The Making of the Atomic Bomb

How a true scholar prepares for a new film.

Like any good physicist, I have been preparing for the Oppenheimer movie.

It is, after all, the first ever blockbuster movie about a scientist, based on the only Pulitzer-prize-winning biography of a scientist¹.

No, that's not why I'm excited. Oppenheimer was remarkable, but riddled with flaws and contradictions, and few scientists would call him their hero. The real fascination is with the making of the atomic bomb. No Hollywood executive would green-light a film called "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", so we are fortunate that there exists a brilliant-but-flawed human representative of the entire enterprise.

Historians are braver than filmmakers, and there is a book called "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", by Richard Rhodes. It's been around for decades, and every time I've spotted its bright red cover adorned with an angry red mushroom cloud, in bookshops and libraries and on reading lists, I've thought, "I really should read that". Now seemed the perfect time.

It's not the only book I've read on the bomb project. This major kink in human history presumably intrigues and terrifies everyone, but for physicists it has a special twisted fascination. What a dream: nearly every major 20th century physicist was there, in a frenzied rush to turn their obscure theories into a device that could change the world. And what a nightmare it turned out to be.

I took the easy way in, through Feynman's mischievous accounts of pranking the Los Alamos security and cracking his colleagues’ safes. Then on to James Gleick's peerless Feynman biography, Genius. It is the gold standard in scientific biography and the entire book is wonderful, but the Los Alamos section is the most gripping, moving, and powerful. The prose blazed at a far greater intensity when the hero passed through the focal point of 20th century history. Later there was American Prometheus, the book that inspired the new film. Yes, it is as excellent as they say, but for me the bomb overshadows everything. After the bombs have gone off, the second half of the book can't help but feel like an epilogue.

If you feel you need a quick course in Oppenheimer himself before the film, or a de-briefing afterwards, you can avail yourself of the series of articles by Ashutosh Jogalekar. Or, shorter still, the two episodes of The Rest Is History podcast. They are the perfect entry point for the non-scientist, and indeed scientists could also benefit from the irreverent puncturing of their egos. I, for one, was delighted by the following exchange, on the beginnings of Los Alamos:

Host 1: "They bring in loads of machines, they bring in generators and cyclotrons and lab things" —

Host 2 (mischievously): "What's a cyclotron?"

Host 1 (after a smidge of hesitation): "It's an important lab thing."

I would recommend this refreshing treatment to all those earnest-yet-insufferable "science communicators", but they probably couldn't handle the repeated and blatant use of the word "boffin". A pity, because it's good to be reminded what a creep the young Oppenheimer was. It's true that the hosts underplay grown-up Oppenheimer's incredible transformation into an inspirational leader (there's an impressive set of corroborating quotes in this Jogalekar post), but on the other hand, his personality retains some unpleasant and disturbing cracks throughout his life.

So, let's zoom out from Oppie, and on to The Making of the Atomic Bomb (TMOTAB).

The moment it arrives I wonder if I've made a mistake. This book is 750 pages long!

The first chapters are not encouraging. After a warm-up story about Leo Szilard having an epiphany while on a stroll, we get down to the early days of quantum mechanics and atomic physics. Oh no, not this again! How many times have I read an account of Planck and the bloody blackbody spectrum? It's thrilling stuff the first time around, and yes these are incredible moments in the history of human discovery, bla bla bla, but can I put myself through yet another breathless account of the wave-particle duality? "It's a particle! It's also a wave! Can you appreciate just how strange that is? No? All right, here's another ten pages on it."

And we're one hell of a long way from the US government being presented with five ridiculously improbable uranium enrichment methods, every one of them more expensive than any industrial project in history, and deciding to invest in all of them.

As the story proceeds, I'm reminded that I actually know very little nuclear physics history. I'm learning a lot. Better than that, I realise that this is one of the best demonstrations of the process of discovery that I have ever read. No, not discovery: the process of confusion, confusion, tantalising hints, misplaced certainty, more confusion, brief elation as small patches of the picture come into focus, then back to confusion.

