November 4th, 2024
Not much has been really said in the first 10 or so pages. It is talking about a physicist named Leo Szilard. I don’t know his relation to the atomic bomb other than that he is a nuclear physicist. It’s a nice little tale of his Hungarian origins at the start of WWI up to his studying in Berlin in the turbulent 20’s and early 30’s. A Jew, he leaves Germany once the Nazis start making headway in 1933. Something big happens when he moves to London, though I don’t know what yet. Clearly he was very smart and figured out something about thermodynamics that puzzled his professors, who happened to be Einstein and Planck.
November 5th, 2024
The rest of the first chapter doesn’t say much of note from a physics point of view. Szilard in London is busy helping people escape Germany. But one day as he walks around town it just occurs to him that nuclear energy could be feasible if something could cause a chain reaction. If hitting a nucleus with one neutron releases two neutrons, it would be exponential. The second chapter starts of kind of boring. It discusses the origins of the atom, from the ancient Greeks, to the mechanical atom of Newton. Then it goes on about a sort of philosophy of science espoused by a chemist, friend of Szilard, Polanyi, I think. Not super interesting.
November 6th, 2024
Now we’re talking about Ernest Rutherford, who I know as the alpha particle guy. He was mentioned as “Lord Rutherford” in the last chapter, but I didn’t put two and two together. He said it was impossible to extract energy from an atom, which inspired Szilard in his chain reaction thing. We’re given essentially a biography of Rutherford. From a humble New Zealand background, he make his name known in radio experiments. In London at university (whatever Cavendish is) he was persuaded to drop his pursuit of monetizing radio for helping someone Thomspon in nuclear experiments. He did some stuff here and there and discovered the electron and beta particles, and alpha particles, which he identified as charged helium atoms. However, he won a Nobel Prize in chemistry, not physics. There was some info on Rotigen/X-rays being discovered, glass tube experiments, and a bunch of other interesting steps along the way.
November 8th, 2024
Time for the important experiments. Now J.J. Thomson had discovered the electron and described the “plum pudding” model of the atom. This was essentially a mass of positive whatever, the pudding, with little bits of negative, the raisins, oriented in a way so they don’t repel each other out of the atom. Thus, the idea the atom is one big mass. Rutherford and his students were firing alpha particles at an angle at some gold foil. If an atom was all pudding, there would be nothing to deflect the alpha particle. However, they found some scattering, with some particles deflected over 90 degrees. For that to happen, there must be a big mass concentrated somewhere in the atom. So the modern model of the atom was discovered. However, Rutherford wasn’t a theory guy, so he got Niels Bohr on the job. Chapter 3 talks about Bohr and his family, and at first it is very boring. It takes a long time to get Bohr into physics, but eventually he does and meets Rutherford at Cavendish. I forget most of it.
November 11th, 2024
I have to admit that the Bohr chapter is not the most interesting. His task from Rutherford is to figure out how his atom is stable. We know it is stable because matter exists. Why don’t the electrons just fly out or in like a vortex? Mechanical physics fails to explain this. Bohr turns to a new field: quantum physics. Planck had invented the field to explain a problem in thermodynamics, I believe blackbody radiation. It’s something to do with certain frequencies and energies that are multiples of a constant, h, that we know now as Planck’s constant. Einstein used this to explain photon emission. Bohr then used quantum physics in the atom. The atom can only occupy certain energy levels, not a continuous spectrum. He more or less created the concept of the electron shells. All radical ideas at the time.
