The Ultimate Weapon: The Race to Develop the Atomic Bomb

This sweeping account of the Manhattan Project during WWII sheds light on the most fearsome project in history. The book is filled with irony. In an opening photograph, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tibbets smiles and waves from the cockpit of the Enola Gray, a bomber plane named after his mother. Tibbets was a young airman in his twenties who was chosen to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Later in the book, we learn that the rest of the crew was kept in the dark about the devastating cargo until midair. Tibbets was given cyanide tablets to use in the event of capture. Sullivan chronicles the atomic bomb from its development to its testing to its use and aftermath. He includes some sophisticated physics. The world's first nuclear chain reaction, which took place on a squash course at the University of Chicago, a dangerous location in a major city, is clarified by including a painting of the event by Gary Sheehan. Following the successful experiment, one observer wrote that it was "a black day in the history of mankind." Most surprising, are the size of the project sites: Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Hanford and the speed with which they progressed. All three were in remote areas, yet Oak Ridge became the fifth largest city in Tennessee by 1945. The government cities sprang up complete with homes, schools, churches, hospitals, stores, and recreation facilities. The maps and photos of these installations are particularly interesting. The frolicking in the swimming pools and recreation halls is paradoxical to the monumentality of the work being done. The author doesn't exclude details from his book because they are controversial. In a section on espionage, he tells the tale of Ethel and James Rosenberg, who were executed for revealing secrets of Los Alamos to the Soviets. Ethel Rosenberg was the first woman since Mary Surratt, who was involved in the Lincoln assassination, to be executed by the American government. Sullivan even includes a section on the Office of Special Services, the OSS, which later became the CIA. Former Boston Red Sox player "Moe" Berg, who had a gift for languages, was recruited to assassinate German physicist Werner Heisenberg. Berg determined, during a lecture, that Heisenberg was no threat so he didn't complete the mission. Readers will tense as the atomic bomb is tested in the New Mexico desert. Sullivan writes that the flash from the explosion was visible in three states and windows shattered as far as 125 miles away. The heat equaled that of the sun, and the bomb vaporized all life in a one-mile radius. The resulting massive crater was filled with glass. After the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, participants and politicians had conflicting emotions. American reactions ranged from horror to satisfaction to profound relief. The co-pilot of the Enola Gray wrote, "My God, what have we done?" Hours later, President Truman declared, "This is the greatest day in history." An Amer

"We love to laugh and play and run And we would never start a war We're all afraid of bombs and guns We know that one fight leads to more. Our country says we must be ready For a fight, no matter where Even though that might be right, It makes the other countries scared" --Peter Alsop, "Kid's Peace Song" "By 2006, six nuclear weapons had been lost and never recovered." I'm frightened. In fact, a piece of me has been frightened ever since my childhood days when I followed my teachers' instructions by watching and reading the daily news and then employed scissors and glue to complete those weekly current events assignments. Sadly, the more I've learned over the years, the more frightened I've become. "Using the atomic bomb against Japan unleashed a Pandora's box of consequences that haunt the world to this day. When the Soviet Union announced in 1949 that they, too, had the atomic bomb, it sparked a nuclear arms race that lasted over three decades. It consumed billions of dollars, instilled in Americans and Russians a constant fear of mutual nuclear annihilation, and in 1962 brought the Soviet Union and the United States to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. At the peak of the nuclear arms race, the Soviet Union and the United States combined had enough weapons to destroy the Earth hundreds of times over. "When the Soviet Union collapsed and fragmented in the late 1980s, it appeared that the menacing cloud of global nuclear destruction that had hung over the world for so long had finally lifted. The reality is that nuclear war is more of a probability now than it ever was. India and Pakistan, who have been fighting for decades over a disputed region called Kashmir, both possess a nuclear arsenal and have threatened to use them against each other if violence between the two countries escalates to full-scale war. "Nations formerly part of the Soviet Union still possess nuclear weapons from the cold war era. Some of those countries are so ravaged by corruption and poverty that there is the very reasonable fear that they could sell the weapons to terrorist organizations or nations hostile to the United States. North Korea, a nation ruled by a ruthless and unpredictably dangerous dictator, has claimed to have detonated a nuclear weapon. Iran, a nation that has a long history of hostility toward Israel, the United States, and other countries, is believed to be in the process of developing nuclear weapons. The five acknowledged nuclear powers -- the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom -- together possess thirty-one thousand nuclear weapons. Israel, surrounded by hostile nations in the Middle East, also possesses a nuclear arsenal. The threat of nuclear war is still a very real, frightening possibility." What happened during World War II, back when my own parents were teenagers, to put the United States in the forefront of what is still an out-of-control nuclear arms race? Why did the U.S. develop T