The Making of the Atomic Bomb
By Richard Rhodes (1986)
1 In this epic history of the Manhattan Project, Richard Rhodes seamlessly weaves perceptive and very human portraits of J. Robert Oppenheimer and other key scientists together with a thorough understanding of the technical challenges they faced and the political and military context in which they operated. Rhodes does the almost impossible—not only making nuclear physics clear (and exciting!) but reconstructing the story as it unfolded to those who lived through it. His finely wrought chapter recounting the first test of the bomb makes clear that the scientists themselves were never entirely sure until the very end that their audacious undertaking would succeed. In the awed moments after the blast, physicist Kenneth Bainbridge congratulated Oppenheimer and the other Los Alamos leaders—then observed, "Now we are all sons of bitches."
The Wizard War
By R.V. Jones (1978)
2 Like many British scientists, Jones, a 27-year-old physicist when World War II began, was desperate to contribute to the war effort but wary that the military bureaucracy would shunt him off to some menial and pointless task. In 1939, however, he was offered a role directing Britain's scientific intelligence efforts against Nazi Germany. "A man in that position could lose the war!" he exclaimed when approached about the job. "I'll take it!" Not only a brilliant scientist, Jones was a natural storyteller and a razor-sharp wit, as this insightful and often very entertaining memoir of his war years shows. His dramatic account of the cabinet meeting at which he convinced a skeptical Churchill of his conclusion that the Germans were employing a radio-beam system to guide their bombers to targets over Britain is just one of many remarkable incidents in this well-wrought tale, which underscores that the Allies did not merely outfight the Germans; they outwitted them, too.
Edited by F.H. Hinsley and
Alan Stripp (1993)
3 It has been nearly four decades since the wall of secrecy surrounding the Allies' successful effort to break the German Enigma cipher first cracked open, and much has been written about the code breakers of Britain's Bletchley Park since then. But no single book has managed to pull the story together in all its scientific, military, and human complexity. Until one does, this collection of 30 essays by men and women who worked at Bletchley offers the best introduction. Their reminiscences include vivid snapshots of the brilliant and eccentric cast of linguists, mathematicians and scholars who came together under the unlikeliest of circumstances to carry out this vital task—and the improvisation, imagination and tedium it entailed. Technical aspects are well covered, but the most poignant recollection is that of Walter Eytan, who had been a lecturer in Medieval German at Oxford and after the war became director of Israel's Foreign Ministry. As head of Bletchley's German translation section, he one day read a decoded German message reporting the transportation of Jews "for the final solution." Eytan recalled: "I had never seen or heard this expression before, but instinctively I knew what it must mean, and I have never forgotten that moment."
By Samuel Goudsmit (1947)
4 The first five Allied vehicles to enter Paris on its day of liberation were tanks; the sixth was a jeep carrying Samuel Goudsmit, a Dutch-born American theoretical physicist who had been entrusted with one of the most dangerous and urgent scientific tasks of the war—to discover how far along the Germans were in developing an atomic bomb of their own. His short memoir is a thrilling combination of detective story and scientific deduction. Dodging gunfire, Goudsmit raced to the Curie Institute that first day in Paris to begin his frantic hunt for clues. The climax came five months later in Strasbourg, where following right on the heels of Patton's troops Goudsmit unearthed a trove of abandoned documents revealing that the Nazi scientists had not succeeded even in producing a sustained nuclear chain reaction or separating the reactive isotope of uranium. Recent evidence has affirmed Goudsmit's scathing rejection of the disingenuous postwar claims by German physicist Werner Heisenberg that he had deliberately prevented the Nazi bomb program from succeeding.
Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry
By Thomas McMahon (1970)
5 This roman a clef of the Manhattan Project captures the utter surreality of life at Los Alamos during the war: the stark desert isolation, the pressure-cooker scientific intensity and the candid fact that for many of the project's members this would be the most exciting intellectual experience of their lives. "The real truth was that we were having a ball," says one of the physicists in Thomas McMahon's novel. A lyrical coming-of-age tale told from the point of view of the teenage son of one of the Los Alamos scientists, it is also a subtle exploration of the paradoxical blend of egotism and selflessness that drives scientific creativity. McMahon, a Harvard engineering professor who wrote four beautifully quirky novels before his untimely death in 1999, at age 55, excels at getting inside the minds of scientists at work; the unsettling question his narrator poses at the end is whether, as a physicist himself in the postwar decades, he will find anything half as interesting to work on in a world of peace.