A personal history of the Atomic Scientists:
The issue of nuclear weapons, weighing on everyone’s mind given the latest Iran-Israel tensions as also the recent tensions between India-Pakistan and of course the Russia-Ukraine conflict, had me reaching out for this fantastic book to read once more.
The book Brighter than a Thousand Suns by Robert Jungk is a beautifully written history of the atomic scientists who were instrumental in the development of the atomic bomb. Of course, J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most well known and the star of the show with the Manhattan Project. This book however traces the entire chronology of the events leading up to the race of making the first atom bomb from 1918 onwards. The author personally corresponded with most of the scientists and wrote up this magnum opus. One of my personal favourites by far.
Some poignant takeaways; quoting directly from the book:
“The international family of physicists has kept together to the best of their ability, at all events better than men of letters and intellectuals in other fields, who bombarded each other with spiteful manifestoes.
Physicists who has worked together before the war, often for years, either by correspondence or side by side in the laboratory, could never become enemies at a command from above.
During these years most zealous efforts were made by the Soviet Union to make contact with Western Scientists. The Bolshevist state not only wished its scientists to learn from those “out there”. It also took care to have its own publications translated into English, French and German. Even that dictatorial state, in those days, imposed no rule of secrecy or censorship upon the field of research”. Continue reading Brighter than a Thousand Suns