November 13th, 2024
The next chapter gets confusing with all the different people they introduce. There’s too much jumping around in people’s lives and the timeline gets all muddled. Moreso when you introduce 3 people, or reintroduce, since I think they all had small mentions earlier. Otto Hahn (German), Leise Meitner (Austrian), Henry Moseley (English) all feature in this chapter. And then there was Chaim Weizmann (Russian). I can’t remember what Hahn and Meitner did, chemistry in Berlin. Moseley was critical in accepting Rutherford’s atom. He used X-ray spectroscopy to prove something. Weizmann was a chemist who was able to distill acetone from corn starch, critical during the war. One of them, or none of them, distilled ammonia or nitrites from air or something like that. Weizmann’s service to English was critical in leading towards the Balfour Declaration and English Zionism. Hahn served the Germans in the poison gas usage. Moseley I believe was an engineer and sadly died at Gallipoli. There’s a long a depressing section on all the gases used during the war. Then it described the Germans using planes to bomb civilians in England, obviously a precursor to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Civilians were now proper military targets. Gas, bombing cities, all aims to “end the war faster”.
November 15th, 2024
The next chapter starts out talking about Hungary and Hungarian Jews and how a good number of famous scientists of the day came from this group. It was mildly interesting. After that it goes back to Niels Bohr and discusses how he came up with the different shells for electrons and how all this explains why atoms in the “columns” of the periodic table have similar chemical properties. This links chemistry and physics and cements the layout of the periodic table. His group also predicted some missing elements this way. Then last stretch introduces Oppenheimer and gives a biography of his early years. A lot of these biographies sound similar. Shy, quiet kid who shows genius early.
November 19th, 2024
There’s some more biography about Oppenheimer and I guess he’s a bit different as he seems deeply depressed. He does not enjoy the Cavendish and experiments and, like Bohr, ends up on the theoretical track. He does well in that regard. Then there’s some drama in the physics world. Schrödinger is comes up with some mathematical proofs that work out electrons or something like that as waves. Then this comes to a dogmatic battle between describing atoms in the classical way vs in the quantum way. Around this time Heisenberg comes up with the uncertainty principal: you cannot know the location and velocity of a particle at the same time. We cannot measure them by eye and thus need to interact with them in some way. It’s like measuring a runner’s location by tripping them. Now you know where they are, but you changed the momentum completely. Thus we can only know both things statistically, not definitely. This was hard to accept for some of the old guard like Einstein.
November 21st, 2024
I forget who did it but somebody split the atom. I forget the point of the experiment but somebody was bombarding hydrogen gas with alpha particles. What they noticed was that there were additional hydrogen atoms in the experiment that could not be accounted for. Then I think Rutherford tried to determine what was going on. Various gases and vacuum were tried and it was determined that nitrogen in the air was being hit occasionally. A hydrogen atom was split off and the nitrogen atom was reduced to an oxygen atom. Thus the atom was broken and opened up a wave for experimentation. Other light elements had similar results, though heavy elements were tougher to crack, as they had more electrical charge to repel the particle. What was needed was something with a very large velocity. One Professor Lawrence at Berkley, a good experimentalist and machinist, was interested in the cause. Inspired by a German journal that described a linear accelerator, he came up with the Cyclotron, which did the accelerating in circular motions and thus was smaller and required only 2 alternating electrodes instead of a long series of them. With a few ten thousands of volts and some huge magnets, he could get protons to travel at high speed.
November 22nd, 2024
Next we discover the neutron. Rutherford speculated there was more to the nucleus of the atom. For light elements, the atomic weight is about double the atomic number. For heavier elements the weight is more than double. Where’d this mass come from which did not affect the electric charge? A particle with no charge but mass like a proton. Rutherford thought it may be a combined proton and electron rather than its own particle. Some unrelated experiments showed that certain things bombarded with a cathode ray gave off a huge amount of energy. This was no alpha particle or beta ray. Some French scientists were speculating gamma rays, but that is light and would radiate in all directions. This was directional and a particle. I forget the rest but one of Rutherford’s guys figured out it was neutral particle being knocked loose. It will now be much easier to penetrate the nucleus than with the proton. I also forgot to write a part about the binding energy. I forget it all now, but that’s why atomic weights are slightly different than just multiples of hydrogen. Extra energy is needed to hold it together and mass is energy, via e=mc2.
