62 pages • 2 hours read
Richard RhodesThe Making of the Atomic Bomb
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1986A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Inevitability of the Bomb
Physicists tend to think along similar lines, and when research points to new possibilities, teams of scientists around the world often quickly converge on similar realizations. This was especially true of nuclear physics in the 1930s, when European and American scientists began to understand that the atom held immense stores of energy that human ingenuity could exploit. When World War II broke out, the idea of atoms as weapons spread like wildfire. Researchers in the warring nations of America, England, Russia, and Germany all understood that a bomb might be possible, and that the first country to develop one would probably win the war. The scientists realized that their counterparts in other countries also realized this, and the race to build the first bomb became more urgent.
Some Manhattan Project scientists wanted to hide these discoveries, lest other nations get wind of them and begin building super weapons. Other researchers pointed out that the scientific pathway to atomic bombs had been laid out before the war, and most physicists already were aware of the possibilities; it would only be a matter of time before they, too, made the same follow-up discoveries needed to build a bomb. Add to this Oppenheimer’s comment that scientists make discoveries, not so much because they should, but because they can, and it becomes clear that atomic bombs would soon be a reality.
The Dark Mirror
Atrocities can be committed out of fear as well as anger and contempt. American officials worried that Germany would build a nuclear weapon before the US did, “even though that threat, of a German atomic bomb, proved to be an image in a darkened mirror” (500). Officials also feared that the Germans would simply breed radioactive materials and release them over American cities, “another vision in a dark mirror” (510). In both instances, the Americans were ahead technologically and were the first to contemplate doing to Germany what they then feared would happen to them. The “dark mirror” thus represents the self-reinforcing paranoia of high-tech warfare that caused opponents to accelerate research into new and devastating forms of weaponry. They looked into the mirror, so to speak, and saw their enemy.
The cruel tragedy of such thinking is that it’s not illogical: The enemy will try to build a war-winning weapon, and we must build one in response. Thus, the weapons research facilities of World War II moved humanity on a course toward a nuclear future of “mutually assured destruction” should any nuclear power try to use weapons of mass destruction against another. Oppenheimer’s dream of a world that refuses to use nuclear weapons warps into the nightmare of a world armed to the teeth with such weapons, frozen with the fear that they might be used; it is the peace of mutual terror.
The Search for Peace in the Nuclear Age
World War I ushered in the age of industrial warfare, when weapons of mass destruction—massed artillery bombardment, poison gas, and aerial bombing of urban centers—became the accepted norm. By the end of World War II, firebombing of civilian areas was commonplace, and the ultimate urban annihilator, the atomic bomb, entered into warfare. Soon, several major nations owned hundreds or thousands of these weapons; the danger of any war becoming a nuclear holocaust rose significantly. If nuclear war would cause worldwide annihilation, that very danger makes the use of such weapons nearly impossible. This was the vision of Bohr, who recognized a complementarity between the atomic bomb’s potential to destroy humanity and its ability to freeze war plans.
US leaders in August 1945 decided to drop nuclear weapons on Japanese cities in the hope that Japan would realize that their civilization might be wiped off the map if they continued to fight. For a few years after the war, the US was the sole owner of atomic weapons; then Russia got the bomb, and as each side rushed to build more of them, their use quickly became unthinkable. Bohr, Oppenheimer, and others foresaw this possibility. They hoped, however, that an edgy peace enforced by nuclear terror might someday be replaced with an international treaty to control or even eliminate nuclear weapons. Their dream has, to this day, been realized only in part.
