Launched in 1942, the Manhattan Project was a well-funded, secret effort by the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada to develop an atomic bomb before the Nazis. The results—the bombs named "Little Boy" and "Fat Man"—were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945. Amelia was the wife of the Austrian physicist Eugene Wigner. Wigner had emigrated to the United States and eventually found a teaching job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He and Amelia met, and shortly thereafter, were married. Then she got ill. As told to Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Wigner recalled: You might be surprised to see a graphic novel on this list, but this must-read for anyone interested in this historical event. It is unlike any other book on this list as it shows, through words and illustrations, everything related to the atomic bomb. This includes the origins of the theory for it, the early work, and the Trinity Test. It then continues with the bombs being dropped on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the early Cold War that resulted from developing these weapons of mass destruction. I did notice Rhodes really had a fetish with Szilard and that seemingly translated into his next book Dark Sun about the Hydrogen bomb. There's no doubt Szilard was also a giant in this period but he was slightly more auxiliary when it came to these atomic bombs. I wonder if maybe the attention lathered on Szilard would have been better focused on some of the other dozen scientists who had such big contributions but perhaps Szilard's ego demands the attention. This is a sort of a Cliff Notes or Reader's Digest compilation of atomic history texts. Richard Rhodes writes the introduction, and at no point does he suggest why you need this book if you've already read his far more comprehensive The Making Of The Atomic Bomb - he probably thinks you don't. If I hadn't just come through it, I probably would have been a bit perplexed. A lot of the key figures remain sketchy, their motivations shadowy, their processes vague.

So they left it for us to live with the legacies of the war. The question is, do we have the courage to overcome them?" - Tsuyoshi Hasegawa Finally in 1942, “[Enrico] Fermi…brought to fruition all the years of discovery and experiment. Men had controlled the release of energy from the atomic nucleus. There were many people involved in this project. The books that we’re about to review include many names, events, secrets, and much more that may surprise you. The story is a broad one with many versions told by different people. However, this project wasn’t a secret for long and there is so much to discover about it after the time that has passed. Why Was the Manhattan Project Called That? It did not take atomic weapons to make men want peace," justified his nightmarish creation Oppenheimer. "But the atomic bomb was the turn of the screw. It made the prospect of future war unendurable." Yet, the moral drawn from the atomic "saga" and its legacy of arms development is that science can lead to evil and its temptations can hardly be resisted. Modern nations do not hinder their scientists because they put inordinate power in the hands of the government. But where will this steady march of technology onward bring us? How soon will the atomic bomb, just like the medieval torture devices, the sabres and the rifles, become an obsolete entity, a museum exhibit? And when it becomes, what is that power that will replace and overshadow it?Consider what had happened earlier, at Monte Cassino in Italy, when Allied commanders made one of the most controversial military decisions of the war and bombed a monastery perched resolutely like a fortress astride an impregnable mountain pass. There are good arguments that that historic monastery never had to be bombed; that, in fact, the whole pass could have been gotten around at a juncture to the east, thus avoiding the head-pounding frustration of trying to take the mountain. Whatever the case, day after day -- to the grunt on the ground -- that monastery was like an evil thing that tied them down, that glowered at them like a death stare. It symbolized a kind of fatal inertia and stasis, a frustrating and threatening obstacle that seemed never-ending. When the place was bombed, it was an instant morale booster to the soldier under siege. If it was the wrong thing to do, it was something to worry about later. At least now you might have a chance to get home alive.

In addition,there are details about the lives of the scientists who worked on the project,but those are not particularly compelling either.

How to Vote

MM: Freeman’s book examines the emergence of the Atomic Age, with its odd mixture of futuristic fantasy and existential angst. It extends the narrative of wartime Oak Ridge into the Cold War and beyond, revealing some of the curious ambiguities that characterize contemporary scientific and political culture. I think we have no hope at all if we yield our belief in the value of science, in the good that it can be to the world to know about reality, about nature, to attain a gradually greater and greater control of nature, to learn, to teach, to understand. I think that if we lose our faith in this we stop being scientists, we sell out our heritage, we lose what we have the most of value for this time of crisis. Atoms are made up of three particles, protons, neutrons, and electrons. At the atom’s core is the nucleus which contains the protons and neutrons. Electrons are found in orbitals or spheres around the nucleus. Protons carry a positive electrical charge, electrons carry a negative electrical charge and neutrons are electrically neutral. Breaking the bonds that hold the nucleus together, splitting the atom, through nuclear fission releases large quantities of energy. During nuclear fission, a neutron collides with a uranium atom and splits it. This collision releases energy in the form of heat and radiation and produces additional neutrons. These additional neutrons are available to collide with other uranium atoms, producing a nuclear chain reaction.