Chain Reactions $ THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB

By R.Z. Sheppard

As yet, there is no mythology of the nuclear age, though parallels with the legend of Prometheus are already apparent. Stealing fire from the gods had an incalculable price; the treasure was indistinguishable from the curse.

This is the burden of Richard Rhodes' excellent book about the visionaries whose pure science was alloyed with the tainted art of politics. Bits and pieces of the atom bomb story are well known, especially the dramatic race to Trinity by J. Robert Oppenheimer and his brainy cohort at Los Alamos, N. Mex. In Rhodes' comprehensive view, the blinding flash of that achievement climaxes decades of brilliant ideas, technological innovations and the contributions of incandescent personalities. "Had astronomers been watching," he writes, "they could have seen ((the explosion)) reflected from the moon, literal moonshine." But moments after the artificial sunburst, witnesses became awed captives of their immediate surroundings: "The horses in the MP stable still whinnied in fright; the paddles of the dusty Aermotor windmill at Base Camp still spun away the energy of the blast; the frogs had ceased to make love in the puddles."

The quality of Rhodes' narrative history resides not only in the grandeur of its structure but in its details: Hungarian-born Physicist Leo Szilard stepping off a London curb in 1933 and being struck by the shattering inspiration of sustained chain reaction; Cambridge's Ernest Rutherford angling for the secrets of the universe with string and red sealing wax; Pierre Curie's hands, swollen by prolonged exposure to radium; the flat feet that kept Albert Einstein out of the army; Nobel Prizewinner Enrico Fermi arriving for an appointment at the U.S. Navy Department and overhearing the desk officer tell his admiral, "There's a wop outside"; F.D.R.'s 13-word handwritten approval of atom bomb research beginning with "O.K."; the B-29 pilot who named a plane after his mother, Enola Gay.

Rhodes, a novelist and social chronicler (Looking for America), has a firm hold on the fundamentals of nuclear physics. He describes the first millisecond of the atomic age in New Mexico with eerie precision: "The firing circuit closed; the X-unit discharged; the detonators at 32 detonation points simultaneously fired; they ignited the outer lens shells of Composition B; the detonation waves separately bulged, encountered inclusions of Baratol, slowed, curved, turned inside out, merged to a common inward-driving sphere; the spherical detonation wave crossed into the second shell of solid fast Composition B and accelerated; hit the wall of dense uranium tamper and became a shock wave and squeezed, liquefying, moving through; hit the nickel plating of the plutonium core and squeezed, the small sphere shrinking, collapsing into itself, becoming an eyeball . . ."

In the time it took to type this out, mankind had its first radioactive mushroom cloud, and nothing would ever be the same. Project Director Oppenheimer realized this immediately, and his reach into Hindu scripture has become famous: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Even before the test blast, Danish Physicist Niels Bohr foresaw a fundamental change in the relationships among nation-states. Both Hitler and Churchill, on the other hand, failed to grasp the political consequences of the new energy. "After all," said the Prime Minister, "this new bomb is just going to be bigger than our present bombs. It involves no difference in the principles of war."

Rhodes' digressions into the strategies and technologies of World War I and the saturation bombing of cities 25 years later demonstrate how those martial rules became a grisly form of accounting. It was a matter of cost per thousand, the fewest dollars for the most kills. In this banal light, a nuclear bomb is the pinnacle of efficiency, a macabre paradox because it was brought about by the best minds working within a great humanist tradition. For the sake of spiritual harmony, it could be said that The Making of the Atomic Bomb recounts the second greatest story ever told.