The Making of the Atomic Bomb

This history follows the science and politics that produced the first nuclear weapons. Rhodes begins with the early twentieth-century physics of the atom and radioactivity, then traces refugee scientists, the discovery of fission, and the wartime laboratories of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Hanford. He attends to Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Robert Oppenheimer, and the military directors who organized the work, and he closes with the tests and the bombs used on Japan. The book is a narrative history of a weapons project, not a textbook of nuclear engineering.

Bound in red cloth printed and blocked in black with a design by Jack Smyth. Black slipcase printed in red with a design by Jack Smyth. Black endpapers.