Books on the Manhattan Project

[Travis]

I'm wondering if someone could recommend what the best books there are on the Manhattan Project as well as the actual use of Fat Man and Little Boy.

I recently read Brotherhood of the Bomb but it was more about the FBI's interest in Oppenheimer than about the actual science and history of the project.

 

[Pope130]

Richard Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb". The classic study of the project.

I recently picked up a copy of the Smyth report: "Atomic Energy for Military Purposes" by Henry DeWolf Smyth, 1945. It lacks a lot of information later declassified, but has a direct immediacy that's interesting.

Robert Klaus

 

[Travis]

Thanks, I'll check that out.

 

[beowulf573]

A second vote for Rhodes' book, one of the best non-fiction books about history I've read. I couldn't put it down. His second book, "Dark Sun" about the Hydrogen Bomb and also Soviet espionage, is good but not as good as his first.

 

[LordoftheLeftHand]

I'm wondering if someone could recommend what the best books there are on the Manhattan Project as well as the actual use of Fat Man and Little Boy.

Well this book document may not be a perfect match for what your exactly looking for but I'll mention it anyway .

Los Alamos From Below by Richard Feynman
In pdf:
http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/14/01/FeynmanLosAlamos.pdf

If you do some creative searching you can find audio of Feynman reading it.

By "from below" he means from someone working there who was not a big shot at the time.

The stories are similiar to some of the chapters in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman".

LLH

 

[fishbait]

I would also highly recommend the 1980 BBC mini-series "Oppenheimer". Although it's a dramatization, it is a well-acted factual account of the development of the bomb and the controversy following it's deployment. I got my DVD set from AmazonUK and bought an all-region VCR just to watch this series.