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"The Making of the Atomic Bomb", by Richard Rhodes, best nonfiction book I ever read. Covers German and Japanese efforts, as well as giving a history of modern
by dxs 3y ago
"The Making of the Atomic Bomb", by Richard Rhodes, best nonfiction book I ever read. Covers German and Japanese efforts, as well as giving a history of modern physics, beginning way back in the 19th century.
Did you know that Einstein was strikingly muscular, and at one point in his life had been deeply religious, until deciding that much of religion was "lies"?
There is also a frightening history of World War I, of Jews in Europe, and biographies all the scientists involved in the US nuclear effort. Totally amazing.
I also read "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb", and "Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust". The latter is deeply, profoundly, sickeningly graphic, and contains more information than you ever knew existed.
- credit_guy 3y agoAbsolutely, Richard Rhodes's book is a gem. You not only read about the Manhattan project, you read about the entire history of Europe between 1900 and WW2, with a bit more focus on quantum physics developments. More specifically about the Japan's atomic program, I found "Atomic Adventures" by James Mahaffey to give a slightly better coverage. Bonus: you will also understand the origin of the UFOs. Bonus 2: you'll get a very funny/sad first hand account of the first cold fusion debacle.
- JoeDaDude 3y agoRichard Rhodes' books are essential reading for anyone interested in the history of nuclear weapons and their development. I will add a second reference, "The First War of Physics" by Jim Baggott which covers the American, German and Soviet weapons programs. Not much on Japan's plans though.
- ahsteele 3y agoI would include Command and Control on a list of essential nuclear history reading. Specifically US and post WWII but fascinating and enlightening. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_(book) https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_(book)
- Aloha 3y agoI'm not sure why this is downvoted, but its a very good book.
- jhbadger 3y agoThere was also a 2016 movie made of it, but it mostly focused on one event from the book -- the 1980 Titan II missile explosion in Arkansas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_(film)
- simonebrunozzi 3y agoNot sure why you're being downvoted?
- miguelazo 3y agoRecommend "The Bastard Brigade" (The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb) by Sam Kean. Crazy stories, larger than life characters.
- octopoc 3y ago[flagged]
- Simon_ORourke 3y agoNo they hadn't, no they didn't. No it wasn't. No they didn't... in that order. The Nazi's had no atomic programme advanced enough to create a reactor, even less a bomb. They certainly knew it was theoretically possible, but didn't pursue it thinking that development would take years longer than they anticipated the war to take.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mock-possum 3y agoYeah they’re is so wrong on this that I’m honestly curious where they got that idea from. It sounds like comic book style WWII fanfiction, like something from a Hellboy or Wolfenstein AU
- tekla 3y agoWhat? Germany did not have a Atomic bomb by the end of WW2. Where the hell are you getting your information?
- pcardoso 3y agoSpeaking of WW2 spies, this is a crazy larger than life character. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Pujol_García https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Pujol_García
- selimthegrim 3y agoHow is Edwin Black on the Holocaust? I thought he was pretty good, but I caught him writing some terribly inaccurate stuff about early Islamic history recently, and was disappointed.
- jacquesm 3y ago> The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust What scares me most is that the political climate is such that I'm fairly sure that some country will go down this path again. Too many wannabe camp guards at large already.
- mock-possum 3y agoI really feel like my childhood education did me a disservice by fostering the misconception that there was something special or unique about Nazis - there wasn’t. Not only are there potential nazis everywhere, there are fractional and even full-blown-but-less-institutionally-powerful nazis everywhere. In our own country, in our communities, at work, on the bus, in the government. Wannabe camp guards indeed. It was a sickening and sobering realization as an adult.
- peterfirefly 3y agoWait till you learn how bad the Commies were! And there was nothing special or unique about them either.
- Snow_Falls 3y agoIts always strange to me that as soon as fascism is mentioned, someone absolutely has to bring up communism. It's like clockwork.
- peterfirefly 3y agoRead more history.
- jacquesm 3y agoThat's exactly it. For me the turning point was to read some 'letters to home' written by the good little Nazi's about how they just incinerated a couple of hundred sub-humans doing them a favor in the process and by the way how is little Helmut and has Heidi's lung condition cleared up, your loving husband and father, Sigmund... It's also why certain groups respond very lively when you call them by their true name: they are utterly in denial about their possible futures give or take an unlucky turn of events or two. The veneer is very thin. You find them in the halls of politics, in the police force, in the armed forces, in the offices of just about any company, at your local soccer club and just about everywhere else. And none of them is going to come out to admit it. I seriously wonder how big a fraction of a society has the subscribe to this kind of ideology before it is unavoidable that it will be expressed but I wouldn't be surprised at all if it was well under 50%.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>Did you know that Einstein was strikingly muscular Any refferences in the book on how much he benched? Asking for a friend.
- presidentender 3y agoBench press wasn't a popular lift until the late 50s, so it's unlikely the man ever performed the motion, much less in such a way that anyone wrote down a PR.
- dekhn 3y agoSee also: Operation Paperclip https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Paperclip-Intelligence-Program-Scientists/dp/031622104X https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Paperclip-Intelligence-Prog... although that mainly focuses on German military research and production of missles.
- williamjpellas 3y agoPaperclip continued to deliver German scientists, engineers, and technicians to the United States for years past the end of WWII. One of the most important of these was Friedwardt Winterberg, who was brought to America before the ink was dry on his PhD in 1955. Winterberg is important because his doctoral supervisors were the wartime nuclear physicists Werner Heisenberg and Kurt Diebner, the latter of whom was much more important than the former. Winterberg's career looks respectable if not particularly noteworthy at first glance; he spent his working years at the University of Nevada - Las Vegas as a physics professor. But it is in his writing that you get major clues as to what wartime German nuclear science was really up to. Winterberg's books explore various means of provoking nuclear detonations, often with an emphasis on prompt fusion, or fusion in synergy with fission, rather than fission alone. Most modern nuclear weapons incorporate this concept, broadly speaking, but what I am getting at here is a particular concept known as a "Prandtl - Meyer hydrogen bomb". This bomb design utilizes shock waves as described in earlier investigations of how those behave in water (hydrodynamics). It appears very likely that wartime SS scientists, most of them Austrian, attempted to build a megaton class hydrogen bomb based on Prandtl - Meyer principles rather than the Soviet "sloika" or the later US Teller - Ulam configuration. There is fragmentary but consistent information about this in the most recently discovered archival documents.
- dang 3y agoRelated: Richard Rhodes wrote a classic book about Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36806922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36806922 - July 2023 (73 comments)
- Viliam1234 3y ago> at one point in his life had been deeply religious According to Wikipedia, that was before his age of twelve. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_and_philosophical_views_of_Albert_Einstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_and_philosophical_vi...
- miguelazo 3y agoPS: The book E = mc^2 by David Bodanis is also a great complement to many of these books. A history of the equation itself.