Thirteen Days of Atomigeddon 2: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

[james_davis_nicoll]

“The deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because they are possible to find.” The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

As ever, corrections accepted but I won't be able to act on them until tonight.

Comments

[monte davis (from livejournal.com)]

As a science writer, I greatly admired the book's craft -- the positioning and "staging" of scientific and technical exposition in counterpoint with the historical and military narratives. Marshalling what the lay reader needs to know is hard; deploying it at the right time, in the right dosage, is really hard.

The microsecond-by-microsecond description of the first detonation is a minor masterpiece in itself. A while back, I asked Charlie Stross if he'd had it in mind when writing the description of the induced supernova in Iron Sunrise. IIRC, he replied that it hadn't been deliberate, but he remembered the Rhodes passage vividly and wouldn't be surprised if its influence had been in the mix.

[cshalizi.livejournal.com]

That connection hadn't occurred to me when I read Iron Sunrise, but now that you point it out, it seems compelling.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

Tom Clancy did something similar in The Sum of All Fears, though there it's a thermonuclear device, and it doesn't work quite right (though it's still a fizzle several times more powerful than Hiroshima).

[rwpikul.livejournal.com]

I happen to still have a copy and ISTR that it was actually about the same as Hiroshima.

(Checks)

The yield of the Denver device was 11,200 tons or 10.16kt, while a Little Boy bomb had a yield of 16kt. What I we remembering was a later report that the device was "less than fifteen kilotonnes."