The Making of the Atomic Bomb
25th Anniversary Edition
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The Making of the Atomic Bomb
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Narrated by:
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Holter Graham
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By:
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Richard Rhodes
About this listen
Here for the first time, in rich human, political, and scientific detail, is the complete story of how the bomb was developed, from the turn-of-the-century discovery of the vast energy locked inside the atom to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan.
Few great discoveries have evolved so swiftly - or have been so misunderstood. From the theoretical discussions of nuclear energy to the bright glare of Trinity, there was a span of hardly more than 25 years. What began as merely an interesting speculative problem in physics grew into the Manhattan Project and then into the bomb with frightening rapidity, while scientists known only to their peers - Szilard, Teller, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Meitner, Fermi, Lawrence, and yon Neumann - stepped from their ivory towers into the limelight.
Richard Rhodes takes us on that journey step by step, minute by minute, and gives us the definitive story of man's most awesome discovery and invention. The Making of the Atomic Bomb has been compared in its sweep and importance to William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It is at once a narrative tour de force and a document as powerful as its subject.
©1995 Richard Rhodes (P)2016 Simon & SchusterListeners also enjoyed...
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 89
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 80
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 80
From the New York Times best-selling author of Rocket Men and the award-winning biographer of Thomas Paine comes the first complete history of the Atomic Age, a brilliant, magisterial account of the men and women who uncovered the secrets of the nucleus, brought its power to America, and ignited the 20th century.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Strong finish
- By David's Opinions and Reviews on 05-04-14
By: Craig Nelson
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Chasing Heisenberg
- The Race for the Atom Bomb
- By: Michael Joseloff
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 3 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 76
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 62
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 61
After a devastating run of German victories, Allied troops are beginning to halt Hitler’s advance. But far from the battlefields, Allied scientists are struggling. Intelligence reports put them a distant second behind the Germans in a competition that could determine the outcome of the war: the race to build the world’s first nuclear weapon. For the Allies’ top scientists, the race is deeply personal. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Samuel Goudsmit have known Hitler’s chief atomic scientist, Werner Heisenberg, for years.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A Good Overview/Introduction to the Bomb Race
- By Ashlyn on 08-05-20
By: Michael Joseloff
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First War of Physics
- The Secret History of the Atom Bomb 1939-1949
- By: Jim Baggott
- Narrated by: Mark Ashby
- Length: 17 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 85
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 78
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 75
An epic story of science and technology at the very limits of human understanding: the monumental race to build the first atomic weapons.
Rich in personality, action, confrontation, and deception, The First War of Physics is the first fully realized popular account of the race to build humankind's most destructive weapon. The book draws on declassified material, such as MI6's Farm Hall transcripts, coded Soviet messages cracked by American cryptographers in the Venona project, and interpretations by Russian scholars of documents from the Soviet archives.
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4 out of 5 stars
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For all atom bomb and physics nerds
- By Jodie Swafford on 11-30-18
By: Jim Baggott
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Tuxedo Park
- A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II
- By: Jennet Conant
- Narrated by: John Kroft
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 106
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 100
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 100
In the late 1930s, legendary financier, philanthropist, and society figure Alfred Lee Loomis gathered the most visionary scientific minds of the 20th century at his state-of-the-art laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York. He established a top-secret defense laboratory at MIT and personally bankrolled pioneering research into new, high-powered radar detection systems that helped defeat the German Air Force and U-boats. With Ernest Lawrence, he pushed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to fund research in nuclear fission, which led to the development of the atomic bomb.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Fantastic book, weak technical execution
- By Paul on 10-13-18
By: Jennet Conant
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Big Science
- Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the Military-Industrial Complex
- By: Michael Hiltzik
- Narrated by: Bob Saouer
- Length: 14 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 117
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 102
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 101
Since the 1930s, the scale of scientific endeavors has grown exponentially. The birth of Big Science can be traced to Berkeley, California, nearly nine decades ago, when a resourceful young scientist pondered his new invention and declared, "I'm going to be famous!" Ernest Orlando Lawrence's cyclotron would revolutionize nuclear physics, but that was only the beginning of its impact.This is the incredible story of how one invention changed the world and of the man principally responsible for it all. Michael Hiltzik tells the riveting full story here for the first time.