November 25th, 2024
Chapter 7 is about Jews. Less bluntly, it’s mostly about the growing antisemitism in Germany after the war. There’s a bit about Einstein’s biography and then how many Germans opposed the theory of relativity, general or special I don’t remember, probably due to his Jewishness. Einstein in return ends up an expat and Zionist. There’s quite a bit of excerpts from Mein Kampf, to the point that it’s almost comical. Hitler wrote some whacky stuff. Then it starts another section about, you guessed it, Jews. It’s actually interesting history about their diaspora since the Persian conquest through Rome and the oppression they had to deal with in a Christian Europe. That is until they were expelled so far east into Poland, which actually welcomed them. Unfortunately, Poland were dismantled in the 18th century by the Jewish hating empires of Russia, Prussia, and Austria (s.b. pronounced Awsh-truh). Fortunately around this time, western Europe was going through the Enlightenment and the whole God thing was becoming less important.
November 26th, 2024
Despite the Enlightenment in the West, most Jewish people lived in the East, and Russia is no enlightened country. A significant number of people emigrated to the United States. Jews were blamed for Marxism, Communism, Anarchism, and assassinating Alexander II. Fast forward to Nazi Germany. This is pretty well-known history. Specifically to our nuclear book, the physicists and scientists that work for universities were technically state employees and thus any with Jewish ancestry were barred from further work. That was maybe 1933. Einstein and most of the Hungarian ex-pats had already left the country. Now the locals, whether they thought of themselves as Jews or not, needed a way out. Different organizations in England and the US worked to find a way to get them jobs outside of the Continent.
December 3rd, 2024
I forgot to write before Thanksgiving and now I don’t remember what I read. The French Joliet-Curies, who missed the neutron, somehow discovered that you can bombard something with neutrons and create a radioactive material. You can take stable element X, hit it with a neutron, and it will become unstable element X if it absorbs it or, I think, element X-2 if it emits an alpha particle. It then typically decays through beta radiation, gaining a proton, and then it chains on until stability. Szilard wanted to use neutrons to find his chain reaction, but had no buyers in England. Fermi had better support in Rome and one by one bombard elements to see what would happen. They were successful, but confused by some results and inconsistencies. The test reacted differently depending on whether it was done on wood or marble tables. Fermi by chance, instead of a lead screen, put lump of paraffin wax in the way and got huge radioactivity. It turns out the hydrogen in paraffin (and wood) slowed the neutron, allowing it to be captured by the nucleus with more ease. They also bombarded uranium, the heaviest element known. This was highly controversial because they claimed this created a man-made element, #93. I think that’s plutonium.
December 6th, 2024
I’ve been negligent in writing but it’s getting pretty exciting. I don’t think there was much more discussion about Fermi’s experiments but it led to some controversy in the physics world. Some people, especially a chemist in France, thought it was just incorrect. For his work with neutron bombardment he got the Nobel Prize and a chance to escape fascist Italy. Most of his colleagues left already, but his wife, who was Jewish, wanted to stay. That is until Mussolini enacted antisemitic laws. Likewise, Hitler annexed Austria and the Sudetenland. Austria becoming a German province meant that Lise Meitner was now a German citizen and subject to antisemitic laws. She escaped to Sweden.
The Joliet-Curies were doing something with bombarding uranium but I forget their results. Something like it was turning into a much lighter element; a big jump down the periodic table. Normal alpha and beta decay move one or two spots. Otto Hahn didn’t believe them and meticulously did his own experiments. He is a chemist, not a physicist. He thought he was getting isotopes of radium, 4 protons down, but the chemical analysis kept showing barium. He couldn’t believe it. Only him and his assistant Strassman knew about the results. Further and further experiments confirmed that it was barium, #56, a huge jump. He wrote to Meitner in Sweden to think talk about it. It was Christmas, and her nephew Otto Frisch was with her from Copenhagen. They couldn’t believe it until they really thought about it.
