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Lawrence and Oppenheimer
Clean, bright book with some creasing from use. Great story about the collaboration and conflict of the two towering atomic scientists. 0671203800 Then we send you a confirmation e-mail. We appreciate your business and welcome any questions. Boook is bright, has creasing and wear to the spine. Then we send you a confirmation e-mail. We appreciate your business and welcome any questions
384 pages, Hardcover
First published September 23, 1968
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 19, 2024
Great historical recount of the Manhattan project. Excellently covers the history of Lawrence and his relationship with Oppenheimer—how they started as colleagues, worked as family, only to fall apart as their paths diverged.
February 2, 2011
You won't read this book; you'll read the thorough, if flawed works by Richard Rhodes that chronicle 20th century schizoid man’s misadventures in atom splitting from cradle to grave. What's fun about Davis' book, though, is the way it follows bomb development and post-WWII nuclear policy through a parallel treatment of Ernest Lawrence and Robert Oppenheimer.
Lawrence's big contribution to nuclear physics was to invent the cyclotron (and calutron), though as witty physicist contemporary Arthur Roberts has musically observed, the constant (and expensive) pursuit of bigger and more powerful atom-smashers was of questionable merit. Lawrence was the experimental physicist at Cal Berkeley (the Rad Lab was his baby) with Oppie – on the rare occasions Lawrence chose to avail himself of the expertise – his theoretical sounding board. When then-Colonel Leslie Groves comes knocking looking for Lawrence's help with developing a bomb, Oppenheimer is there to advise. So it is that Oppenheimer ends up (brilliantly) directing Los Alamos, just as Lawrence busies himself making a toxic soup of Oak Ridge, Tennessee (and inefficiently, to boot). Davis' insights are laced with judgment (though who can blame him?), one of them excusing Lawrence's monomaniacal devotion to the calutron on the basis that as the only functional (if barely functional) prototype extant for uranium enrichment in 1943, it represented the least risky path forward to manufacture of bomb-ready material in time to, you know, actually make use of it.
According to Davis, Groves was well-aware that Lawrence's methodology left much to be desired, but that was also part of its charm. "The calutron, he decided, was on the one hand the quickest way for a nation to win a war, but on the other hand he did not much care what his enemies the Russians learned about it. His testimony in 1954 makes it brutally clear that as early as 1943 he had judged Lawrence's process to be primitive and as a military secret not worth much. Hence his nonchalance about traitors in the Radiation Laboratory." (p. 200)
Surprisingly, Davis also has Groves anticipating the arms race as an engine of Soviet bankruptcy.
While Oppenheimer’s role in this book is primarily to play the conscience-stricken martyr of the Manhattan Project (which he assuredly was), Davis does not do nearly as good a job of coloring him in as he does Lawrence. In a typical passage lionizing Oppenheimer’s early stewardship of the Atomic Energy Commission as chair of the General Advisory Committee in the half-dozen years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Davis is more journalist than biographer.
If those better in the know about this period in history think I’m making a hash of things, blame Davis, whose last hundred pages skip about like a flea in asynchronous flashback through the years 1946-1954. It’s really hard to keep track of who did what to whom and when. Frankly, I found all this to be far easier to follow in John Adams’ Manhattan Project opera Doctor Atomic . In fact, I have the sense that the show could be made to dovetail perfectly with Davis’ book simply by adding a Peter Grimes style frame: a prologue/epilogue of Teller’s security trial testimony and Oppenheimer’s pithy rebuttals. Then again, I find I filter most, if not all of my experience and interest in the world through music, so take that for whatever it’s worth.
Ultimately, Truman’s distinguished Secretary of War Henry Stimson, with Groves, proved instrumental in persuading the President to drop those radioactive pop guns Fat Man and Little Boy on Japan (proving perhaps once and for all that it was all but unthinkable for the army to develop new weapons if it wasn’t actually going to use them). I’m going to give Stimson the last word here, because I think his views sum up the whole of the Pandora’s box opened by the engineering of the mushroom cloud. This is from page 642 of Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb and represents Rhodes' verbatim transcription of Col. Stimson's talking points. It is accidental poetry at its finest:
Okay, so I added that last line myself.
