Review: The Making of the Atomic Bomb

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
My rating: X of 5 stars

This book was made for that subset of the college university educated population who double-majored in history and physical sciences because it sometimes feels like it's having an identity crisis in whether it's a history or science textbook. (History of science text for sure though.)

The scientific explanations in particular were technical enough to the point where a layman who didn't study Physics in college would probably struggle a bit to keep up-- I certainly struggled even after studying it for an engineering degree. And at the same time, it's just dryly written enough in its citation of historical events that you know it was written by an academic historian.

So why did I subject myself to this nearly 1000-page behemoth for the better part of this year? Surely not because "oh Oppenheimer is coming out this year," because I only made it to the film release with half of the book done and not the half that actually mattered for the movie given Oppenheimer hadn't been introduced yet (Niels Bohr though *heart*).

Yet it felt apt to be able to put names and sometimes faces to all of the individuals who were involved in making the atomic bomb happen, and there are A LOT of them. Too many names to keep track of even within a single chapter to be honest. But unlike Oppenheimer to some extent, it does give appropriate heft and weight in terms of the combined human efforts needed, and just how monumental an undertaking it was to make the bomb happen in as short of a time it did, with just enough WWII history sprinkled in there to give you a sense of the urgency and constraints the scientists were working with.

But does all of that justify what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

I don't know if there will ever be a truly satisfying answer to that question, and not here of all places. When you consider things within the wider context of humanity's propensity for killing its own kind across history... it is shocking the technical extent to which we will go when given the right combination of timing of discoveries and opportunity. This book's length alone speaks to that technical extent.

You do get both the background for the official wartime justification (with interesting insight into the European front, comparison with Dresden, etc) and the actual on-the-ground impact on Japanese civilians-- having just visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum this year, I won't say it's as complete in picture as that, but it's significant enough to convey some of the human cost.

Yet at the end of the day, I think another book would be better served to examine the philosophical, moral side of this, while also weighing the historical context and the fact that we live in a very different time today that learned heavy lessons from the wars. The ultimate hope is that we never again approach a point where such destruction feels... necessary... or that our governments at least never feel the way that the US did in the 1940's.

But that assumes that the people leading the charge of our future have also learned from this history.

I can only hope (and vote) that they do.