The Making of the Atomic Bomb

By Richard Rhodes, Simon & Schuster, 1986, 788 pages
Reviewed by Jim Stasiowski, Oct. 7, 2020

You’re the second-smartest – Einstein is still alive at the time of this tale – person in the world. You get hired to invent a product, and you overcome a million doubts from a billion doubters to get it done. The first time it is used as intended, the product works spectacularly well, so well that your ecstatic boss telephones to thank and praise you.

Your response to the boss: “Everybody is feeling reasonably good about it …”

“Reasonably good?” Really? You just did the impossible, and that’s what you come up with?

Why the reticence? Excessive humility? Overmedicated? Poor phone connection?

Nothing so simple, if you’re Julius Robert Oppenheimer, known as Oppie. You just led the Manhattan Project, the extraordinary World War II accomplishment of creating the atomic bomb, and your boss, Brigadier General Leslie Groves, is calling to tell you about the Aug. 6, 1945, dropping of it on the city of Hiroshima, Japan, a detonation that immediately kills 100,000 Japanese and ultimately, because of lingering radiation sickness, ends up killing another 100,000.

Which is why the “feeling” is only “reasonably good.”

Oppenheimer and many other brilliant scientists gave up coveted jobs, mostly at the highest level of U.S. universities in lively urban areas, to cloister themselves in a pioneer outpost on the isolated New Mexico highlands to solve the knottiest, and nastiest, of physics problems: creating in a single small package history’s most efficient mass killer.

“The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” a deliberately colorless title (in white letters on a violently yellow-on-orange cover) for a most challenging book, will be best appreciated by readers with advanced degrees in physics. Its author, the much-praised Richard Rhodes – “Making” won him a Pulitzer – had nearly as many difficult decisions to make as Oppenheimer and his colleagues: Explain every intricacy of nuclear fission, or welcome the ignorant reader? Focus on the torment of the practitioners of science at its highest, admirable people who love physics for its purity but are caught up in the U.S.’s need for a weapon that will kill unprecedented numbers of the enemy? Dig into the Nazis’ efforts to create their own bomb? And how about the Russian problem? Stalin and company were U.S. wartime allies; morally, is it justifiable to withhold from them the science of mass destruction?

Rhodes, to both his credit and the book’s detriment, tried to answer all those questions. Ethically, he did the right thing, he did what most moral historians do, he covered it all. But is an author fulfilling his responsibility to his readers if he places his scientific knowledge too far beyond the ability of most readers to understand it all?

I first read “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” in the 1980s. I was thrilled by the inside look at such an extraordinary project, and as an aficionado of all histories of World War II, I wanted to devour the book.

But it was a gourmet meal, way too filling for my Taco Bell intellect. I frequently went several pages of reading but not comprehending, so long and deep were the physics problems, experiments, arguments, formulas, behaviors of neutrons, etc. When some innovative effort that befuddled me paid off in advancing the science, the physicists were elated, not unlike the less gifted of us who consider winning a poker hand a breakthrough for mankind.

Those moments in the book were semi-rewarding because I could understand the elation, but the rewards were tempered because I didn’t understand the equations.

My recent re-reading of “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” alternated between exasperation and enjoyment. It is true, the intervening nearly four decades of spending long nights in bars that enticed me with free pretzels when I could have been studying nuclear physics probably impeded the broadening of my comprehension; but the book’s seemingly never-ending cycles of hypothesis-failure-pessimism-encouragement-improvement-progress-success-elation-hypothesis-failure … (rinse and repeat) made my effort worthwhile.

I was especially lifted up by Oppenheimer, a lifelong self-loather and apparently a hard-to-deal-with fellow both before and after the Manhattan Project he organized. But at the spartan Los Alamos site, he was a changed man, revered as a boss, a convivial party-thrower, a genius who needed only the most significant physics challenge in history to tap into his humanity.

And yes, it is a paradox that his humanity emerged in the creation of the world’s most inhuman weapon. Late in the book, Rhodes points out that Oppenheimer was hardly the only person ever to find his true self in war.

Readers get to wrestle, as did Oppie and many others, with the most brutal equation of all: To end the war, an invasion of Japan might cost, in slogging ground combat, more than a million lives, American and Japanese; were the hundreds of thousands of victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in two brisk strokes from above, worth it?

Rhodes presents both sides in agonizing detail.

Although Oppenheimer is the most prominent figure in “Making,” he is hardly the only compelling character. Neils Bohr, the Dane whose stature as both scientist and deep thinker outstripped even Einstein’s, is the most human of the supporting cast. He tried, futilely but fervently, to warn of the ultimate, inevitable outcome of atomic-bomb research. Leo Szilard, a Hungarian, from the first page of the book to the end displays both his brilliance and bullheadedness as he unlocks the secrets of atoms, then campaigns against the bomb. Even Einstein, in a supporting role, makes the key political contact that leads to the creation of the Manhattan Project.

Along the way, the conflicts reach to infinity. You probably have never heard of Seth Neddermeyer or George Kistiakowsky, possessors of no doubt the two longest last names of any mano-a-mano opponents in the history of physics.

For the research to bear fruit, the two had to collaborate on Neddermeyer’s crucial contribution: perfecting the implosion that would trigger the explosion. (Yeah, it’s just what you think: The implosion collapses inwardly, triggering the outward, deadly boom.)

Their clash – would you want to referee a battle of expertise between two heavyweight physicists? – was inevitable. Kistiakowsky gave Oppie three choices to resolve their disagreements, all three of which would end their work together. Oppie chose a fourth: Kistiakowsky was to be the boss, Neddermeyer the subordinate. Oppie, desperate for compromise, pleaded with the loser: “I hope you will be able to accept it.”

Rhodes writes: “With enduring bitterness Neddermeyer did.”

It worked, as did the bomb, but considering all that has happened since Aug. 6, 1945, there can be no more fitting description of the modern world than: “With enduring bitterness … .”