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4 out of 5 stars
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An informative and thought-provoking book
- By Jean on 08-23-15
By: Michael Hiltzik
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Robert Oppenheimer
- A Life Inside the Center
- By: Ray Monk
- Narrated by: Michael Goldstrom
- Length: 35 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 361
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 306
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 303
Robert Oppenheimer was among the most brilliant and divisive of men. As head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, he oversaw the successful effort to beat the Nazis in the race to develop the first atomic bomb – a breakthrough that was to have eternal ramifications for mankind and that made Oppenheimer the “Father of the Atomic Bomb.” But with his actions leading up to that great achievement, he also set himself on a dangerous collision course with Senator Joseph McCarthy and his witch-hunters. In Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center, Ray Monk, author of peerless biographies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, goes deeper than any previous biographer in the quest to solve the enigma of Oppenheimer’s motivations and his complex personality.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A comprehensive biography
- By Jean on 10-17-14
By: Ray Monk
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109 East Palace
- Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos
- By: Jennet Conant
- Narrated by: Anne Twomey
- Length: 5 hrs and 57 mins
- Abridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 290
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 198
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 197
They were told as little as possible. Their orders were to go to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and report for work at a classified Manhattan Project site, a location so covert it was known to them only by the mysterious address: 109 East Palace.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Great Listen
- By John H. Davis III on 10-22-05
By: Jennet Conant
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Hitler's Scientists
- Science, War, and the Devil's Pact
- By: John Cornwell
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Abridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 135
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 63
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Story4 out of 5 stars 64
When Hitler came to power in the 1930s, Germany had led the world in science, mathematics, and technology for nearly four decades. But while the fact that Hitler swiftly pressed Germany's scientific prowess into the service of a brutal, racist, xenophobic ideology is well known, few realize that German scientists had knowingly broken international agreements and basic codes of morality to fashion deadly weapons even before World War I.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent due to great content and reader
- By Dave on 04-12-04
By: John Cornwell
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Racing for the Bomb
- The True Story of General Leslie R. Groves, the Man Behind the Birth of the Atomic Age
- By: Robert S. Norris
- Narrated by: Peter Johnson
- Length: 23 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 95
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 82
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 80
Revealed for the first time in Racing for the Bomb, Groves played a crucial and decisive role in the planning, timing, and targeting of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions. Norris offers new insights into the complex and controversial questions surrounding the decision to drop the bomb in Japan and Groves' actions during World War II, which had a lasting imprint on the nuclear age and the Cold War that followed.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Fascinating
- By Jean on 04-22-15
By: Robert S. Norris
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Burning the Sky
- Operation Argus and the Untold Story of the Cold War Nuclear Tests in Outer Space
- By: Mark Wolverton
- Narrated by: John Lescault
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 401
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 349
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 346
After the Soviet Union proved to the United States that it possessed an operational intercontinental ballistic missile with the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, the world watched anxiously as the two superpowers engaged in a game of nuclear one-upmanship. Amid this rising tension, eccentric physicist Nicholas Christofilos brought forth an outlandish, albeit ingenious, idea to defend the US from a Soviet attack: detonating nuclear warheads in space to create an artificial radiation belt that would fry incoming ICBMs. Known as Operation Argus, this plan is the most secret and riskiest experiment in history, and classified details of these nuclear tests have been long obscured.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Extraordinary interesting history
- By Magnus Almgren on 10-23-20
By: Mark Wolverton
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Blackett's War
- The Men Who Defeated the Nazi U-boats and Brought Science to the Art of Warfare
- By: Stephen Budiansky
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 11 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 127
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 115
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Story4 out of 5 stars 114
In March 1941, after a year of unbroken and devastating U-boat onslaughts, the British War Cabinet decided to try a new strategy in the foundering naval campaign. To do so, they hired an intensely private, bohemian physicist who was also an ardent socialist. Patrick Blackett was a former navy officer and future winner of the Nobel Prize; he is little remembered today, but he and his fellow scientists did as much to win the war against Nazi Germany as almost anyone else.
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4 out of 5 stars
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First time science used to fight a war
- By Jean on 08-20-14
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A Fiery Peace in a Cold War
- Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon
- By: Neil Sheehan
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 19 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 119
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 87
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 88
From Neil Sheehan, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning classic A Bright Shining Lie, comes this long-awaited, magnificent epic. Here is the never-before-told story of the nuclear arms race that changed history - and of the visionary American Air Force officer Bernard Schriever, who led the high-stakes effort. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War is a masterly work about Schriever’s quests to prevent the Soviet Union from acquiring nuclear superiority, to penetrate and exploit space for America, and to build the first weapons meant to deter an atomic holocaust.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Schriever rhymes with beaver.
- By John Gardner on 11-13-09
By: Neil Sheehan
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Hiroshima Nagasaki
- By: Paul Ham
- Narrated by: Robert Meldrum
- Length: 20 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 112
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 97
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 98
The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed more than 100,000 instantly, mostly women, children, and the elderly. Many hundreds of thousands more succumbed to their horrific injuries later, or slowly perished of radiation-related sickness. Yet the bombs were "our least abhorrent choice", American leaders claimed at the time - and still today most people believe they ended the Pacific War and saved millions of American and Japanese lives.
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3 out of 5 stars
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While extraordinary, I can only give it 3 stars
- By Gillian on 12-17-14
By: Paul Ham
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Churchill's Bomb
- How the United States Overtook Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race
- By: Graham Farmelo
- Narrated by: Clive Chafer
- Length: 14 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 102
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 92
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 92
As award-winning biographer and science writer Graham Farmelo describes in Churchill's Bomb, the British set out to investigate the possibility of building nuclear weapons before their American colleagues. But when scientists in Britain first discovered a way to build an atomic bomb, Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not make the most of his country's lead and was slow to realize the bomb's strategic implications.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Loved it!! This was great.
- By MAC24211 on 09-08-21
By: Graham Farmelo
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How the Laser Happened
- Adventures of a Scientist
- By: Charles H. Townes
- Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 34
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 30
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 30
In How the Laser Happened, Nobel laureate Charles Townes provides a highly personal look at some of the leading events in 20th-century physics. This lively memoir, packed with firsthand accounts and historical anecdotes, is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history of science and an inspiring example for students considering scientific careers.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great for aspiring physicists
- By James S. on 10-06-18
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The Apocalypse Factory
- Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age
- By: Steve Olson
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 102
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 90
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 91
It began with plutonium, the first element ever manufactured in quantity by humans. Fearing that the Germans would be the first to weaponize the atom, the United States marshaled brilliant minds and seemingly inexhaustible bodies to find a way to create a nuclear chain reaction of inconceivable explosive power. In a matter of months, the Hanford nuclear facility was built to produce and weaponize the enigmatic and deadly new material that would fuel atomic bombs.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Lacking in many aspects
- By ATM on 08-27-20
By: Steve Olson
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Tesla
- Inventor of the Electrical Age
- By: W. Bernard Carlson
- Narrated by: Allan Robertson
- Length: 16 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 355
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 305
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Story