The Manhattan Project: Big Science and the Atom Bomb (Revolutions in Science) - Hardcover

Hughes, Jeff

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0231131526 ISBN 13: 9780231131520

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2003

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Jeff Hughes is a senior lecturer in the history of science and technology at the University of Manchester. His research concerns the social history of the physical and chemical sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the institutional history of twentieth-century British science.

Reviews

To set the parameters of his analysis of the Manhattan Project, Hughes homes in on two pictures: one of physicist Ernest Rutherford at his table-top particle-detecting apparatus, and another of a building-size detector used in a modern particle accelerator. The milestone between the two is invariably said to be the crash development of the atomic bomb. Construction of the bomb, seen as the nexus between science, industry, and the military, had antecedents reaching back to Rutherford himself, argues Hughes. His labs as well as those of physicist Ernest Lawrence in the 1930s increasingly relied on industrial funding even as the British military simultaneously funded various scientific organizations. In Hughes' view, the Manhattan Project accelerated trends rather than created them, which may not be an earth-shaking conclusion, but Hughes develops his thesis in interesting fashion. His essay is free of technical jargon but will be most accessible to readers familiar with the bomb's history and with huge, expensive installations such as CERN or Fermilab. Gilbert Taylor
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Edition details

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0231131526
• ISBN 13: 9780231131520
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200