Customer Reviews

Atomic Spaces: LIVING ON THE MANHATTAN PROJECT

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I found some sections of this book fascinating, and others quite slow and tedious, hence the three star rating.

Be prepared: this is not quick reading!

I like how this book glorifies no one. It also talks about many "forgotten" victims of the Manhattan PRoject; those who were evicted from their property, the "underclass" workers, those who lived near Alamogordo and sufferred from nuclear fallout. I learned information about Gen. Groves and how he oversaw the project. It spoke also about the scientists, but not just about the scientists. This isn't a book about the making of the bomb; it's a book about the culture. At times it was slow---I skimmed about 100 pages at the beginning, which I very rarely do--- but there should be something for you in this book if you're interested enough in the topic to read this review! I found especially interesting the medical testing (or lack thereof), the radiation safety protoocols (or lack thereof) and the fallout (literal and sociological) of the Alamogordo test. These areas were fascinating to me. Also, while I already knew about Feynman's battle with the censors, it's fun to read again!

Beautifully written and by turns restrained and emotionally charged, this moral history of the Manhattan Project takes on what the others never mention-- all the smaller worlds created, destroyed or utterly changed as we entered the atomic age. Engrossing, packed with information spirited out of classified archives or found in the bottom of boxes, this book deserves the prizes it has won. Even the pictures are striking and remain on my mind long after I have closed the book.

I have read literally a dozen or more books about the atomic projects both in the United States and Germany. Unlike most books on the subject, Atomic Spaces, glorifies no one. It tells the story like it really was. It goes into the social, economic, racial, and moral cost of the project. It puts into perspective the relationship between the military, the government, big buisness, and the American people for this last half of the twentieth century. In no uncertain terms it demonstrates the true cost of entering the atomic age.

Although the outcome was "successful," I wonder if the true price of the atomic age was worth it? It certainly came with a high price tag, much, much more than money.

This book is a must read in order to see the real Manhattan Project and not the glorified picture presented by so many other authors. This is a really great book, about a really great endeavour, done by the average man with his usual weakness.

To be upfront, I have not read the entire book, but I don't think you need to look at much of it to get a feel for what's in it. I think the idea of looking at the communities and culture that evolved for Manhattan Project workers is an interesting one. However, it only took some reading of the introductory material and some browsing through it to convince me that this book was not going to do that topic justice.

To me, this is an example of the worst kind of academic writing. The prose is pretentious and overblown, and attempts to sound more intelligent than it actually is. The author's analyses of the photos and the history seems unsubstantiated, and at times, just ridiculous. Worst of all, he appears to have taken the events and attitudes of 65 years ago and judged them based on his own contemporary morality. His personal revulsion is then sledge-hammmered into every paragraph, forming what seems to me to be an unfair and biased portrayal of people and events of which he has no real knowledge. To me, those are exactly the things a historian is NOT supposed to do. Maybe it's unfair to say, but this reads like it was written by someone who just likes to hear themselves talk.

Again, these opinions are based on a cursory examination, so take them as you wish.

I found this book interesting but an unnecessary slog for a couple of reasons.

The author tries too hard to make little things sound deep, profound, and meaningful, as when he describes a photograph and takes a paragraph to squeeze every possible bit of meaning out of that single image. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

The book attempts to cover all of the Manhattan Project, and so each chapter is obliged to jump around from Oak Ridge to Richland to Los Alamos, and it's often difficult to remember which location the author is referring to at any given time.

Odd details are left out. Five hundred pages and 3 pounds of paper later, I still don't know how much people were paid for their work on these projects. You'd think the hourly wages of the various types of workers would be mentioned in such a book, but no such luck.

Lastly, a word to the designer: The next time you design a book that weighs 3 pounds, get your head examined. I found this book physically uncomfortable to read. Balancing it on my lap was painful. Holding it in front of me strained my wrists. The paperback cover and soft paper flopped all over the place. I finally had to lay it on the table in front of me, and flip one page at a time. I don't understand why the book was designed this way. The images are not large or good enough to merit coffee table or art book treatment. Vast amounts of whitespace seem wasted on these pages!

