a scientist by training and not a politician. In hindsight it seems obvious that, instead of more openness, the development of atomic weapons by enemies would lead to an arms race and mutual suspicion. More recently, it has provided a convenient excuse for pre-emptive war - the specter of nuclear holocaust initiated by a rogue regime gave George W. Bush a chance to overthrow his family's nemesis, Saddam Hussein.

It can be argued, though, that the atomic bomb may have ended the possibility of wars between states armed with the weapon; we'll know soon enough with Iran and, perhaps more immediately, North Korea. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project, was of this view:

Oppenheimer had already found succinct metaphoric expression of that change [that the atomic bomb had affected in the world] in a commencement address he delivered early in 1946. "It did not take atomic weapons to make war terrible," he said then. "...It did not take atomic weapons to make man want peace, a peace that would last. But the atomic bomb was the turn of the screw. It has made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country."

The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a well-constructed combination of science, history, and policy implications. The latter are discussed mostly in the book's epilogue, the bulk of the book being a history of atomic research and the science behind it. I don't think you have to be a scientist to get an appreciation for the furious pace of research and development that was involved in the Manhattan Project, but people who have been involved in research will be interested in the story of those whose research changed the world in real time. It's an experience that most of us don't get the chance to have, to be sure.
In addition to his description of the research behind the bomb, Rhodes is exhaustive in discussing the horrific aftermath of the world's first nuclear explosion over a populated area. He also discusses the mass killing strategies of earlier times, such as poison gas in WWI and firebombing in Europe during WWII. The atomic bomb, however, dwarfed every method of indiscriminate death that had come before. I.I. Rabi wrote this:

The lesson we should learn from all this, and the frightening thing which we did learn in the course of the war, was...how easy it is to kill people when you turn your mind to it. When you turn the resources of modern science to the problem of killing people, you realize how vulnerable they really are.

It's impossible to read this book and not come away disgusted by the practice of war, whether it involves atomic weapons or not. The only difference between the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, the firebombing of Dresden in the same year, and the "Shock and Awe" Iraq bombing campaign in 2003 is one of scale. According to the Iraq Body Count's Dossier of Civilian Casualties in Iraq, 6616 civilians were killed during the opening bombing phase of the 2003 campaign. This is a fraction of the ~25,000 killed in Dresden and a smaller fraction of the 140,000 who were killed in Hiroshima, but it should still be abhorrent to civilized, sane people.

I would recommend this book for anyone who enjoys reading about history or science. Since I'm interested in both, this book was a fascinating read; it's almost 800 pages long, and I would have been happy if it were twice that. Rhodes is a wonderful writer, and he integrates his primary sources seamlessly into his analysis. It's easy to see why this book won as many awards as it did.