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British Scientists and the Manhattan Project by NA NA Pdf
During World War 2, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill pooled their nations' resources in the desperate race to beat the Germans to the secret of the atomic bomb. This book tells the story of the British scientists who journeyed to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to help develop the world's first nuclear weapons. The contributions of the British Mission to Los Alamos, which have been largely overlooked, were vital to the completion of the project. In addition, the two dozen scientists who collaborated with their American and Canadian allies were to have a profound effect on the post-War world, helping to shape the nuclear programs of the United States, Great Britain and, more controversially, the USSR.
British Scientists and the Manhattan Project by Ferenc Morton Szasz Pdf
During World War II, Franklin D.Roosevelt and Winston Churchill pooled their nations' resources in the race to beat the Germans to the secret of the atomic bomb. This book tells the story of the British scientists who journeyed to Los Alamos to help develop the world's first nuclear weapons.
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. A vast state within a state, the Manhattan Project employed 130,000 people and cost the United States and its allies 2 billion dollars, but its contribution to science as a prestigious investment was invaluable. After the bombs were dropped, states began allocating unprecedented funds for scientific research, leading to the establishment of many of twentieth century's major research institutions. Yet the union of science, industry, and the military did not start with the development of the atomic bomb; World War II only deepened the relationship. This absorbing history revisits the interactions among science, the national interest, and public and private funding that was initiated in World War I and flourished in WWII. It then follows the Manhattan Project from inception to dissolution, describing the primary influences that helped execute the world's first successful plan for nuclear research and tracing the lineages of modern national nuclear agencies back to their source.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes Pdf
**Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award** The definitive history of nuclear weapons—from the turn-of-the-century discovery of nuclear energy to J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project—this epic work details the science, the people, and the sociopolitical realities that led to the development of the atomic bomb. This sweeping account begins in the 19th century, with the discovery of nuclear fission, and continues to World War Two and the Americans’ race to beat Hitler’s Nazis. That competition launched the Manhattan Project and the nearly overnight construction of a vast military-industrial complex that culminated in the fateful dropping of the first bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Reading like a character-driven suspense novel, the book introduces the players in this saga of physics, politics, and human psychology—from FDR and Einstein to the visionary scientists who 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 earliest foreshadowing in the work of H.G. Wells to the bright glare of Trinity at Alamogordo and the arms race of the Cold War, this dread invention forever changed the course of human history, and The Making of The Atomic Bomb provides a panoramic backdrop for that story. Richard Rhodes’s ability to craft compelling biographical portraits is matched only by his rigorous scholarship. Told in rich human, political, and scientific detail that any reader can follow, The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a thought-provoking and masterful work.
The History and Science of the Manhattan Project by Bruce Cameron Reed Pdf
The development of atomic bombs under the auspices of the U.S. Army’s Manhattan Project during World War II is considered to be the outstanding news story of the twentieth century. In this book, a physicist and expert on the history of the Project presents a comprehensive overview of this momentous achievement. The first three chapters cover the history of nuclear physics from the discovery of radioactivity to the discovery of fission, and would be ideal for instructors of a sophomore-level “Modern Physics” course. Student-level exercises at the ends of the chapters are accompanied by answers. Chapter 7 covers the physics of first-generation fission weapons at a similar level, again accompanied by exercises and answers. For the interested layman and for non-science students and instructors, the book includes extensive qualitative material on the history, organization, implementation, and results of the Manhattan Project and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing missions. The reader also learns about the legacy of the Project as reflected in the current world stockpiles of nuclear weapons. This second edition contains important revisions and additions, including a new chapter on the German atomic bomb program and new sections on British and Canadian contributions to the Manhattan project and on feed materials. Several other sections have been expanded; reader feedback has been helpful in introducing minor corrections and improved explanations; and, last but not least, the second edition includes a detailed index.
