Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians

By: Kelly, Cynthia C.

Book Overview

The definitive collection of writings on the Manhattan Project by the pre-eminent scientists, historians, and the everyday observers who bore witness to the birth of the modern nuclear age.

Begun in 1939, the Manhattan Project eventually employed more than 130,000 people, including our foremost scientists and thinkers, and cost nearly $2 billion, while operating under a shroud of absolute secrecy. This groundbreaking collection of documents,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1579128084
• ISBN13: 9781579128081
• Release Date: February 2009
• Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
• Length: 495 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 5.9" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Interesting book.

It is always a pleasure to review a good book. Cynthia Kelly should be complimented for her intelligent chioce of the items for this anthology. The prefaces to the chapters and the items are well written, concise, but fully povide the needed background. Even for those who are familiar with the History of the Manhattan Project, the book reads like a thriller. The last two chapters can serve as an introduction to Richard Rhodes's "Arsenls of Folly".

Total Destruction

The Manhattan Project is a excellent book on the making of the world's first atomic bomb. From J.Robert Oppenheimer to Paul Tibbits, this book covers the people who invented the bomb,delivered the "gadget", to the horrible aftermath. The last chapter covers the reflections from the people involved---from apprehension to justification, this book covers all angles to make this book a fair-balanced account of August 6, 1945.The Atomic Bomb Collection This DVD collection offers many atomic bomb explosions--awesome showing of raw power and destruction.

great documentary on the making of the a-bomb and its aftermath

I am a babyboomer, born in 1947 after World War II was over. But my father had worked at Aberdeen Proving Ground during World War II and entered the nuclear filed after the war becoming a reactor theorist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. So the Manhattan Project and many of the physcists associated with it along woth the post-war movement for peaceful development of nuclear energy became a natural part of my life. This book tells the story about how men like Einstein, Szilard, Bohr the British scientists and British intelligence made discoveries about nuclear energy and the potential for nuclear chain reactions to recognize the potential for the development of a superbomb by the Nazis. After Einstein's letter to Rossevelt, cooperation between the US and Britian and the birth of the Manhattan Project began shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The plants at Hanford and Oak Ridge and the research lab at Los Alamos became the key sites for the project. The book shows how the leadership of Groves and Oppenheimer lead to the rapid development of the bomb over a two year period and as the Nazi were defeated how the goal shifted from the urgency of beating the Germans to the development of a bomb to question of whether to use it on Japan to put a quicker end to the war in Japan. The book tells the story of the lives of the key figures during this time with Oppenheimer and Groves playing the biggest role. But it also relates many facts and opinions out through the highly classified writings and documents of the period that are now public information. We learn about security, espionage, difficult decisions and controversy. A lot of interesting discussion is presented about the varying views of Truman's decision to drop the bomb on Japan. Was it really to shorten the war and save lives of the allied forces or might it have been intended to cut the war short before a Soviet invasion. The post-war desire to control nuclear weapons and to harness the power for peaceful purposes is cover in the last two chapters of the book. It includes Eisenhower's "atoms for peace" speech to the United Nations and goes on to present interesting writings about disarmament and the post-cold war threat from small nations like Pakistan and North Korea. The writings of Gorbachev about the meetings with Reagan in Iceland was very enlightening and interesting.

An important historical document that is a delightful story of unforgetable personalities ,

One of the things we want history books to do for us is to give us insight into a world now gone. As we look back on puzzles solved, technologies developed, hardware built--it's hard to recreate the mood when all these challenges lay ahead, and the future was far from certain. How did the people involved view the strange new technology they were creating? This book brings us in their own words, their hopes, their doubts, their fears, their triumphs. This is not a new approach. Many history books are collections of documents wherein key players describe events or ponder their significance. But Cindy Kelly brings creativity and a deep knowledge of the history and its players, to combine little-known letters and papers with current interviews and brief contemporary notes, to give variety, sparkle and intimacy to this very human story of vast and earth-shaking developments that require our understanding in order to deal intelligently with current events. We watch, fascinated, as these scientists and engineers work to change the world, while the new world they are creating inexorably changes them. This book is a unique, factual historical document and, at the same time, a delightfully personal story. A perfect Christmas present.