The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb

This book gives a brief and highly technical summary of what was known about nuclear fission in 1942 and how to go about turning this knowledge into a "practical weapon". Great fun to read if you have an engineering or physics degree or similar background knowledge. The author has extensively annotated and updated the terse original lecture notes that were given to new arrivals at Los Alamos. Interestingly, the annotations now take up more space that the original notes. These annotations may help to make the subject accessible to a non-technical audience as they provide invaluable historical and technical background. Invaluable for anyone interested in science history and/or the Manhattan Project.

This is a truly exciting book for people with the desire to understand bomb physics. This book consists out of the original lecture notes from a series of seminars given in 1943 to the bomb scientists at the start of the Manhattan Project. These lecture notes are clearly annotated so that a layman can understand the bomb. Although the book discusses mainly the knowledge of 1943, the clear annotations of the author comments also on the advances since 1943.In this book you will learn to calculate the energy of an atomic bomb after already 5 pages using only one simple physical law (no, not Einstein!). When you are halfway in the book, you will understand the calculations of the critical mass.However to fully appreciate the book, you need to have a basic understanding of mathematics and physics. (it would be nice if you know what a differential equation is.) The book also contains several funny anekdotes which make it a truly astonishing reading.

Excellent book, it takes a bit to stick with it, but the modern day excerpts/perspectives threaded into the book give it a good historical perspective. This is a good combo to go together with Richard Rhodes "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" and "Dark Sun".

This is an incredible book. This is originally a compilation of Robert Serber's notes he gave to incoming scientists at Los Alamos in the 1940s, explaining to them the purpose of the Manhattan Project and the expected means by which they would achieve their goal. This particular copy, courtesy of the University of California Press, contains not only an introduction by Mr. Richard Rhodes (author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb - strongly recommended), but notes throughout the Primer itself by Robert Serber. It is fascinating to read comments on a document by the man who wrote it many years afterward. Be warned: This is NOT a how-to book, and does require some basic knowledge of calculus and physics. It is, however, unbelievably interesting, and worth the cost to add it to your collection.

If you want to understand the bomb, there's no substitue for this book. I have a degree in physics with a decade of dust on it and found this presentation to be just within my understanding. If you don't know calculus and freshman physics, you're probably not going to understand it very well. If you do, it's fascinating.