The Manhattan Project: Big Science and the Atom Bomb

Hughes, Jeff

ISBN 10: 1840465042 / ISBN 13: 9781840465044

Published by Icon Books Ltd, 2003

About this Item

Softcover. Good binding and cover. Clean, unmarked pages.

Seller Inventory # 2406200019

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Manhattan Project: Big Science and the Atom Bomb
• Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1840465042
• ISBN 13: 9781840465044
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 8 ounces
• Seller catalogs:
  • Science, Math, Space and Engineering

About this title

Synopsis

I am become death, destroyer of worlds'. Robert J. Oppenheimer. Established in 1942 at the height of the Second World War, the Manhattan Project was a dramatic quest to beat the Nazis to a deadly goal: the atomic bomb. At Los Alamos and several other sites, American, British, Canadian and refugee European scientists, together with engineers, technicians and many other workers, laboured to design and build nuclear weapons. With their huge experiments, complex organisations and lavish funding, these institutes represented a new form of scientific organisation: 'Big Science'. Their efforts produced 'Little Boy' and 'Fat Man', the bombs that ultimately destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. In The Manhattan Project, Jeff Hughes offers a lively reinterpretation of the key elements in the history and mythology of twentieth-century science.

Book Description

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.