We are constantly researching the Manhattan Project in an effort to locate surviving veterans. Mr. Hales' account of war-time life at Los Alamos, NM, Oak Ridge, TN, and Hanford, WA is first rate. I recommend it highly to anyone yearning for a full understanding of the circumstances surrounding the development of the atomic bomb. Michael Vickio, Exec. Dir. .............

The author did a lot of legwork in his research for this book, but distorts his results in the name of bias and intolerance. Written in liberal arts-speak and presented as a sociological text, it nevertheless forfeits scientific rigor by its many omissions. This is a book of victims, and only women and minorities qualify; and women or minorities who do not fit his agenda of negativity are not included in this discussion.

For example, the experimental physicist Chien-Shiung Wu, Chinese-born (and a woman) who made an important contribution at Oak Ridge is omitted completely. Dorothy McKibben, the Los Alamos gatekeeper, a resourceful, indespensable cornerstone of the Los Alamos team, gets one brief mention with her name badly misspelled, and then only to observe that she was not invited to the Trinity test.

The author especially despises any contact between whites and native peoples, and disgust simply drips from him as he describes a celebratory feast held for the physicists at San Ildefonso Pueblo in 1945. Edith Warner, who ran the teahouse at Otawi Bridge, is presented as an Eastern aesthete who hopelessly romanticized the Pueblo Indians, and longed to be accepted by them. The author quickly changes the subject before he need mention that she lived with Tilano, a native, for the last twenty years of both their lives.

The last photograph in the text shows two weary medical doctors standing at ground zero in Hiroshima. The author comments on their clothing and camera, and then says "It is a tourist picture of visitors at the site." He fails to note that the man on the right is Dr. John S. Lawrence, brother of the Nobel physicist Ernest O. Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron atom smasher and head of the isotope separation plant at Oak Ridge. One can only imagine the complexity of reaction and emotion entailed in this journey, for this man, but this is just the sort of atomic space this book has no interest in examining.

At the end of the text is a tepid 'meditation' in black and white, entitled 'Eleven Photographs', all taken by the author at Hanford and Richland, WA in the early nineties. I suppose they are meant to echo the famous 'Magnificent Eleven', the surviving snaps of Robert Capa's shaking, crazy-brave captures in the surf of Omaha Beach on D-Day. If you need to be reminded of the absolutely desperate imperative behind the Manhattan Project, go check these out again.

On my scale of 10, I gave this book a rating as high as one (1) for the author's effort in searching for material and referencing it in extensive notes. As a history of the times, it rates a zero (0).

The author might have written the objectives of his book as:

"America did an abomination by building the atom bomb and killing brutally without compassion thousands of totally innocent Japanese. The instigator of this horror, American General Leslie Groves,had only one objective: to gain power over the most people he could, control them and maintain that control regardless of laws or ethics or safety. He recklessly endangered the entire planet and all of American culture solely for his own greed for power."

Then the author wrote the book in propagandese with distorting adjectives and selection of events to convince a reader that the author's view of "history" was The Truth .

The depiction of Groves as a monster begins early in the book.

"Groves's ascendance, his early success at forging a cooperative venture among government, military, and corporate entities, signaled a broader campaign of expansion and control, into labor relations, into social relations, even into language. This last area is perhaps the most surprising and significant example of the District's imperial tendencies. One of its earliest manifestations was the naming of the program."

A full page is then devoted to explaining that the choice of "Manhattan" for the organization was not simply to avoid hinting at its purpose. "For him [Groves], the single most important concern lay with "security" (Groves's term subsuming secrecy and control of information), and he envisioned language as a potent weapon for duplicity."

The portrayal of Groves as the supreme tyrant continues throughout the book. General Groves as a hard driving decision maker who forced the accomplishment of an almost impossible job does not appear. And the reasons such a drive was felt necessary by all of us, the dread of Germany's building a nuclear bomb before we could and then the horror of the continuing slaughters of both US and Japanese forces in the jungles of the South Pacific and the prospect of worse to come with invasion, was ignored totally.

Two examples of the writer's distortions represent his propagandizing technique:

"New workers entering these factories found them to be confusing and sometimes terrifying warrens of piping, walls of analog dials, valves, and knobs, marked with Bakelite labels in the arcane language of the engineer."

