The Making of the Atomic Bomb
This book, sent to me by fellow-blogger Missy Ween, was fascinating, hard to put down, and paradoxically hard to read.  The first third of the book was an enthralling history of the scientific inquiry into the nature of the atom.  It was also a minor crash-course in basic nuclear physics, as seen through the minds of the brilliant theorists and experimentalists who speculated about the atom’s nature.  From Marie Curie to Robert Oppenheimer, through dozens of unfamiliar names and the details of their work and their equally fascinating personal lives, Richard Rhodes makes an unwieldy and complex story out of the converging threads of nuclear history.  The many physicists who were forced to take refuge in England and America because of Hitler and Mussolini’s violence against Jews, the few who did heroic and relentless work helping them escape, the many who did not see clearly the possible results of their enormous effort, all have a voice in this narrative.
The book’s difficulty comes not where one would expect – attempting to understand the complexities of physics – but in the description of the horrors of war. Â From the firebombing of Dresden to aftermath of Hiroshima, detail is not spared and the accounts are often first-hand. Â One thing the book makes clear is that the effects of the A-bomb were not particularly original, but simply more total. Â Both the Allies and the Axis powers had deliberately and frequently targeted civilians – under various euphemisms and justifications. Â The A-bomb did that much more powerfully. Â What strikes me about the knowledge of such accumulated horror, isn’t that war and death are so much more awful than I’d thought, but that love and honor and bravery and kindness and courage are so much greater than I’d imagined them to be. Â The more my understanding of the sins of the world increases, the more awed I am that so much virtue has persisted in the face of them. Â Modern warfare is not so much more horrible than all the death and disease that have plagued this earth since the Fall, we are always teetering on the brink of death and, worse, damnation. Â And yet Truth, Goodness, and Beauty yet abound.
Rhodes ends his book with an Epilogue devoted to the virtues of the religion of science. Â He derives from one of the great physicists of the story, Neils Bohr, the idea that an open world based on the principles of scientific community, could have brought about a world peace after World War Two and prevented the arms race of the Cold War. Â I have rarely read such an open declaration of allegiance to science before, although most people I know can hardly formulate what they mean by “science” and still unquestioningly assume its supremacy. Â Rhodes emphasizes politicians failure to follow Bohr’s suggestions about how to establish the openness policy, but he fails to explicate either how anyone imagined this successfully working, or where authority, moral and otherwise, was to be derived from. Â The Epilogue is suggestive, but finally ends in little more Enlightenment wishful-thinking. Â Our world is immeasurably more open than it was in 1986, and yet it looks less and less like Bohr imagined.
I think this book belongs, along with a history of the Holocaust, on that basic shelf of books one must read to consider themselves an informed member of the modern world. Â There are certainly books of better philosophy to read (Augustine anyone?) but an understanding of this development in physics, and for what is (inadvertently) revealed about the weaknesses of science as a belief system, I think it is a must-read.