Pandora's Keepers: Nine Men and the Atomic Bomb - Hardcover

Brian VanDeMark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316738336 ISBN 13: 9780316738330

Publisher: Little Brown & Co, 2003

Synopsis

They were nine brilliant men who believed in science and who saw before anyone else the awesome workings of an invisible world. They came from many places, some fleeing Nazism in Europe, others quietly slipping out of university teaching jobs, all gathering in secret wartime laboratories to create the world's first atomic bomb. During World War II, few of the atomic scientists questioned the wisdom of their desperate endeavor. But afterward they were forced to deal with the sobering legacy of their creation. Some were haunted by the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and became anti-nuclear weapons activists; others went on to build even deadlier bombs. In explaining their lives and their struggles, Brian VanDeMark superbly illuminates not only their moral reckoning with their horrific creation but also the ways in which each of us grapples with responsibility and unintended consequences.

About this title

About the Author:

Brian VanDeMark teaches history at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis.  He is also the author of American Sheikhs (2012), Into the Quagmire (1991), and co-author of Robert McNamara's #1 best-selling Vietnam memoir, In Retrospect (1995).

Review:

""The story of the Manhattan Project is famous, and so are the complicated, remarkable men behind it, whom VanDeMark brings engrossingly to life: men like Oppenheimer, Bethe, Bohr, Teller, Fermi and Szilard.... VanDeMark does not overlook the implications in today's world."

About this edition

• Publisher: Little Brown & Co
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0316738336
• ISBN 13: 9780316738330
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416