The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Richard Rhodes tells the story of the atomic bomb from the first discoveries about the structure of the atom in the early twentieth century to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The history opens with physicist Leo Szilard on a London street in 1933, imagining a nuclear chain reaction, and follows the scientists who turned that idea into a weapon, among them Niels Bohr, Lise Meitner, Enrico Fermi, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller. Rhodes explains the physics in plain terms while tracing the politics of the war, the vast industrial effort of the Manhattan Project and the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert. The book won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. It suits adult readers interested in science, history and the ethics of modern warfare.