With a new Introduction by the author, the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning epic about how the atomic bomb came to be.
In rich, human, political, and scientific detail, here is the complete story of the nuclear bomb.
Few great discoveries have evolved so swiftly-or have been so misunderstood. From the theoretical discussions of nuclear energy to the bright glare of Trinity there was a span of hardly more than twenty-five years. What began merely as an interesting speculative problem in physics grew into the Manhattan Project, and then into the Bomb with frightening rapidity, while scientists known only to their peers-Szilard, Teller, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Meitner, Fermi, Lawrence, and von Neumann-stepped from their ivory towers into the limelight.
Richard Rhodes takes us on that journey step-by-step, minute by minute, and gives us the definitive story of man's most awesome discovery and invention. "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" is at once a narrative tour de force and a document as powerful as its subject.|Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS after its initial publication, The Making of the Atomic Bomb remains the seminal and complete story of how the bomb was developed, from the turn-of-the-century discovery of the vast energy locked inside the atom to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan.
Few great discoveries have evolved so swiftly-or have been so misunderstood. From the theoretical discussions of nuclear energy to the bright glare of Trinity, there was a span of hardly more than twenty-five years. What began as merely an interesting speculative problem in physics grew into the Manhattan Project, and then into the bomb, with frightening rapidity, while scientists known only to their peers-Szilard, Teller, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Meitner, Fermi, Lawrence, and von Neumann-stepped from their ivory towers into the limelight.
Richard Rhodes gives the definitive story of man's most awesome discovery and invention. Told in rich human, political, and scientific detail, The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a narrative tour de force and a document with literary power commensurate with its subject.