"Twenty-five years after its initial publication, The Making of the Atomic Bomb remains the definitive history of nuclear weapons and the Manhattan Project. From the turn-of-the-century discovery of nuclear energy to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan, Richard Rhodes's Pulitzer Prize-winning book details the science, the people, and the socio-political realities that led to the development of the atomic bomb. This sweeping account begins in the 19th century, with the discovery of nuclear fission, and continues to World War Two and the Americans' race to beat Hitler's Nazis. That competition launched the Manhattan Project and the nearly overnight construction of a vast military-industrial complex that culminated in the fateful dropping of the first bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Reading like a character-driven suspense novel, the book introduces the players in this saga of physics, politics, and human psychology--from FDR and Einstein to the visionary scientists who pioneered qu

Describes in human, political, and scientific detail the complete story of how the bomb was developed, from the turn-of-the-century discovery of the power of the atom, to the first bombs dropped on Japan.

In this work of history, science, and politics, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb tells for the first time the secret story of how and why the hydrogen bomb was made. This book traces the path by which "the Bomb," the supreme artifact of twentieth-century science and technology, became the defining issue of the Cold War, and reveals how close the world came to nuclear destruction before the United States and the former Soviet Union learned the lesson of nuclear stalemate. This stalemate, the author makes clear, forced the superpowers to a tenuous truce for more than four decades, in the end bankrupting and destroying the Communist state and foreclosing world-scale war. From the day in September 1941 when the first word of Anglo-American atomic-bomb research arrived in Moscow via Soviet espionage, to the week of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when Curtis LeMay goaded President Kennedy to attack the USSR with everything in the US arsenal, this book is full

This book presents the first photographic record of the Manhattan Project - the United States Government-sponsored effort to build an atomic device - and its publication coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the development of the atomic bomb. The compelling photographs from the Manhattan Project, by turns specific, abstract, dramatic, and surreal, offer a multifaceted look at history. Photographs of landscapes and of construction, of scientific experiments and their results, are framed against official portraits and casual snapshots. In gathering these materials the authors, Rachel Fermi and Esther Samra, have had unprecedented access to the personal archives of many physicists and their families, as Rachel is the granddaughter of Enrico Fermi, one of the key participants in the Manhattan Project.