Neils Bohr had described the nucleus like a drop of water, with a surface tension. At a certain size, the electrical repulsion of protons is strong enough to break the surface tension and separate. Their math showed around 100 protons, so uranium at 92 was very close, and that’s why there were no natural elements above uranium. If the neutron bombardment strengthened the instability in the “drop”, it oscillates and forms a shape like a barbell, then the electrical repulsion would be stronger than the strong force. You get two atoms from one, barium and krypton. A large amount of energy, 200MeV, from the “missing” mass, E=mc^2, would be released. The numbers worked out. Frisch brought this to Bohr who believed it instantly. Meitner then talked to Hahn about it while he was publishing his findings, with her name attached. Frisch did some experiments and did find 200MeV of energy released. From a biologist colleague, he called it “fission”.
December 10th, 2024
The first section of the book ends with uranium fission accidently being leaked by Bohrs in America. It obviously becomes big news and spreads rapidly. The second section starts with exploring fission in more detail. Frisch in Europe and others in America also detected fission in Thorium. Frisch lacked the equipment, but the Americans bombarded thorium or uranium with varying speeds of neutrons. Bohrs thought the news of fission meant ended the confusion of “transuranics” from Fermi, or that the “heavier” elements were just confused by the fission process. A colleague was not so short. There was still confusion. Uranium split with fast and slow neutrons. Thorium only fast neutrons. Uranium in theory could absorb a neutron in resonance, or at 25eV. Through beta decay, this captured neutron could become a proton and thus created element 93. Bohrs was dismayed and realized something important. Uranium is really 99% U238 and 1% U235. The less stable U235 was the culprit behind the slow bombardment reaction. Despite the low energy of the neutron, somehow the binding energy and “reorganization” required of going from an odd-numbered weight to an even-numbered put the atom over the energy required for fission. He wrote a 1700 page paper on it in two days. What was yet to be known, or thought possible, was whether a pure U235 could be separated out. Fermi didn’t believe it and needed proof. Szilard saw this as his way to a chain-reaction and experiments were abound in the US, by Frisch, and by the Joliot-Curies. The data showed more than 1 neutron being released during fission.
December 11th, 2024
There’s a long debate among the physicists in America whether to publish the results on fission. Bohrs is against secrecy, Fermi is hesitant, but it comes to nothing because Joliot publishes from Europe. The Germans learn about it and stop the export of uranium. Around this time they invade Czechoslovakia. Through various contacts, Fermi meets with the Navy in Washington, though they don’t seem interested in the subject. Szliard and Fermi do some experiments with natural uranium, while others explore separating U235. The Fermi results show excess neutrons released from fission, but it seems the water moderator is also absorbing some neutrons. This is not good enough for a chain reaction. Szilard thinks using graphite with a lattice of uranium “balls” would work, but it needs to be very pure graphite. Otherwise, he thinks heavy water would work, but is not possible to get in such quantities. Politically, Szilard, Teller, and Wigner hope to reach the Roosevelt administration on the subject. They also want to stop Germany from getting uranium from Belgium through the Congo. Einstein has a personal relationship with the Queen of Belgium, so they find him at his vacation spot.
December 23th, 2024
I skipped about a week of writing, so that’s some 60 pages. There’s been some useless committees in the US about nuclear power. It reaches FDR but it’s still not seen as an important item for a country not at war. They dabble in nuclear energy. The Germans are on pace with the British and invade some more countries, notably Norway, where a heavy water manufacturer is. Due to some bad data, the Germans rule out graphite as a moderator. Only Frisch and associates bring up the question, why can’t you do fast fission with U235? Of course, it can be done, but no one has been investigating it. This puts the British at the forefront of research. Fermi and crew are still looking at natural uranium. There’s a lot of talk about separating isotopes but I don’t follow the chemistry behind it. I forget who is doing what, but element 93 is created when uranium absorbs a neutron and beta decays. That is neptunium. Np239 then beta decays to Plutonium. Lawrence worked on making plutonium with his cyclotrons. That’s pretty much all the good stuff so far. No Manhattan Project yet. Some stories about Japan and Russians on the sidelines. A bit about hydrogen bombs being dismissed as a possibility.
