Customer Reviews

The Manhattan Project (Cornerstones of Freedom. Third Series)

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There are inflection points throughout history, events that occur that are so significant that the world is forever altered as a consequence. One of the most significant was the explosion of the first nuclear weapon at Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945. So powerful that it dwarfed all previous weapons by orders of magnitude, it literally meant that the human species was now capable of destroying all life on Earth.

This is an event that all children must learn about and Stein does a good job in describing the background of the development of the weapon. He starts by describing the actions of the physicists, including the famous letter to President Franklin Roosevelt from Albert Einstein. The next step is to describe the complexity of the Manhattan project and how it got the name. It closes by giving the reader some idea of how powerful the weapon is, although that is nearly impossible to do in print.

I strongly recommend that this book be required reading for all elementary school students.