Churchill's Bomb - from the author of the Costa award-winning biography The Strangest Man - reveals a new aspect of Winston Churchill's life, so far completely neglected by historians: his relations with his nuclear scientists, and his management of Britain's policy on atomic weapons. Churchill was the only prominent politician to foresee the nuclear age and he played a leading role in the development of the Bomb during World War II. He became the first British Prime Minister with access to these weapons, and left office following desperate attempts during the Cold War to end the arms race. Graham Farmelo traces the beginnings of Churchill's association with nuclear weapons to his unlikely friendship with H. G. Wells, who coined the term 'atomic bombs'. In the 1930s, when Ernest Rutherford and his brilliant followers, such as Chadwick and Cockcroft, gave Britain the lead in nuclear research, Churchill wrote several widely read newspaper articles on the huge implications of their work. British physicists, in 1940, first showed that the Bomb was a practical possibility. But Churchill, closely advised by his favourite scientist, the controversial Frederick Lindemann, allowed leadership to pass to the US, where the Manhattan Project made the Bomb a terrible reality. British physicists played only a minor role in this vast enterprise, while Churchill ignored warnings from the scientist Niels Bohr that the Anglo-American policy would lead to a post-war arms race. After the war, the Americans reneged on personal agreements between Roosevelt and Churchill to share research. Clement Attlee, in a fateful decision, ordered the building of a British Bomb to maintain the country's place among the great powers. Churchill inherited it and ended his political career obsessed with the threat of thermonuclear war. Churchill's Bomb is an original and controversial book, full of political and scientific personalities and intrigues, which reveals a little-known side of Britain's great war-leader.
The Spy Who Changed the World by Mike Rossiter Pdf
The incredible true story of a British physicist who was an undercover spy for the Soviets. The world first heard of Klaus Fuchs, the head of theoretical physics at the British Research Establishment at Harwell in February 1950 when he appeared at the Old Bailey, accused of passing secrets to the Soviet Union. For over sixty years disinformation and lies surrounded the story of Klaus Fuchs as the Governments of Britain, the United States and Russia all tried to cover up the truth about his treachery. Piecing together the story from archives in Britain, the United States, Russia and Germany, The Spy Who Changed the World unravels the truth about Fuchs and reveals for the first time his long career of espionage. It proves that he played a pivotal role in Britain's bomb program in the race to keep up with the United States in the atomic age, and that he revealed vital secrets about the atom bomb, as well as the immensely destructive hydrogen bomb to the Soviet Government. It is a dramatic tale of clandestine meetings, deadly secrets, family entanglements and illicit love affairs, all set against the tumultuous years from the rise of Hitler to the start of the Cold War.
Author : Cynthia C. Kelly Publisher : Black Dog & Leventhal Page : 496 pages File Size : 43,8 Mb Release : 2009-02-10 Category : History ISBN : 9781603762069
The definitive collection of writings on the Manhattan Project by the pre-eminent scientists, historians, and the everyday observers who bore witness to the birth of the modern nuclear age. Begun in 1939, the Manhattan Project eventually employed more than 130,000 people, including our foremost scientists and thinkers, and cost nearly $2 billion, while operating under a shroud of absolute secrecy. This groundbreaking collection of documents, essays, articles, and excerpts from histories, biographies, plays, novels, letters, and the oral histories of key eyewitnesses provides unique perspectives for the historian and student of history all compiled by experts at the Atomic Heritage Foundation. Photographs throughout depict key moments and pivotal figures. The Manhattan Project gives actual voice to a significant period in history.
'Everything about this story is astounding' Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times "Trinity" was the codename for the test explosion of the atomic bomb in New Mexico on 16 July 1945. Trinity is now also the extraordinary story of the bomb's metaphorical father, Rudolf Peierls; his intellectual son, the atomic spy, Klaus Fuchs, and the ghosts of the security services in Britain, the USA and USSR. Against the background of pre-war Nazi Germany, the Second World War and the following Cold War, the book traces how Peierls brought Fuchs into his family and his laboratory, only to be betrayed. It describes in unprecedented detail how Fuchs became a spy, his motivations and the information he passed to his Soviet contacts, both in the UK and after he went with Peierls to join the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in 1944. Frank Close is himself a distinguished nuclear physicist: uniquely, the book explains the science as well as the spying. Fuchs returned to Britain in August 1946 still undetected and became central to the UK's independent effort to develop nuclear weapons. Close describes the febrile atmosphere at Harwell, the nuclear physics laboratory near Oxford, where many of the key players were quartered, and the charged relationships which developed there. He uncovers fresh evidence about the role of the crucial VENONA signals decryptions, and shows how, despite mistakes made by both MI5 and the FBI, the net gradually closed around Fuchs, building an intolerable pressure which finally cracked him. The Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear device in August 1949, far earlier than the US or UK expected. In 1951, the US Congressional Committee on Atomic Espionage concluded, 'Fuchs alone has influenced the safety of more people and accomplished greater damage than any other spy not only in the history of the United States, but in the history of nations'. This book is the most comprehensive account yet published of these events, and of the tragic figure at their centre.
From New York Times bestselling author Sam Kean comes the gripping, untold story of a renegade group of scientists and spies determined to keep Adolf Hitler from obtaining the ultimate prize: a nuclear bomb. Scientists have always kept secrets. But rarely have the secrets been as vital as they were during World War II. In the middle of building an atomic bomb, the leaders of the Manhattan Project were alarmed to learn that Nazi Germany was far outpacing the Allies in nuclear weapons research. Hitler, with just a few pounds of uranium, would have the capability to reverse the entire D-Day operation and conquer Europe. So they assembled a rough and motley crew of geniuses -- dubbed the Alsos Mission -- and sent them careening into Axis territory to spy on, sabotage, and even assassinate members of Nazi Germany's feared Uranium Club. The details of the mission rival the finest spy thriller, but what makes this story sing is the incredible cast of characters -- both heroes and rogues alike -- including: Moe Bergm, the major league catcher who abandoned the game for a career as a multilingual international spy; the strangest fellow to ever play professional baseball. Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist credited as the discoverer of quantum mechanics; a key contributor to the Nazi's atomic bomb project and the primary target of the Alsos mission. Colonel Boris Pash, a high school science teacher and veteran of the Russian Revolution who fled the Soviet Union with a deep disdain for Communists and who later led the Alsos mission. Joe Kennedy Jr., the charismatic, thrill-seeking older brother of JFK whose need for adventure led him to volunteer for the most dangerous missions the Navy had to offer. Samuel Goudsmit, a washed-up physics prodigy who spent his life hunting Nazi scientists -- and his parents, who had been swept into a concentration camp -- across the globe. Irène and Frederic Joliot-Curie, a physics Nobel-Prize winning power couple who used their unassuming status as scientists to become active members of the resistance. Thrust into the dark world of international espionage, these scientists and soldiers played a vital and largely untold role in turning back one of the darkest tides in human history.
The Manhattan Project by Francis George Gosling Pdf
A history of the origins and development of the American atomic bomb program during WWII. Begins with the scientific developments of the pre-war years. Details the role of the U.S. government in conducting a secret, nationwide enterprise that took science from the laboratory and into combat with an entirely new type of weapon. Concludes with a discussion of the immediate postwar period, the debate over the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, and the founding of the Atomic Energy Commission. Chapters: the Einstein letter; physics background, 1919-1939; early government support; the atomic bomb and American strategy; and the Manhattan district in peacetime. Illustrated.