December 24th, 2024
Heisenberg sees progress in the German bomb and is worried about the consequences. At the risk of his life, he talks to Bohr in Copenhagen. Understanding Bohrs was likely under surveillance, he tries to talk in a code. There is not much understanding between the two, despite their years of working together, and Bohrs is horrified at Heisenberg’s apparent implications and what appears to be his willingness to work with Nazis. Heisenberg apparently slipped Bohrs a schematic, which may not have helped the situation. Meanwhile the US finally takes things seriously and goes full steam on a uranium bomb, by any path necessary. Left out of the picture is plutonium, but Compton pushes for it and Fermi’s work on natural uranium. Not long after all these decisions are made, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor.
As an aside, how much did the American government know before the attack? I don’t think they knew everything. It seems they were aware a Japanese attack was very likely at the end of November. Not surprising given their aggression and desperation after US embargoes. Negotiations failed. If the Japanese were to attack US territory, it would seem that the Philippines was the most likely location. It was already surrounded by new Japanese territory. Hawaii was far enough away that it seems reasonable for it to be on a medium alert. Thus unprepared, the Americans misinterpreted what they saw on radar the morning of the attack. The crippling attack was really a great move and well prepared by the Japanese. It could not have gone better. So I think any conspiracy that it was allowed by the US government as a way to enter the war is just a denial that the US could be unprepared and that the Japanese could be capable of an excellent military maneuver. They did beat the Czar, after all.
January 7th, 2025
Not much of interest has happened after Pearl Harbor. It’s mostly a lot of drama about bureaucracy and organization in the different projects. The New Yorkers are forced to move to Chicago, while Berkley remains in place. Oppenheimer is brought in to run Berkley. Lots of things happen until General Leslie Groves is given overall command, and he seems to be the only one who gets things done, though he didn’t want the job. Fermi and the now Chicago group build various experimental “piles” to get slow-neutron fission out of natural uranium. It’s a lot of engineering. They need big blocks of pure graphite, good uranium, spherical shapes, low absorbing containers, etc. Previous experiments showed a k factor between .8 and .9, meaning less than 1 neutron released on average. The goal is obviously to have more than 1 for a chain reaction. Things seem fine for the plutonium guys; I don’t remember the details. Also I think the Germans gave up on a bomb. There was also a long bit about the hydrogen, or “super”, bomb, in which a fission bomb creates enough heat to fuse hydrogen (deuterium) to helium. It is seriously considered.
January 9th, 2025
The project brings on a new leader: General Leslie Groves. He is overall commander and seems to be good at organization and getting things done. He built the Pentagon, after all. He wanted to go overseas and leave Washington, but was not given much choice. Oppenheimer, despite his Communist ties, was chosen to lead the bomb project. Just watch the movie for that. The Japanese have weirdly decided that the bomb was not possible given their resources and also to spend millions of dollars on a cyclotron for bomb development. The Norwegians and British performed some covert operations against the heavy water facility in Norway held by the Germans. The first attempt ended in disaster, with two planes crashing and the survivors executed. The second attempt succeeded and set the Germans back well over a year in heavy water production. The most interesting part has been the Chicago pile work. I’d like a movie on that. The 57 layers of graphite and uranium, something like at 12’ sphere, took several full-time weeks to build. Cadmium control rods were inserted in several locations to absorb neutrons. Then the day came when they started to remove rods and take measurements. Everything matched Fermi’s calculations. Once the last rod was removed, the readings went up and up and up. It would not be stopped. While nerves were high, Fermi took data for 4 minutes and gave the order for the control rods to be returned. A controlled nuclear reactor had been made with natural uranium.
