The Making of the Atomic Bomb is one of the most interesting and informative books I have read. I suppose I am not alone in such an assessment, as the book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. I learned more about world history and nuclear physics than I have from any other single source.

I found in the book that American perceptions and assumptions of German nuclear weapons research and development were, up until the end of the second war, little different from what is the norm today. Namely the worst case scenario is always chosen; the members of the Manhattan Project believed themselves to be in a race with Hitler for the possession of the bomb and were facing an existential threat.

Noam Chomsky has argued the researchers and engineers at Los Alamos became so enamoured with the beauty of their work that they lost sight of the moral implications – pure science run amuck. I found that not to be the case.

Under Werner Heisenberg's direction, Germany proceeded to build a research facility on the grounds of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (KWI). According to Rhodes, the German War Office had consolidated German fission research under its authority in September 1939. They sponsored a conference that same month, coincidental with the appearance of a paper by Niels Bohr and John Wheeler in the September edition of Physical Review, titled "The mechanism of nuclear fission". That article concluded that Uranium 235 was probably most responsible for slow neutron nuclear fission.

In June 1940, Germany ordered 60 tons of uranium oxide from occupied Belgium. Rhodes states that Germany had access to the world's only heavy water factory, and to thousands of tons of uranium ore in Belgium and the Belgian Congo. It had chemical plants second to none, and competent physicists, chemists, and engineers. It lacked only a cyclotron for measuring nuclear constants. A cyclotron in Paris filled that need with the fall of France.

A meeting occurred around this time between Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, in which Heisenberg passed along a drawing of an experimental heavy water reactor on which he was working. Evidently, there were misunderstandings about Heisenberg's intentions, but Bohr was deeply shocked. He was skeptical about the possibility of creating an atomic bomb, but could now see the Germans believed it could be built, and already had advanced designs. Bohr was also shocked and disappointed that Heisenberg was willing to work for the Nazis.

Vannevar Bush wrote to President Roosevelt in March of 1942 "We may well be in a race toward realization [of the bomb], but I have no indication of the status of the enemy program.” James B Conant, Ernest Lawrence and Arthur Compton, civilians who oversaw the Manhattan Project, constantly fretted about the possibility of a German bomb, according to Rhodes.

In 1942, Conant argued that the decision about how "all out" the effort should be might well turn on the military’s appraisal of what would occur if either side had a dozen or two bombs before the other. Conant reviewed the evidence for the German bomb program, including a report from a German immigrant physicist who said that his colleagues at KWI were hard at work.

Conant said "If they are hard at work, they cannot be far behind, maybe as much as a year, but hardly more, since they started in 1939 with the same initial facts as the British and ourselves. There are still plenty of competent scientists left in Germany. They may be ahead of us by as much as a year, but hardly more."

Hans Bethe said he wanted to oppose Nazism. "After the fall of France, I was desperate to make a contribution to the war effort."

In James Gleich's biography of Richard Feynman, I found that Feynman's motivations were much the same as Bethe's.

Rhodes writes that the war was a manifestation of nationalism, not science, and as such the scientists did their duty on the Hill [Los Alamos].  "There was relatively little nuclear physics at Los Alamos,” Bethe said, "mostly cross section calculations" [i.e., the calculation of the probability of neutron capture by a nucleus]. They thought they were assembled to engineer a practical military weapon."

Rhodes asserts that the possibility of German use of radioactive material bred in a nuclear reactor as a weapon of war began to worry the scientists in late 1942. They suspected the Germans might be a year or more ahead of the US in pile development. The scientists argued that the Germans might have had time to run a pile long enough to have created "fiercely radioactive isotopes that could be mixed with dust or liquid to make radioactive [but not fissionable] bombs. Germany might then attempt to attack Met Lab, if not American cities. German development of radioactive warfare seemed to the leaders of the Manhattan Project to require countering by examination into parallel US development; the S-1 Committee gave such assignment to a subcommittee consisting of James Conant as chairman and Arthur Compton and Harold Urey. They went to work in Feb. of 1943. (Rhodes p500)

Enrico Fermi suggested to Robert Oppenheimer that radioactive fission produced in an atomic pile might be used to poison the German food supply.

Oppenheimer stated: (p 510) “I should recommend delay in that is possible. In this connection, I think that we should not attempt a plan unless we can poison food sufficient to kill half a million men, since there is no doubt that the actual number affected will, because of the non-uniform distribution, be much smaller than this.” 

I know of no evidence, nor does Rhodes' book inform me, of any reason for believing the physicists or the administrators of the Manhattan Project ever had a reason to relax their supposition that Germany was not hard at work on an atomic bomb.

The Japanese program was headed by Yoshio Nishina, who had studied with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. More than 100 young Japanese scientists, the cream of the crop, worked under Nishina.

The Riken, Yoshino Nishina's prestigious Tokyo laboratory, served the Army primarily. There, they explored "conversion" from yellow cake to uranium hexafluoride, and then U235 enrichment by gaseous diffusion. [“conversion” means converting “yellowcake”, which is a blend of several oxides of solid uranium into the gaseous uranium hexafluoride which is then suitable for enrichment of the fissile isotope U235.]  In the spring of 1942, the Navy committed itself to developing nuclear power for propulsion. By 1944, Japan had built a small cyclotron which was also used for enrichment. The fire-bombing of Tokyo, destroyed the Riken facility. By that time, they were producing grams of Uranium hexafluoride while the US was producing tons. It is not clear how much the US knew of their program.

The USSR began its program in 1939 headed by Igor Kurchatov, who alerted the government to the suspected US program. They had observed the spontaneous fissioning of the uranium atom. The German invasion of 1941 effectively ended the Russian program.

There were about 50 million deaths resulting from the Second World War. About half a percent of those occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Rhodes' description of the aftermath of these events is sobering, to say the least. But so are his descriptions of the fire-bombings of Tokyo and Hamburg.

Pilots reported [over Tokyo] that the air was so violent that B-29's at 6000 ft were turned completely over, and that the heat was so intense, even at that altitude, that the entire crew had to don oxygen masks, the area of the fire was nearly 100% burned; no structure or its contents escaped damage. The fire spread largely in the direction of the natural wind.

In the shallower canals of Shitamachi, where people submerged themselves to escape the fire, the water boiled.

The strategic Bombing Survey estimated that "probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six hour period than at any [equivalent period of] time in the history of man." ... More than 100,000 men, women, and children died in Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945; a million were injured, at least 41,000 seriously; a  million in all lost their homes. Two thousand tons of incendiaries delivered that punishment -- in the modern notation, two kilotons. But the wind, not the weight of the bombs alone, created the conflagration, and therefore the efficiency of the slaughter was in some sense still in part and act of God.

Rhodes' says of the Hamburg bombing:

Small fires had coalesced into larger fires and greedy for oxygen, had sucked air from around the coalescing inferno and fanned further fires here. That created the wind, a thermal column above the city like an invisible chimney above a hearth; the wind heated the fury at the center of the firestorm to more than 1,400 degrees, heat sufficient to melt the windows of a streetcar, wind sufficient to uproot trees.

The fire filled the air with burning embers and melted the street ...

We got to the [park] all right, but I couldn't go on across the street because the asphalt had melted. There were people stuck in the asphalt. They must have rushed  onto the roadway without thinking. Their feet had got stuck and then they put out their hands to try to get out again. They were on their hands and knees screaming.

Four story high blocks of flats [the next day] were like glowing mounds of stone right down to the basement. Everything seemed to have melted and pressed the bodies     away in front of it. Women and children were so charred as to be unrecognizable. Their brains had tumbled from their burst temples and their insides from the soft parts under the ribs. How terribly these people must have died. The small children lay like eels on the pavement. (p 474)  

Quoting again from Rhodes (p 475):

The bombing of Hamburg was hardly unique. It was one atrocity in a war of increasing atrocities. Between 1941 and 1943 the German Army on the Eastern Front captured and enclosed in prisoner-of-war camps without food or shelter some two million Soviet soldiers; at least one million of them died of exposure and starvation. During the same period the Final solution to the Jewish Question -- the vast Nazi program to exterminate the European Jews -- began in deadly earnest after the Wannsee Conference of coordinating agencies met in suburban Berlin on January 20, 1942. Whatever moral issues such atrocities raise, they resulted from the  progressive escalation of the war by all its belligerents in pursuit of victory. (Even the Final Solution: because the Nazis believed the Jews constituted a separate nation lodged subversively in their midst -- nationality being defined in the Nazi canon primarily in terms of race -- and as such the nation with which the Third Reich was pre-eminently at war. It was Hitler's particular perversity to define victory over Jews as extermination; the Allies in their defensive war against Germany and Japan wanted only total surrender, in return for which the mass killing of combatants and civilians would stop.

As I observed earlier, about half a percent of the 50 million deaths of World War II occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The numbers of those killed were on the order of those killed at Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo by conventional weaponry. The bombs dropped, named, Little Boy, and Fat Man, were small by modern standards, about 20 kilotons -- three orders of magnitude smaller that the largest thermonuclear weapons of today.

I have often felt that it is the most important precedent in the entirety of human history that atomic bombs were used only once in warfare, in 1945, and not since. Partly as a result of their actual use against a human population, rational people realize the terrible consequences of a nuclear exchange, or even just the blast of a single bomb over a single large modern city. The small bombs used over Japan provide us only a hint of the unimaginable destruction likely to be wrought.

Now President Bush is developing a new type of nuclear weapon, forbidden under the SALT II treaty negotiated by Carter, the bunker buster. Israel had developed the enhanced radiation warhead, or the neutron bomb, briefly considered but rejected by the Carter administration, for deployment as a theater weapon.

Within the last week of this writing, the US and the government of Poland have agreed to station US anti-ballistic missiles on its soil. Thus, President Bush has chosen to ignore (or is ignorant of), a large body of expert opinion that has concluded that a missile defense system is more like to contribute to instability and uncertainty as it increases the likelihood, or at least the belief, that the US could survive a first strike against Russia.

At Reykjavik, President Reagan had argued to Soviet Premier Gorbachev that a missile defense system was defensive, like a gas mask, as he put it, and thus it should not threaten anyone. But Reagan did not think that an army equipped with gas masks could launch a gas attack against an enemy and have a high confidence of survival themselves. This is exactly the basis of the ABM treaty signed in 1972.

I am convinced that neither Reagan or Bush ever understood this or were ever even acquainted with the argument, as both their thinking and their knowledge is shallow. During a crisis situation, or a time of extreme tensions, a nation equipped with nuclear weapons and a missile defense system would be more likely to launch a first strike attack than a nation equipped with nuclear weapons but without a missile defense. Thus, in such a circumstance, the level of instability and uncertainty is increased.

I do not think that Bush understands the fire with which he plays.