The Making of the Atomic Bomb
The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a history book written by the American journalist and historian Richard Rhodes, first published by Simon & Schuster in 1987. The book won multiple awards, including Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The narrative covers people and events from early 20th century discoveries leading to the science of nuclear fission, through the Manhattan Project and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Author
1986
United States
886 (hardcover)
623.4/5119/09 19
QC773 .R46 1986
Background[edit]
Before writing The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes already authored several fiction books, and worked as an independent journalist. He liked science writing, though his only training, in his own words, was "a course at Yale that we called Physics for Poets". When he started to work on the book he found out that "the early papers in nuclear physics were written very clearly".[1]
Subsequent books[edit]
In 1992, Rhodes followed it up by compiling, editing, and writing the introduction to an annotated version of The Los Alamos Primer, by Manhattan Project scientist Robert Serber. The Primer was a set of lectures given to new arrivals at the secret Los Alamos Laboratory during wartime to get them up to speed about the prominent questions needing to be solved in bomb design, and had been largely declassified in 1965, but was not widely available.[18][19]
In 1994, Rhodes published Nuclear Renewal: Common Sense about Energy detailing the history of the nuclear power industry in the United States, and future promises of nuclear power.[20] In 1995 he published a sequel to The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, which told the story of the atomic espionage during World War II, the debates over whether the hydrogen bomb ought to be produced, and the eventual creation of the bomb and its consequences for the arms race.[21] In 2007, Rhodes published Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race, a chronicle of the arms buildups during the Cold War, especially focusing on Mikhail Gorbachev and the Reagan administration.[22][23] The Twilight of the Bombs, the fourth and final volume in his series on nuclear history, was published in 2010. The book documents, among other topics, the post-Cold War nuclear history of the world, nuclear proliferation, and nuclear terrorism.[24]