That is the scientific life — being propelled through a landscape of uncertainty and questions by the joy of an occasional answer. We all experience it when solving small problems, and we can dream of being one of those lucky few who get that mind-blowing hit from a major revelation. That experience is rarely conveyed in print. It is there in Rhodes' book, and for all the non-scientists who make it through those hundreds of pages of increasingly complicated details, I hope the sense of it comes through.

The scientists burrowing down into the structure of the atom followed that pattern of confusion and discovery again and again through the first three decades of the 20th century. In the cartoon history that most scientists learn, a few key figures — Rutherford and Bohr are usually sufficient — have their Eureka moments, and voila! we know all about the atom: protons, neutrons, electrons, the shell structure, binding energy, the whole works! It's easy to imagine early 20th-century physics as a quiet field, populated by a small club of geniuses and no-one else. That picture of Einstein and Curie and co at the Solvay meeting — that's pretty much everyone, right?

Rhodes reveals the vast crowd surrounding them, and the competitiveness between all of them. He takes it year by year, and sometimes day by day. A fine-grained scientific history could be dull, but by walking us through the personalities and debates and conversations, science comes alive. At every step another obscure figure reads a paper on the latest developments, and wants to get in on the game, and cooks up an experiment that turns over another piece of the puzzle. By 1940, a "masterly" review of nuclear physics — written by another unknown — cites over 100 papers in just the previous year.

What is greatest about TMOTAB is that it is not just a popular science book. The making of the bomb is bigger than that and the book avails itself of every genre necessary to cover its subject. Until the First World War arrives the book is almost entirely a popular science exposition. Then we detour into military history: specifically, the rise of gas warfare. For the science fan revelling in intellectual adventures, this is our reminder that for all our fun, our story will ultimately take a dark turn. (Oh look, here's Fritz Haber! I heard about him in chemistry classes. What I didn't hear was that his wife, also a chemist, was so disgusted by his work on poison gases that she was driven to depression and finally suicide.)

The frenzied development of successively nastier chemical weapons is just the beginning. By the Second World War we upgrade to firebombing. If you had only heard the term "firestorm" from hyperbolic media commentators (as in, "a political firestorm"), you can discover when it was coined — after the firebombing of Hamburg — and just what a terrifying phenomenon it is, from first-hand accounts of residents who leave their homes to find themselves in the midst of a city-wide hurricane of road-melting heat. You can also watch the psychological evolution of military planners and leaders, as they progressed from standing by a nebulous illusion of civilised warfare, through eagerness to destroy as much as possible of the enemy's production capabilities, then the unfortunate consequence that that was easiest if they destroyed entire cities. In the last stages of the Second World War we have the spectacle of the US military strategy of firebombing every Japanese city. In order for Hiroshima to be on the list of potential atomic targets, it first had to be on a special list of cities to not bomb — they needed a few pristine specimens so they could properly assess the impact of the exciting new weapon.

Between these guys and the infamous antics of the Nazis, WWII truly was the height of "terror by technocrats".

The power of TMOTAB is to employ, and excel at, any tone or style required to tell the full story. As the Manhattan project gets underway, the Allies decide that they must deny the Nazis all of the ingredients to make a bomb. There is a factory in Norway that produces heavy water, and in 1944 word comes of plans to ship the factory's entire supply to Germany. An agent in Norway must sink the ferry that will transport the heavy water across a lake. What follows would make for the purest Hollywood thriller, complete with cat-and-mouse evasions, a tense countdown, and even delightful comic touches — the innocent concert violinist who cannot be warned not to ride the doomed ferry nonetheless survives the sinking, and another passenger rescues his violin.