January 10th, 2025
Los Alamos opens and Oppenheimer’s crew are briefed and discuss what needs to be done. There’s not enough material to test anything, so a lot of this relies on theory. They definitely need help with the ordinance part; they’re not bomb builders and yet they need to be. The plan is to use a gun to combine two separate subcritical materials (with more in parallel) to initiate the reaction. A man named Neddermeyer has the idea to use a crushing implosion to bring the material together, but is mostly shot down. A parallel topic is the switch from precision bombing of German targets to area bombing and targeting civilians. The British wished to lower losses and switch to night-bombing. Dropping bombs half-blindly leads to the official adoption of area bombing using explosives and incendiary. The area bombings of Luebeck and Cologne proved successful. To be explicit, the target was no longer factories but the residential areas. Project Gomorrah was designed to destroy Hamburg. Several night bombings by the British and day bombings by the Americans destroyed some parts of the city in July 1943. On the 27th, the air conditions and the mixture of explosives and incendiaries were just right. A firestorm was created; a hurricane of fire, one massive fire over the city, was hot enough to melt the roads. Humans burst from the heat. 37k to 45k civilians, mostly women, children and elderly, were killed. This is horrific and shows the idea the using inhuman methods to “shorten the war” and to “save lives” do not work at best, and are lies to cover intentional war crimes at worst.
January 13th, 2025
It’s good that the author puts American and British actions against civilians in the atrocities category. Many people ignore these things because they are the “good guys”. But whether it is Germans killing Poles or Brits killing Germans or Russians killing Poles and Germans, it’s all evil. Back at Los Alamos, there is some work with plutonium after the cyclotron is running. They measure a significant amount of secondary neutrons from fission, more than U235. Next there’s talk about implosion and Von Neuman (a visiting adviser) and Teller start to discuss how it can be done seriously, and with less radioactive material. Last, we revisit Bohr in Copenhagen. Interesting to me is that the Nazis let the Danes keep their government because the Germans were incredibly dependent on Danish agricultural exports. A part of this deal was that Danish Jews were off-limits to the Nazis. As the Germans started losing the war, strikes and sabotage increased. This gave the Nazis a reason to take over the government and deal with radical elements. Bohr was on their list. He had an open invitation to England, but first he and his wife escaped across the water to Sweden. He personally tried to get the Swedes to openly declare against the Nazi’s (secret) plan to deport the Jews and take them as refugees. The bureaucracy failed and Bohr went around it directly to the king. His plan worked and the Swedish radio broadcast that it will take Danish Jewish refugees, with some 7000 people escaping to the Swedish coast guard. Fearing assassination, Bohr soon left for England in the belly of a Mosquito bomber over dangerous Norway. He soon learned about the reality of atomic weapons.
January 14th, 2025
The next chapter goes into production of U235 and plutonium. First is the cyclotron method, in which the lighter U235 turns with a tighter arc than U238. The separated U235 is then collected. The Oak Ridge plant in Tennessee is built for hundreds of these machines in Alpha and Beta stages, with problems aplenty. The problem I remember is the magnets. First, there is not enough copper available. The Treasury offers to loan 10,000 tons of silver bullion. This is melted down for wire. The transformers are wound with this uninsulated silver wire and submerged in oil. However the spacing is wrong and the oil is full of metallic FOD so the transformers short. Every one has to be dismantled and sent back for repair. Then there is gaseous diffusion, but it was kind of boring and I didn’t follow it too well. To get plutonium, a uranium reactor would be built in unpopulated Washington desert. The Du Pont engineers were going to helium cool it, but Wigner said, as they knew over a year ago, with better graphite and pure uranium it could be water cooled. A big graphite cylinder with aluminum tubes full of aluminum cans of uranium would be in another uranium tube for water flow, 75k gallons per day. This would fission for weeks and then new uranium cans would be popped in, popping out the old into a pool to continue radiating to safe levels. Then they’d be sent for separation. Something like that.
