The First War of Physics: The Secret History of the Atom Bomb, 1939-1949

585 Pages·2011·6.44 MB·English

by  Jim Baggott

PEGASUS BOOKS
NEW YORK
For Jini,
My soulmate
CONTENTS
List of illustrations
Preface
Prologue: Letter from Berlin
PART I: MOBILISATION
Chapter 1 The Uranverein
Chapter 2 Element 94
Chapter 3 Critical Mass
Chapter 4 A Visit to Copenhagen
Chapter 5 Tube Alloys
PART II: WEAPON
Chapter 6 A Modest Request
Chapter 7 The Italian Navigator
Chapter 8 Los Alamos Ranch School
Chapter 9
Chapter 10 Escape from Copenhagen
PART III: WAR
Chapter 11 Uncle Nick
Chapter 12 Mortal Crimes
Chapter 13 Alsos and AZUSA
Chapter 14 The Final Push
Chapter 15 Trinity
Chapter 16 Hypocentre
Chapter 17 Operation Epsilon
PART IV: PROLIFERATION
Chapter 18
Chapter 19 Iron Curtain
Chapter 20 Crossroads
Chapter 21 Arzamas-16
Chapter 22 Joe-1
Epilogue: Mutual Assured Destruction
Timeline
List of Key Characters
Notes and Sources
Bibliography
Index
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn
2. Otto Frisch
3. Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg
4. Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard
5. The faculty of the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory
6. Rudolf Peierls and his wife Genia
7. James Chadwick
8. Ernest Lawrence, Arthur Compton, Vannevar Bush, James Bryant Conant,
Karl Compton and Alfred Loomis
9. J. Robert Oppenheimer
10. Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi
11. The world’s first nuclear reactor
12. Leslie Groves
13. Leif Tronstad
14. Damage to the heavy water concentration cells at Vemork
15. The Norsk Hydro Vemork facility
16. The Los Alamos laboratory
17. Klaus Fuchs
18. Theodore Hall
19. David Greenglass
20. Igor Kurchatov
21. The second Alsos mission ‘council of war’
22. A spherical reactor captured by the Alsos mission
23. The last German experimental nuclear reactor, B-VIII
24. The first ‘Fat Man’ plutonium bomb
25. Oppenheimer and Groves inspect the damage following the Trinity test
explosion
26. The mushroom cloud above the ruins of Nagasaki
27. Alan Nunn May
28. Andrei Sakharov
About the author
Jim Baggott is an award-winning science writer. A former academic scientist,
he now works as an independent business consultant but maintains a broad
interest in science, philosophy and history, and continues to write on these
subjects in his spare time. His previous books have been widely acclaimed and
include A Beginner’s Guide to Reality (Penguin, 2005), Beyond Measure:
Modern Physics, Philosophy and the Meaning of Quantum Theory (Oxford
University Press, 2004) and Perfect Symmetry: The Accidental Discovery of
Buckminsterfullerene (Oxford University Press, 1994).