In early 1942, the fate of the Allies appeared dire. Germany had conquered most of Western Europe, and its armies were deep into Russia. Japan had overrun Manchuria, the Philippines, and the Dutch East Indies, had conquered large swathes of China, and had destroyed much of the US battle fleet at Pearl Harbor. But the tide of World War II turned dramatically in favor of the Allies, and in this, Allied scientists played a critical role. The chapters covered in this book include an Overview summary of the entire war, the Battle of Britain, the Battle of the Atlantic against the German U-boats, the battle for command of the air, the Allied breaking of the German Enigma cipher, D-Day and the Allied invasion of Europe, and the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb. Harold Feiveson is a deep student of history, a masterful story teller and one of the pioneers in the global cooperative effort to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. This book provides a new, integrated overview of the remarkable technical achievements by the U.S. and British scientists who helped turn the tide of World War II. Although the war seemed endless to the participants, the number of world-shaping developments that occurred during the six years after the worlds industrialized countries committed themselves to total war is both remarkable and terrifying. The final breakthrough, nuclear weapons, led to a post-war nuclear-arms race whose dangerous legacy of destructive potential we are still struggling with today. -Frank von Hippel, Professor of Public andInternational Affairs emeritus, Princeton University An authoritative introduction to what Winston Churchill called the wizard war. Feivesons examination of the crucial role played by science and technology in World War II will appeal to both specialists and military history buffs. -Colonel Paul L Miles, U.S. Army, (Retired),former lecturer in history, Princeton University.
THE WORLD SET FREE was written in 1913 and published early in 1914, and it is the latest of a series of three fantasias of possibility, stories which all turn on the possible developments in the future of some contemporary force or group of forces. The World Set Free was written under the immediate shadow of the Great War. Every intelligent person in the world felt that disaster was impending and knew no way of averting it, but few of us realised in the earlier half of 1914 how near the crash was to us. The reader will be amused to find that here it is put off until the year 1956. He may naturally want to know the reason for what will seem now a quite extraordinary delay. As a prophet, the author must confess he has always been inclined to be rather a slow prophet.The war aeroplane in the world of reality, for example, beat the forecast in Anticipations by about twenty years or so. I suppose a desire not to shock the sceptical reader's sense of use and wont and perhaps a less creditable disposition to hedge, have something to do with this dating forward of one's main events, but in the particular case of The World Set Free there was, I think, another motive in holding the Great War back, and that was to allow the chemist to get well forward with his discovery of the release of atomic energy. 1956or for that matter 2056may be none too late for that crowning revolution in human potentialities. And apart from this procrastination of over forty years, the guess at the opening phase of the war was fairly lucky; the forecast of an alliance of the Central Empires, the opening campaign through the Netherlands, and the despatch of the British Expeditionary Force were all justified before the book had been published six months. And the opening section of Chapter the Second remains now, after the reality has happened, a fairly adequate diagnosis of the essentials of the matter. One happy hit (in Chapter the Second, Section 2), on which the writer may congratulate himself, is the forecast that under modern conditions it would be quite impossible for any great general to emerge to supremacy and concentrate the enthusiasm of the armies of either side.There could be no Alexanders or Napoleons. And we soon heard the scientific corps muttering, 'These old fools,' exactly as it is here foretold.These, however, are small details, and the misses in the story far outnumber the hits. It is the main thesis which is still of interest now; the thesis that because of the development of scientific knowledge, separate sovereign states and separate sovereign empires are no longer possible in the world, that to attempt to keep on with the old system is to heap disaster upon disaster for mankind and perhaps to destroy our race altogether. The remaining interest of this book now is the sustained validity of this thesis and the discussion of the possible ending of war on the earth.
