The Making of the Atomic Bomb

The Making of the Atomic Bomb is the definitive history of the invention that divided the twentieth century, told across nearly nine hundred pages that read with the momentum of a novel. Richard Rhodes begins not at Los Alamos but in London in 1933, with Leo Szilard stepping off a curb as the idea of a nuclear chain reaction assembles itself in his mind, and the first third of the book is a history of modern physics itself, Rutherford's laboratory, Bohr's institute, the discovery of the neutron and then, in Nazi Germany in 1938, of fission, each step rendered so clearly that the science becomes character development. Then the emigres, many of them Jewish refugees from the Reich, carry the fear of a German bomb to America, and the book becomes the epic of the Manhattan Project: Oppenheimer improvising a secret city on a New Mexico mesa, General Groves building an industry the size of the automobile business in three years, Hanford and Oak Ridge, the Trinity test, and the two mornings over Japan, which Rhodes narrates at ground level, from the burned schoolchildren and the doctors working in the ruins, in chapters that refuse the abstraction everything else in the story tempts. He interviewed surviving participants and mastered the archives, and his moral register is exact: wonder at the physics, awe at the organization, and unflinching accounting of what the achievement did. The book won the 1987 National Book Award for Nonfiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.