Twenty-five years after its preliminary publication, The Making from the Atomic Bomb remains the definitive history of nuclear weapons and the Manhattan Task. From the turn-of-the-century finding of nuclear energy towards the dropping of the first bombs on Japan, Richard Rhodes’s Pulitzer Prize-winning publication details the science, the people, and the socio-political realities that led to the development of the atomic bomb.

This sweeping account begins in the 19th century, with the discovery of nuclear about Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition fission, and continues to World War Two as well as the Americans’ race to beat Hitler’s Nazis. That competition launched the Manhattan Project and the almost overnight construction of a vast military-industrial complex that culminated in the fateful shedding of the initial bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Reading such as a character-driven suspense book, the book introduces the players with this saga of physics, politics, and human being psychology-from FDR and Einstein to the visionary scientists who all pioneered quantum theory and the application of thermonuclear fission, including Planck, Szilard, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Meitner, von Neumann, and Lawrence.

From nuclear power’s first foreshadowing in the task of H.G. Wells towards the shiny glare of Trinity at Alamogordo and the arms race of the Chilly War, this dread invention permanently changed the course of human history, and The Making of The Atomic Bomb offers a panoramic backdrop for that story.

Richard Rhodes’s capability to craft persuasive biographical portraits is usually matched only by his rigorous scholarship. Told in wealthy human, political, and scientific detail that any audience can follow, The Making of the Atomic Bomb is normally a thought-provoking and masterful work.