January 15th, 2025
There’s a brief description of the Russian nuclear plans. They sniffed out that other countries had a weapons program when there was radio silence in all the physics journals from those countries. There was a brief investigation until Barbarossa changed priorities. By 1943 it was given some serious attention again. Meanwhile there’s a big drama between Szilard and Groves. Szildard hated the compartmentalization which disrupted the open discussions and ideas between scientists. Groves failed to appreciate that the program essentially existed to due to the insistence of this man and a few other immigrant scientists. In response, Szilard started to seek his patent rights and the man was certainly a fighter. A disgusting story then takes place in which Fermi suggests to Oppenheimer a use for spent nuclear material from the piles: poisoning the food supply. Oppenheimer loves the idea and wants enough strontium to kill half a million people. These are civilians were are talking about. And these scientists are civilians. I have lost all respect for Fermi and what amount I may have had for Oppenheimer. Bloodthirsty animals.
January 16th, 2025
The big story of this section is the British-Norwegian continued attack on the heavy water supply. The Germans got it back up and running pretty quickly, so the British bombed it during lunch to avoid casualties. The book does not report if there was any loss of life. The Germans then planned to move the factory and water to Germany, as informed by a Norwegian engineer. The only agent in the field organized a bomb to go off when everything was travelling by ferry. 26 people drowned. A senseless loss of life, no different than terrorism. The Germans then had no heavy water and were out of reactor development for the war. Then there was a description of the war in Pacific. Not known to the general public was the different fighting methods of the Japanese. While all eyes were on Europe, the Japanese were fighting to the death. Americans thought them little jungle monkeys, but they were a serious adversary and needed the government’s serious attention. Next chapter and a bunch of scientists come from England to work with the Americans. FDR commits to unconditional surrender, a big mistake.
January 24th, 2025
There’s a lot of personal drama and it’s not very interesting. There are some interesting discussions are implosion and the workings of the bombs. One interesting story was the piles in Washington were found to have an oscillation. They’d produce a lot of energy, then decay for a couple days to dormancy, then increase again and repeat. It was found that some products of fission were Xenon or something, which had a huge neutron absorption rate. Once there was enough Xenon, the reactor would shut down. Then the Xenon would decay to something else, stop absorbing neutrons and everything would pick back up. I don’t think there was much of a solution other than add more uranium to prevent total starvation. There was also a bit about Bohr trying to get Churchill and FDR to discuss the bombs openly with the Soviets, otherwise there’d be a secret arms race between nations and arsenal build up. Churchill was a dick. FDR was interested until Churchill talked him out of it. The next chapter starts with life at Los Alamos. Seems like they had a good time on the weekends for people who were working on WMDs.
January 28th, 2025
I have to say, I think Los Alamos is the least interesting part of the book. Maybe if it were more concise, but there are a lot of details I just don’t find interesting. There’s a side-story about Japan’s nuclear bomb work, but they just don’t have enough resources to accomplish anything. There’s background about Tibbets and how he came to lead to the atomic bombing missions, though he didn’t know what he was dropping yet, and Curtis LeMay gaining command over the Pacific. Then the tragic parts. First was the firebombing of Dresden, a city with no military value or significant industry. Some 100k people were killed, many suffocating in their basements due to the flames removing all oxygen. Churchill really was a war criminal. Following this was the development of firebombing of the wooden cities in Japan by B-29s. The planes were used to justify their own cost, even though they were not great and caught fire. Thin excuses for military targets brought death to over 150k people in Tokyo and other cities until the Americans ran out of bombs to use. To them, it was better to kill Japanese than let American soldiers die in an invasion. The topic of conditional surrender is rarely brought up. I can see some of that fear, though it is still hard to justify. Nearly 1 in 10 marines on Iwo Jima was being killed or wounded at this time. The Japanese were not going to do a suicidal charge here. They intended to kill as many as possible before being killed.