Big,yes; terrifying, no. New workers did not wander into a building without orientation and explanation of where he or she was to work, go to the bathroom, eat. What's confusing? Any new job for the first day or so. But of course walls of stuff with Bakelite labels must be dangerous, especially in arcane language with words like "open" and "closed" and "pressure" and "temperature".

The second example of such writing tries to use a picture of a control room, in which I worked at one time, to show manipulation by the tyrannical Manhattan Engineer District. Here is Hales' description of the picture as he tries to show distortions created by the Manhattan District use of language: [The first sentence refers to a different picture taken for record at a trailer park at Oak Ridge.]

"This particular photograph is, itself, a document that reinforces the District's grammar -- though the way this grammar is imbedded in visual form is clearer in another equally prosaic picture, also made by Du Pont's official site photographer, Ed Westcott, to illustrate the workings of the K-25 master control room (Fig. 36). [Du Pont was not one of the Oak Ridge contractors, but maybe Westcott was delegated to make pictures of Oak Ridge for the record. I won't argue the point.]

"Reading the photograph as a distinct document, one can recognize the District's extension of written grammar into visual grammar. Yet the brilliance of the method manifests itself in the way the picture seems not to tell but to show . Even though, to a careful eye, it's an obviously managed, set-up picture, still the impression persists that the result is natural. The obsessional orderliness of the workplace seems incontrovertible. It seems simply to show the control desk with its banks of switches and the supervisor's desk with its paperwork, with everything lined up parallel and neatly diagonal to the walls filled with their workstation graph-paper plotters and their own cruciform arrangements of gleaming lights. The people too, are nicely symmetrical -- two men, two women; two engrossed in tasks, two awaiting orders. The desks are orderly, reassuringly so. Underneath the details is a message. Everything's under control in the control room."

The following three paragraphs add more suppositions to the explanation of the evil and manipulative intent of this photograph. "... as a staff photographer following orders." "Westcott has manipulated the circumstances..." "... bland, even lighting." "Even Westcott's work isn't really his." and more and more.

Then the long paragraph with the ridiculous clincher at the end:

"Behind Westcott's professionalism lies the repertoire of conventions he learned as he mastered the job of staff photographer. So also with the conventions learned by the architect-engineers of the master control room and transmitted to their plans: that the control room should have even, revealing lighting, and that such lighting came best from multiple panels in the ceiling, that the plotters for each K-25 cubicle should properly be lined up in even rows where they could be easily seen ."

That's nice: clear statements of the requirements for an informative photograph and a good control room. Then Hales continues in the same paragraph:

"(This arrangement is orderly, but it isn't necessarily intelligent; looking at the control panel of the Hanford pile for the first time in the fall of 1991, I was struck with an immediate and palpable anxiety, for each of the control stations looked like each of the others -- in a crisis, how could the operators, assured by the law of comparmentalization that they would never know the logic that lay beneath the dials, distinguish between one dial and the next in a row of some too identical dials? Equally so with the dials and plotters in this master control room.)"

Hales ascribes ignorance of their job to the operators of the Hanford works and lack of intelligence to the designers of the control rooms because he never worked in a control room, didn't know anything about it, and doesn't know what he is talking about .

I worked the K-25 control room in this picture. To work there I had to know the meaning of each line on the graphs and each light; the "indistinguishable dials and plotters" were arranged in exactly the order in which material passed from one "cubicle" to the next so the process details were clear and easy to see.

All this and more to pretend that the Corps of Engineers had invented a "new grammar" to control the thinking of their employees!

I have a picture taken by my beloved father of my brother and me on our little wagon when we were five and three. Here is my guess at Hale's probable description of my memorial of fun on the little red wagon.

"These two small children, both apparently male, are obviously terrified of the photographer. This fear is easily apparent to the careful observer from the way their mouths are partly open and their eyes are wide and staring at the camera. The photograph must have been staged in an attempt to record the likenesses of the children in case of accident. Obviously the older boy was forced on top of the younger one in the tiny wagon which must have been so small as to make injury to at least one of them likely. Such an injury may have made him amenable to the enforced duties he performed years by later making material for the atomic bomb."