This amidst the flurry of memos and meetings and miscommunications and politicking required to get the bomb project started. If the youthful scientist feels the thrill of all those wonderful experiments and calculations and epiphanies, the seasoned academic sighs in miserable sympathy through the forehead-smacking failures of bureaucracy and inept leadership. Oh look, after months of plotting it's been arranged for Niels Bohr to meet Churchill. Now we're cooking. No, maybe not: the meeting is so disastrous that Churchill wants Bohr locked up.

Eventually we're under way, and if you found all those fine distinctions between Uranium-235 and Uranium-238 difficult to keep track of, prepare yourself for the industrial intricacies of separating them. We are not skimping on details here. I found a lot of it hard going. I kept wondering how readers with minimal technical background would fare. (Remember those Rest Is History hosts?) I also wondered how much the author wondered about that: did he worry, 500 pages in, just how much detail to provide about gaseous diffusion? Was he confident — "if you've made it to page 500, you'll take anything" — or was he defiant — "I must write this book, and I don't care if no-one reads it!"? It doesn't matter. Whatever drove him to his heroic efforts, he was right. The book won a string of awards (including the Pulitzer and the National Book Award) and the edition I read was published on the book's 25th anniversary.

There's a lesson here for those would-be science communicators: if you give people a good reason, they will take the time to understand anything.

The scale of the book allows it to capture the scale of the Manhattan Project. Los Alamos was only a small part. It was not the only town erected out of nothing: there was Oak Ridge, where the gaseous diffusion plant was the largest contiguous structure in the world, or Hanford, home to a production reactor and now living a second life as one of the gravitational-wave detector sites. Even the seemingly smallest details involved surprising numbers of people. Paul Tibbets, who trained pilots to drop a single bomb and then veer away extremely quickly, was in charge of 225 officers and 1,542 enlisted men.

The entire project employed on the order of 150,000 people, which, oddly enough, is roughly one employee for every person killed by atomic bombs.

And that is where we end: with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What started with Leo Szilard on a stroll, and continued as an intellectual journey unprecedented in human history, ends with a class of horror similarly unprecedented. There is page after page of harrowing testimony of the appalling aftermath. It could have gone on for many pages more. Whatever it takes to make sure it never happens again.

So far it has not happened again. No-one knew that in 1945, just as no-one could guess the miserable farce of the Cold War. But that is for another book. Rhodes wrote that one, too, but I think I'm done for now.

There is plenty on the lunacy of the 1950s in American Prometheus. Or, if you require instead a quick podcast to sum up the madness, you can marvel to political commentator Ian Dunt raging apoplectically on Thomas Schelling's game-theory nuclear strategy. Representative example: "you can almost hear him losing his mind as he writes it". (Lurid metaphors of research-related brain injuries are a Dunt speciality.)

Or, indeed, you could watch the Oppenheimer movie. If you feel a hankering to loathe Robert Downey Jr, his turn as the fiendish Lewis Strauss is sure to satisfy.

Will I enjoy the film? In a way, it already gave me enough enjoyment: it got me to read a great book. I, in turn, commend it to you. On the incredible story of the bomb and the collision of pure science with impure humanity, The Making of the Atomic Bomb is essential reading.

References

Here are the books that I mention or allude to in the article. My referencing style is a travesty and I provide no links. I assume everyone is capable of copying and pasting a title into their favourite online bookstore. Once upon a time I read another book on the history of the Manhattan Project, but I can’t remember what it was called. It was perfectly fine, but TMOTAB is better.

Books.

1. Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, “American Prometheus: the triumph and tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer”.

2. Richard Feynman, “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman?”

3. Richard Feynman, “What do you care what other people think?”

4. James Gleick, “Genius: Richard Feynman and modern physics”.

5. Richard Rhodes, “The making of the atomic bomb”.

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1. If you think another blockbuster movie about a (real) scientist already exists, feel free to advertise it in the comments. I can then adjust my personal definition of “blockbuster” so that my statement continues to stand. For the Pulitzer Prize I’ve restricted myself to the “biography” category (in case you were tempted to try a gotcha with the main subject of the article), but, again, I may have missed some.