7/5 stars for how impressed I was with the accomplishment of this book. 3/5 stars for the general reading experience for someone like me who is more interested in history and politics than nuclear physics. But in the end it cannot be anything but 5 stars for this beast of a book.

Boy (or girl), was this an impressive read in sheer scope, ambitiousness and storytelling. The author writes in an appealing style and seamlessly interweaves the technical aspects of pursuing nuclear physics - and ultimately the bomb - with the progress of world political history before and during WW2. At the same time you get a close personal view of the key personalities in the world of physics - not least Oppenheimer and Bohr (of course I’m biased to mention my fellow Dane;-) - and later on the decision makers in the US government.

BUT (because there is a major but..) at the same time the book is so technically complex at times, often spending several pages describing the trial and error of nuclear physics/quantum mechanics, characteristics of individual nuclear atoms etc. that I simply had to skim-read until the author got back to the realm of the English language where ordinary people can keep up. So in a sense the book would have been a better reading-experience FOR ME if it was 30 % shorter and had stuck to the broader lines of physical pioneering and world history. That doesn’t mean that it should be though since this seems like the definitive account of the nuclear bomb.

So.. I rarely spend 3 months finishing a book, but this was surely a mountain to climb due to sheer length (750 closely written pages) and complexity. And my feelings are mixed - but in the end it feels worth my while to have finished the job. But you definitely need to be highly interested in the topic, before I can recommend jumping in to this book :-)

….So next for me now is Benjamin Labatut’s ‘The Maniac’ - which I’m already enjoying immensely - but also feels a bit like young-adult-autofiction after reading Richard Rhodes’ mammoth!

This book is one of the few I have ever read that is able to correctly capture the essence of scientific inquiry and progress. Rhodes is able to show through the production of the atomic bomb that scientific progress is hardly ever a linear path followed by a single individual but a forked adventure that a community of people must wonder through almost blindly. The fact Rhodes is not a scientist by training makes this accomplishment even more impressive.

The book is a large time investment and probably a more difficult read for people of a non-scientific background. However, it is well worth a read for anyone interested in how an expert text should be written for major milestones in human history and those interested in the conditions that produced a weapon with the ability to destroy humanity. Thoroughly enjoyable.

A monumental achievement, both by Rhodes and by everyone who makes it through the full book.

What do you even say about a book like this?

Superb. A very long, detailed account of the history of the Manhattan Project, beginning with turn of the century physics. The final chapter, on the aftermath at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, stands as a horrific counterpoint to the rest of the book. It's as if the reader, like the scientists, also gets sucked into the project to make these weapons, suspending rational analysis of the uses to which they will be put.

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos lab, chief designer of the atomic bomb, and a polymath with mystic and leftist inclinations, had the perfect quote for the first artificial dawn of an atomic explosion. There are many ways in which we die: disease, age, accident, violence. And many ways in which we might all die; suddenly in the wake of some cosmological catastrophe or slowly starving on a dying planet. With the atom bomb, it was now possible for a single individual, at the top of a chain of technological and political commitments, to kill almost everyone in the space of an afternoon. The bombs were only used in anger twice, punctuation to end the global slaughter of the Second World War. Since then, history has existed under the shadow of a potential mushroom cloud. This book is the story of how we got there.

Rhodes takes almost the first half of the book to establish the basic science and personalities of the atomic bomb. The first half of the 20th century was a golden age for physics which will likely never be equaled, as imaginative theorists and skilled experimenters probed the basic building blocks of the universe. Rutherford and Bohr nailed down, for the first time in evidence rather than speculation, the basic building blocks of matter. Atoms had most of their mass in a small nucleus, and owed their chemical properties to the quantum behavior of electron shells. The neutron was added to the list of fundamental particles. New elements were created by neutron bombardment, and by the late 1930s it was widely known that uranium would fission on bombardment, splitting into two lighter elements, and releasing a large deal of energy. There positive glee of work in this field, at this time, comes through in Rhodes' able biographical sketches of the scientists involved, particularly Bohr, Fermi, and Szilard.

Szilard was the first to think of the potential of a fission chain reaction. If some substance, on absorbing a neutron split and released two or more neutrons, could produce a great deal of energy in millionths of a second. It would be a bomb of stupendous power, a city-smasher. Politically perceptive, Szilard had been helping Jewish physicists flee the Nazis for years. He had hoped for an H.G. Wells inspired international coalition to peacefully control this new power, but in 1939 if the bomb was too be invented, best by the Americans or British rather than Hitler.

The next section, building the bomb, is less fun. Bohr predicted that you would need to turn all of America into a factory to build a bomb, and that is what the Manhattan project did, mobilizing thousands of scientists, $2 billion, and massive plants to do the hard work of separating fissile U-235 and Plutonium from natural uranium. Bureaucratic confusion and balky precision engineering made the task anything but easy. The other powers pursued the bomb. The British sent over their best to help with the Manhattan project. Germany's team, lead by Heisenberg, never had the necessary priority in the Reich, and were stalled by clever British-Norwegian sabotage directed at a heavy water production facility required for the Nazi reactor design. Japan never had access to the raw material to move beyond theory.

The last section is grimmer yet. The design of the bomb was an exercise in precision, in delicately engineered explosive lenses to make the implosion to critical mass happen smoothly in nanoseconds. Tibbetts' B-29 bomber group trained to a razor's edge to accomplish the mission of deploying the 'gadget'. Roosevelt, on approving the Manhattan project, had instinctively reserved the bomb to himself as President. In 1945, Vice President Truman had not been read into the project until he succeeded to the presidency. The bomb was used on Hiroshima because it could be, because the Japanese still resisted, and because something had to be shown for the effort invested. It was a crime, a mass-murder in an instant. Rhodes does not flinch from the horror of Hiroshima.

Personally, I think we need to distinguish between the bomb's use at the end of the Second World War, where it seems a matter of degree compared to area bombing rather than kind, and its use now, where that would signal breaking the nuclear taboo. This does not absolve the scientists who built the bomb of their responsibility. Nature's secrets were all around, and once fission had been theorized it was probably only a matter of time before someone figured out how to make it work, but these people made a choice to build Death a supersonic jet bomber to replicate his tired old horse.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a penetrating look at the most consequential scientific and political moment of the 20th century. I'd give it six stars, if I could. It is also my 1000th review on Goodreads!

Greatest non-fiction book I have ever read.