What's a good short book/resource on the making of the atomic bomb?

October 21, 2019 4:35 PM

A good friend of mine is seeing the play "Copenhagen" (Michael Frayn) next year which centres around the meeting of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the middle of WWII. He wanted to know more of the background. He tried reading Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb, but it goes into too much detail for his needs. Is there something better that you would recommend?
posted by storybored to Media & Arts (13 answers total)

Tom Zollener's Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock That Shaped the World is eminently readable.
posted by General Malaise at 4:40 PM on October 21, 2019

The movie Fat Man and Little Boy is realistic-ish, but condensed a few people into the main character. I’d bounced off the Rhodes before but the movie gave me enough context and curiosity to ask this question (and then super-enjoy the Rhodes).
posted by supercres at 4:47 PM on October 21, 2019

Rhodes is pretty readable, though admittedly long, so I'm not sure I'd recommend a straight history book. The National Museum of Nuclear Science and History sells this beautifully illustrated and accurate nonfiction graphic novel, titled Trinity by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm.
posted by wnissen at 5:30 PM on October 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

While the Feynman books get mentions in the last thread, it's now clear that Feynman — undoubtedly brilliant theoretical physicist that he was — also went through life deliberately getting into situations that he could retell as great stories about himself. This is ultimately more tiresome than entertaining and detracts from the politics and personalities around the project.
posted by scruss at 6:01 PM on October 21, 2019

Steve Sheinkin won a ton of awards for his Bomb a few (8?) years ago. It was written for kids, but I found it a page turner. It’s something under 200 pp.
posted by carterk at 6:19 PM on October 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

I don't have much constructive to say, except the audio book of the Making of the Atomic Bomb is good, and if your friend simply wants to avoid coming into the play cold, there is a BBC movie version that is quite good.

But at the risk of stating the obvious, the atom bomb comes after the events of Copenhagen. So if your friend gets all his background by reading a slim book about the atom bomb there's a pretty good chance that he'll know a lot about the exciting story that is the Manhattan project, but very little about early 20th century European physics or the German cultural/political context that is far more relevant to the Copenhagen meeting.
posted by caek at 9:17 PM on October 21, 2019 [7 favorites]

If you like comics, the graphic book Trinity is really, really good.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 4:43 AM on October 22, 2019

You may be over-thinking it. Copenhagen is a very good play. It is about human matters, not scientific matters. I didn't find I needed any kind of preparation to appreciate it.

That said, there was a great game by Infocom called Trinity, which provides a surprisingly large amount of background about the A-Bomb. Since Infocom is defunct, you can play the game for free here.
posted by ubiquity at 6:44 AM on October 22, 2019 [1 favorite]

I also really enjoyed The Girls of Atomic City: The untold story of the women who helped win World War II. I believe a series was based on it. My friends who grew up there say that the social stuff pretty faithfully shares what it was like to grow up in the city that had no name.
posted by answergrape at 6:53 AM on October 22, 2019

Speaking of Trinity, games blogger Jimmy Maher has a 9-part series of in-depth, accessible articles about that game and about the history that it discusses. It uses the game as a lens but it's a highly informative overview of every aspect of the making of the bomb. This is the first installment.
posted by zeusianfog at 9:51 AM on October 22, 2019

I had the pleasure of seeing the second half of Copenhagen earlier this year. (We were several minutes late due to getting lost trying to find parking, and had to wait until intermission to enter.) If your friend is just looking for information on the making of the atomic bomb as an exercise in immersing in one aspect of an event that occurred at the time, I'd suggest Feynman's memoirs. Yes, Feynman was a self-promoter and had a number of unpleasant character traits, but he was also a wonderful writer and a good story-teller, and his stories about working at Los Alamos are entertaining and interesting, and give a sense of what it was like to be a scientist there.

However, from what I saw of it, the making of the atomic bomb isn't really directly relevant background to Copenhagen. It really is more a story about the friendship and professional relationship between Heisenberg and Bohr, and what it was like for them as they overturned physical orthodoxy, and how their different personalities clashed and complemented each other, and the critical role that Margrethe Bohr played in performing both emotional and intellectual labor in facilitating their partnership, and the incredible tension of Heisenberg's Nazi sympathies underlying it all. I have a bachelor's degree in physics, and I definitely found my appreciation of the story was enriched by having at least some understanding of quantum mechanics and the Copenhagen Interpretation that they developed, but the nucleus of the story is the human relationships, and the non-physicists I saw the play with had no trouble following the story.

But, if your friend does want some relevant scientific/historical background before seeing the play (which as I say is not necessary but could enrich their enjoyment), I think it would be more relevant to read up on the history of the early development of quantum mechanics, rather than on the atomic bomb. This really was a fascinating moment in the history of science, with radical figures like Heisenberg and Bohr insisting that experiments and mathematics demanded overturning everything we thought we knew about physics. I'm afraid I don't have a great recommendation, as the version of this history that I know is more the "folk history" that physicists tell their students rather than the true history that a historian would write a book about, but this article has a list of 10 books recommended by an MIT physicist for introductions to both QM and the history of QM.
posted by biogeo at 9:16 PM on October 22, 2019

I agree that it's much more human story than a technical one, but if you want history, to my mind the most relevant is Jeremy Bernstein's Hitler's Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall.

Much of the intrigue in Copenhagen revolves around how far the Germans got in their nuclear program, how aware they were of the Allied efforts, and what Heisenberg's intentions were. We still don't know, which is part of the uncertainty(!) Copenhagen deals with, but some insight comes from the recordings of German nuclear scientists (including Heisenberg) that were made when they were imprisoned in Farm Hall on the day that the bomb was dropped. The recordings reveal their scientific and emotional reactions to the news -- and more than a little of their personalities.

In the book, Jeremy Bernstein [a historian and physicist who worked on the Manhattan project -- link goes to his Web of Stories page, which is fascinating in its own right] provides not only the transcript of the Farm Hall recordings, but also footnotes and explanations to give the conversations scientific & historic context.

And bonus, because it's a transcript, Hitler's Uranium Club reads like a play.
posted by Westringia F. at 4:50 AM on October 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

Your friend might also enjoy science historian Alex Wellerstein's blog post/essay Historical thoughts on Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen. The comments (there are only a few) are also worth reading.
posted by Westringia F. at 4:57 AM on October 23, 2019 [1 favorite]