The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Amazing book. The first act is a fantastic set of tableaus about the physicists and progression of science necessary to discover the capabilities of the atom. The second act is somewhat dry, regarding mostly the politicking necessary to have made the bomb happen, but there is some decent engineering spliced in here and there. The third is about the war effort, the Trinity test, and the eventual dropping of the bomb. The last chapter is horrifying and not something I'd describe as the feel-good read of the year, but it helps to drive home just how terrible these things are.

I would strongly recommend this book to everyone.

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.

Wow. An utterly stunning read that is both illuminating and horrifying in providing a breathtaking level of historical insight and context into the scientific, political, and wartime events (across both wars) that led to the making and dropping of the first atomic bombs.

An absolute brick of a read, clocking in at almost a solid week of full-time reading (30+ hours) but the best thing I've read all year, and fully deserving of its Pulitzer.

Required reading for the 21st century I'd argue.

Turns out, a war crime doesn't become any more glamorous or less gruesome if committed with an air of moral superiority.

Exceptionally good book, but the title is misleading: It's much more about the making of modern atomic physics, and how that precipitated the bomb. They don't get to making an actual bomb until more than half way into the book. Still super interesting though and full of great side-stories about Bohr, Meitner, Einstein, you name ‘em. Should be required reading for anyone interested in physics.

This book takes a far broader approach to the topic than I was expecting. The breadth of scope helped me understand WWII society in a much more nuanced way; how different things are when our world devotes itself to destruction. I recommend wholeheartedly.

I always imagined physicist as awkward individuals holed up somewhere in seclusion where they could peer into the space time fabric in peace conjuring seemingly impossible formulas that has little relevance . This book has exposed me to the profoundness of their thoughts and the importance of physics on the modern world .

This is how history should be written.
This book is not a monotonously bland narration of events that lead to the atomic bomb. It is about how an innocuous speculation of mere existence of nuclear energy under vile pressure of world war compelled the most brilliant minds of the era into creating the most destructive weapon in the human history. This book is more about the scientists, their discoveries and philosophies than about the bomb. Every facet from science to geopolitics has been aptly covered. A must read for every curious mind.

There was quite a bit of what I was looking for, a history of the engineering and science behind the development of the first fission bomb. But it was wrapped in too much about the histories, relationships and personalities of the scientists involved. Add in the politics of the time and ethical debates and over a third of the book was about stuff I wasn't interested in.
It was deeply researched and very thorough but I wanted to know more about how such large organizations were created so fast, how the shear scale of the processing plants was managed, what new engineering techniques had to be developed to allow laboratory methods to be run as a giant industries. It was a good book, just not what I wanted. I'm glad I read it.