The Neutron and the Bomb: A Biography of Sir James Chadwick by Andrew Brown Pdf
James Chadwick (1891-1974) came from a humble background: his father was a cotton spinner. He was accepted in the physics department of Sir Ernest Rutherford at Manchester University in 1908 on a scholarship, and soon started publishing new findings about radioactivity. This led to a traveling scholarship to Berlin, where he made the important discovery of the continuous spectrum of β-particles. When the World War I broke out, Chadwick was interned by the Germans as an enemy alien for the next four years, but continued experiments in the prison camp. On his return to England in broken health, Rutherford invited Chadwick to join the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge where he became Rutherford’s deputy and oversaw much groundbreaking physics research over the next 15 years. Chadwick concentrated on finding evidence for the neutron, an uncharged nuclear particle whose existence was first proposed by Rutherford in 1920. Having noticed anomalous results from the Curie laboratory in Paris in 1932, Chadwick used simple bench-top apparatus to convince himself, after weeks of intense observations, that he had definite evidence for the existence of the neutron. The Nobel Prize for physics followed in 1935; that year he moved to Liverpool University to head his own department. At the outbreak of World War II, the feasibility of atomic bombs of unprecedented explosive power was already being discussed. Chadwick drafted the British MAUD committee's historic reports in the summer of 1941 which concluded that atomic bombs were indeed feasible with sufficient industrial capacity. In wartime Britain this was impossible, but in 1943 Chadwick moved to the US as head of the British scientists working on the Manhattan Project. He formed an unlikely alliance with its leader, General Leslie Groves, and became an adroit scientist-diplomat. Witnessing the first explosion of a plutonium-fueled device at the Trinity Test shattered him. Chadwick believed that dropping atomic bombs on Japanese cities was justified but the development of nuclear weapons as an unintended consequence of his discovery of the neutron caused him deep personal anguish. “Until this excellent book by Andrew Brown, [Chadwick] has remained the most shadowy of the atomic scientists who, for better or worse, gave the human species mastery over nuclear energy.” — Nigel Calder, New Scientist “Andrew Brown’s biography beautifully reveals [Chadwick’s] scientific, diplomatic and personal achievements.” — Roger H Stuewer, Physics Today “I can warmly recommend this book to all interested in the life of a remarkable scientist who played a crucial role in a formative period of the modern world.” — Hermann Bondi, Times Higher Education Supplement “This is the biography of a physicist who made one of the most important discoveries in nuclear physics, but retained to his old age the shyness of a young lad... Andrew Brown takes us through Chadwick’s life as an adventure... I found it a very good read.” — Hans Bethe, American Journal of Physics “The tale of so sterling a character, even when told as well as in this book, may be a little short on light moments, but any reader interested in the evolution of physics from an academic passion to a leading role on the world stage will find it a fascinating story and a worthy tribute to a great scientist.” — Brian Pippard, Nature “... makes absorbing reading... more than the life story of a remarkable man... unfolds the tremendous transformation that science underwent in the 20th century.” —Joseph Rotblat “… avidly researched and artfully written... This biography... blends elegantly direct scientific descriptions with often witty episodes and character summaries.” — William Lanouette, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm Pdf
Trinity, the debut graphic book by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm, depicts the dramatic history of the race to build and the decision to drop the first atomic bomb in World War Two—with a focus on the brilliant, enigmatic scientist, J. Robert Oppenheimer. "Succeeds as both a graphic primer and a philosophical meditation." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) This sweeping historical narrative traces the spark of invention from the laboratories of nineteenth-century Europe to the massive industrial and scientific efforts of the Manhattan Project, and even transports the reader into a nuclear reaction—into the splitting atoms themselves. The power of the atom was harnessed in a top-secret government compound in Los Alamos, New Mexico, by a group of brilliant scientists led by the enigmatic wunderkind J. Robert Oppenheimer. Focused from the start on the monumentally difficult task of building an atomic weapon, these men and women soon began to wrestle with the moral implications of actually succeeding. When they detonated the first bomb at a test site code-named Trinity, they recognized that they had irreversibly thrust the world into a new and terrifying age. With powerful renderings of WWII's catastrophic events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Fetter-Vorm unflinchingly chronicles the far-reaching political, environmental, and psychological effects of this new invention. Informative and thought-provoking, Trinity is the ideal introduction to one of the most significant events in history.