Lawrence's big contribution to nuclear physics was to invent the cyclotron (and calutron), though as witty physicist contemporary Arthur Roberts has musically observed, the constant (and expensive) pursuit of bigger and more powerful atom-smashers was of questionable merit. Lawrence was the experimental physicist at Cal Berkeley (the Rad Lab was his baby) with Oppie – on the rare occasions Lawrence chose to avail himself of the expertise – his theoretical sounding board. When then-Colonel Leslie Groves comes knocking looking for Lawrence's help with developing a bomb, Oppenheimer is there to advise. So it is that Oppenheimer ends up (brilliantly) directing Los Alamos, just as Lawrence busies himself making a toxic soup of Oak Ridge, Tennessee (and inefficiently, to boot). Davis' insights are laced with judgment (though who can blame him?), one of them excusing Lawrence's monomaniacal devotion to the calutron on the basis that as the only functional (if barely functional) prototype extant for uranium enrichment in 1943, it represented the least risky path forward to manufacture of bomb-ready material in time to, you know, actually make use of it.
According to Davis, Groves was well-aware that Lawrence's methodology left much to be desired, but that was also part of its charm. "The calutron, he decided, was on the one hand the quickest way for a nation to win a war, but on the other hand he did not much care what his enemies the Russians learned about it. His testimony in 1954 makes it brutally clear that as early as 1943 he had judged Lawrence's process to be primitive and as a military secret not worth much. Hence his nonchalance about traitors in the Radiation Laboratory." (p. 200)
Surprisingly, Davis also has Groves anticipating the arms race as an engine of Soviet bankruptcy.
In contrast {to paranoid FBI operatives}, Groves viewed the situation as an opportunity. The Russians were bound to want a bomb as soon as this country exploded one in war. Groves seems to have hoped some high commissar would allocate the last five hundred million dollars of an exhausted economy to building calutrons; after all, we had paid out that much. This looks inescapably like the reason he would not let Security or the F.B.I. shut down Eltenton's school for subversives. (p. 206)This is no 20/20 hindsight, either; bearing in mind that Lawrence and Oppenheimer was published in 1968. If true, what would have seemed preposterous in the heyday of the Space Race, proved to be incredibly prophetic. Of course, it wasn't mindless development of calutrons that did in the USSR, but rather the high costs of proliferating and perpetuating nuclear and conventional military might. Still, such foresight surely helps to explain Groves' advocacy for the super (the H-Bomb) following the Soviet's first successful A-Bomb detonation in 1949. What I don't understand is why if Groves – and presumably others as influential – genuinely held this view, they would not also have considered that what could bankrupt the Soviet Union could do as much damage to the GNP of the good ol' US of A.
While Oppenheimer’s role in this book is primarily to play the conscience-stricken martyr of the Manhattan Project (which he assuredly was), Davis does not do nearly as good a job of coloring him in as he does Lawrence. In a typical passage lionizing Oppenheimer’s early stewardship of the Atomic Energy Commission as chair of the General Advisory Committee in the half-dozen years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Davis is more journalist than biographer.
"They were all individualists, " says the A.E.C.’s present research director, Paul McDaniel. "Sometimes I watched Oppenheimer function as their chairman. He never dictated, he always apportioned time fairly to everyone, he always submitted himself and his opinions to theirs, he always drew from everyone a full and uninhibited expression of views. Afterward he faithfully reported the consensus to the Commission. The fact that under these conditions there always was a meaningful consensus on all serious issues is something that I just cannot explain, but it makes me think more rather than less of Oppenheimer. " (p. 264)Oppenheimer’s crime appears to have been honesty and candor in a decade of paranoia and hypocrisy. He saw value in putting only most, but not all of America’s defense eggs into the nuclear basket. And if his reasonable position to tie appropriations to efficacy over pure escalation, combined with a reticence to blow ever more atolls to bits just because we could proved sufficiently persuasive to earn Oppenheimer a reputation as a Svengali or hypnotist of his fellow physicists (including those of the caliber of Hans Bethe, Isidor Rabi, and Enrico Fermi), it earned him the enmity of fusion bomb cheerleaders. These were nuclear science’s primary venture capitalist Lewis Strauss, fusion bomb physicist Edward Teller, and last but by no means least Lawrence, whose unworkable and wasteful Materials Testing Accelerator (billed as a plutonium extractor) the G.A.C.-led A.E.C. had exiled to a 40-month proving period that the MTA could not plausibly survive. Lawrence could not see past his latest engineering boondoggle and so conspired with Strauss and Teller to sideline Oppenheimer by slandering him as a possible security risk.