January 30th, 2025
Yesterday I finished the second section of the book. There was some interesting parts about how at Los Alamos Otto Frische was doing some heavy duty experiments with near critical-mass U235. Very dangerous stuff. There was also a very interesting section about an American espionage group in occupied Europe searching for German uranium and scientists. They raced around the frontline, sometimes in front of it, picking up evidence for German nuclear research. They found convincing evidence that the Germans never bothered with a bomb. Groves demanded they find the Congolese uranium, which it was eventually found. Also found in safer Bavaria was a German pile, tucked inside a cliff. Scientists like Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg were picked up before the Soviets could find them. On Friday the 13th, April, a bombing in Japan destroyed all the nuclear work done so far in Japan. That same day (a day earlier in America), Roosevelt died. The final section will go over Trinity and the actual bombings. It starts with Truman’s early days as president and it took a worryingly high number of days to tell him about the bombs. He battled diplomatically with Russia and other less interesting things. On May 1st, Hitler killed himself and the Germans surrendered a week later. The big debate would be how to handle the Pacific. It looks like they were counting on Russia to join the war and put pressure on Japan to surrender. We’ll see how that goes.
February 7th, 2025
A bit surprised I haven’t written in over a week. Guess I’m kinda lazy. Honestly, it’s a lot of prose and small details without much worth summarizing. The big things are they chose targets, Trinity happened. Where I stopped, the Enola Gay is mid-flight. The writing is good. There’s so much detail and build-up to the Trinity test that I didn’t want to stop reading. I didn’t want to stop now, but I have things to do. I’d like to say the book paints Secretary of War Henry Stimson in a good light. Despite his role, he is strongly opposed to the fire bombings and the area bombings that needlessly kill civilians. I don’t think he wants to use the bomb, and he forbids certain targets like Kyoto, which had zero military value. At them same time, he knows it’s going to mass kill civilians and has to be considered a guilty party. Savage killing was the zeitgeist, though this does not defend any city bombing. The big question everyone has is: would the Japs have surrendered, conditionally, without the atomic bombings? I think so. It’s a simple reality that without material a war cannot be fought. Why is an invasion even necessary if they will let the emperor remain and let the main islands remain in Japanese hands? A blockade would have worked with minimal loss of life.
February 11th, 2025
The anticipation to the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima is like waiting to watch an execution. It is an unpleasant wait as this small group of men made the long trip to kill many people. Some of them can remain indifferent to it while I hope some of them felt some negative feeling. Then it happens. The blast itself, the heat, the concussion, the mushroom cloud, is well known. What follows are many pages of quotations from survivors. It all made me very sick to my stomach. The atomic bombing was such a horrible event that it is hard to believe that it really happened. But there is no denial of this war crime. I think this should be required reading for everyone. I’d like to think there’d be no one who justifies the bombing after that.
February 12th, 2025
I finished the book today. I wanted to stop reading but pushed on through. The accounts of survivors are incredibly difficult to read. Nearly cried. There are so many horrible stories and this was just a small subset. After the initial slaughter, people started to die days later. Once the radiation wore off, the tissue from the gamma radiation took effect and more started to die. Probably 200k died in total, over the next couple years. Some Americans rejoiced, some people like Leo Szilard, Otto Hahn, and Otto Frish were sickened or horrified. I can see why a soldier would be glad that the war would end soon. Better them than you. But the Japanese government dilly-dallied, the Soviets invaded Manchuria, and the Americans dropped another bomb on Nagasaki. The author does not give much coverage to this. Another 100k or so died. While regular bombing continued, the Emperor got involved and forced a Japanese surrender, which ended up conditional. A third bomb would have been ready to drop by the 18th. It’s hard to imagine how much killing and murder occurred in the roughly 10 years of war in Asia and Europe. The people of today did not experience it and do not know its lessons. It will get worse before it gets better.