If those better in the know about this period in history think I’m making a hash of things, blame Davis, whose last hundred pages skip about like a flea in asynchronous flashback through the years 1946-1954. It’s really hard to keep track of who did what to whom and when. Frankly, I found all this to be far easier to follow in John Adams’ Manhattan Project opera Doctor Atomic . In fact, I have the sense that the show could be made to dovetail perfectly with Davis’ book simply by adding a Peter Grimes style frame: a prologue/epilogue of Teller’s security trial testimony and Oppenheimer’s pithy rebuttals. Then again, I find I filter most, if not all of my experience and interest in the world through music, so take that for whatever it’s worth.
Ultimately, Truman’s distinguished Secretary of War Henry Stimson, with Groves, proved instrumental in persuading the President to drop those radioactive pop guns Fat Man and Little Boy on Japan (proving perhaps once and for all that it was all but unthinkable for the army to develop new weapons if it wasn’t actually going to use them). I’m going to give Stimson the last word here, because I think his views sum up the whole of the Pandora’s box opened by the engineering of the mushroom cloud. This is from page 642 of Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb and represents Rhodes' verbatim transcription of Col. Stimson's talking points. It is accidental poetry at its finest:
S.1
Its size and character
We don't think it mere new weapon
Revolutionary Discovery of Relation of man to universe
Great History Landmark like
Gravitation
Copernican Theory
But,
Bids fair {to be} infinitely greater, in respect to its Effect
—on the ordinary affairs of man's life.
May destroy or perfect International Civilization
May [be] Frankenstein or means for World Peace
May be red herring or McGuffin
Okay, so I added that last line myself.
June 20, 2023
Loved it, am totally fascinated by Oppenheimer and the brilliant minds that created the bomb. Sounds weird, but I have always been intrigued by the science and boldness of the scientists who huddled up at Los Alamos. Perfect appetizer for the movie, "Oppenheimer", which opens later this summer. This isn't the book the movie is based on-the bio of Oppenheimer, this is mainly the working relationship between Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists. He was a bit of an odd duck, which I totally appreciate.
December 8, 2022
Incredible history. This is an informative look. I live on the Mesa so how I can I not be fascinated by this history. An informative read.
July 12, 2012
By telling the story of scientific research into the working of the atom and the development atomic bomb in a historical rather than totally scientfic manner, the author actually makes the progress more logical and easier to understand. Things like the cyclotron, heavy water and the Los Alamos site become more than words in a text book. Also, the treatment of Oppenheimer during the red scare in the early 1950's really bring home how you can devote years of your life to science and your country only to have someone dig up some meeting you attended years ago.
October 14, 2008
What really happened out there at Trinity? This book tells you. How could so many smart guys participate in mass murder? Should Iran have the bomb? This book doesn't tell you. But I learned a lot about particle acceleration, cyclotrons, the FBI and Berkeley in the 1930's. Innocent and dangerous times, at that precise moment when science married murder, and put on the collar of military industry. Out of print.
August 14, 2016
As a scientist and a fan of history, this book really hit home with me. The loose narrative spans the entire careers of both title figures, replete with painstakingly chronicled quotes and anecdotes. Davis offers a vivid insight into the scientific community and culture of the early- to mid-20th American century. If you have any interest in the historical development of Atomic science or understanding the intricacies underlying the Manhattan Project, read this book.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews