Customer Reviews

Uranium Wars: The Scientific Rivalry that Created the Nuclear Age (Macsci)

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This book is a very shallow but capable treatment of the major personalities involved in the development of the atomic bomb.

I've read many of the books about the development of the bomb and was enjoying this book's easy-reading stories about some of the major people involved in the development until I got about 75% finished with the book.

At that point the author made it very obvious that his real point in writing the book was to criticize the USA for actually dropping the bomb on Japan. He covered this from every angle and made it clear that while he was pretending to be fair what he really wanted to say was that the USA was wrong in dropping the bombs.

I've personally thought long and hard about this myself and what I find is that most modern people who have this opinion that America was wrong in dropping the bombs are usually never able to transport themselves back in time to that era and remember how things really were.

Yes its very easy in 2010 to criticize America for the bombs but I try to think what it would be like if I had lived in 1945 and my 2 sons were getting ready to invade Japan. I think about everything that happened on both sides leading up to August 1945. Why is Japan's role in getting the bombs dropped on them played down?

He makes very obvious that he feels Japan wanted desperately to surrender. I ask this scholar the simple question.. . if Japan wanted to surrender and therefore we not drop the bombs...then Japan could have solved this problem quite quickly but just surrendering. But JAPAN choose to keep killing Americans and we ended it. But of course in 2010 killing Americans is OK and we should understand why Japan did what they did and we should be more sympathetic. I should also note that while the bombs were absolutely horrible I think everyone agrees that ultimately less lives were lost as compared to an all-out invasion of Japan.

There are many books out there on the dropping of the bomb especially Richard Rhodes masterpiece. I have a small collection of these books in my library and while all of them mention the debate about the dropping of the bomb, especially Szilard's efforts, it seems like the main purpose of this book in its last 50-60 pages is to remind us Americans(very subtly of course) that we are a horrible and ruthless people for what we did.

I am extensively familiar with the history, physics, and personalities of the Manhattan Project - it is my professional research area, in which I have published a book and numerous papers in physics and history-of-physics journals. Aczel's book is one of a number available which surveys the development of nuclear physics and the Manhattan Project. As is common with this genre he begins with the discoveries of Becquerel, Rutherford, the Curies, etc., and works up through the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their aftermaths, the Cold War, and the current world situation. The best example of this genre (despite its numerous digressions) is still probably Richard Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb". Unfortunately, Aczel's "Uranium Wars" falls far short of the mark and cannot be recommended. It is so riddled with errors, confusing statements and poor editing that I gave up on reading it after getting only half-way through. This is particularly disappointing given Aczel's Berkeley physics and math background and his previous experience as a writer on science and math topics.

Some examples (an incomplete list): On page 12 it is remarked that scientists working in America built the atom bomb "just ahead" of their counterparts in the Third Reich. This is nonsense. The Germans were nowhere close to developing a bomb; they had not even achieved a working reactor. This just-ahead-of-the-Germans theme appears frequently, implying a sort of neck-and-neck race that never was. In a cast of characters on page 17 we find John Wheeler credited as a co-discover of fission; in the same list there is no mention of the discovery of fission under the entry for Otto Hahn. Also on page 17 it is remarked that Rutherford identified the nucleus through his work "on uranium radiation"; in actuality his alpha-scattering experiments did not utilize uranium at all. On page 23 we read that the B-29 bomber was developed expressly for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions - this would be a surprise to the thousands of crew members who flew missions in them well before August 1945. On page 29 it is stated that half of any amount of U-238 will become lead after 4.47 billion years. This is the half life of U-238, but it decays to Thorium first. In a confusing discussion of Rutherford scattering on page 42 it is stated that gravity deflects the alpha particles; gravity plays no significant role in that phenomenon. On page 64 it is stated that the "magic numbers" (2, 8, 20, ...) of atomic and nuclear physics are not well understood; this would be a surprise to researchers in those fields. On page 72 appears a discussion of the possibility of uranium absorbing neutrons to form transuranic elements, followed by the statement that plutonium is formed by a "different process". In fact, this is exactly how plutonium is synthesized. On page 94, Pt-239 should be Pu-239. On page 124 the first deliberate observation of fission is attributed to a group at Columbia, but Otto Frisch had already done so in Denmark following his return from his famous meeting with his aunt, Lise Meitner, in early January 1939. A little lower down on the same page we learn that Leo Szilard was awarded a Nobel Prize! (As in many popular science books, there is an over-emphasis on Nobel prizes - it seems as if they are the only significant scientific-career recognitions worth mentioning.) On page 130 the headquarters of the Manhattan Engineer District is given as Los Alamos; it was at Oak Ridge. On page 134 we find the sentence "The Alsos Mission was the code name given to a secret Allied unit that, after the Nazi surrender in May 1945." Aside from being an improper sentence, the implication that the unit was formed after the German surrender is incorrect. On page 139 we read that Paul Harteck "brought the Nazis dangerously close to their goal" (of a nuclear weapon, that is). A few lines later we find that the Germans had not made enough plutonium in the Haigerloch reactor to make a weapons. Based on my own research I don't believe that they ever deliberately made **any** plutonium by any process. I could go on, but readers have surely gotten the idea by this point. Save your money.

Having enjoyed Fermat's Enigma (by Simon Singh) and mistakenly thinking I had read Aczel's Fermat's Last Theorem instead, I decided to ignore the negative reviews that Uranium Wars had begun to collect on Amazon.com. Big mistake. After a chapter or two only my morbid curiosity about what the author must have been trying to accomplish kept me reading to the bitter end of this strange little book. Not only does it seem to have been directed at a readership of early teenagers, its numerous technical inaccuracies and simplistic writing style make it read as though it was written by a very young and inexperienced author, and a rather sloppy one at that.

Readers are informed that U-235 constitutes only 0.7% of naturally occurring uranium nearly every time the subject of isotope separation comes up. On page 89, after alpha particles, protons and neutrons already have been discussed several times, we are told that "alpha rays are heavy particles--they consist of four little particles..." (On the other hand Aczel seems to assume that readers are already familiar with the principles of quantum mechanics and fails to discuss wave-particle duality.) Competition between early investigators always has to be described as "fierce." The list of insults to the intelligence of adults, even those with no background knowledge of science, goes on and on. And then on page 174 the author finds it necessary to tell us that observers of the Trinity nuclear test saw the flash before they heard the noise and felt the shock wave because "light, and radiation, travels so much faster than sound and air."

Not only do the extraordinary superficiality and numerous factual errors in Uranium Wars disqualify this book as a source of information about the interesting and timely subject of nuclear energy and weapons; the author's style makes it dull reading to boot. Don't make the same mistake that I did.

That's what the title of this book should be. I am not disparaging the "for Dummies" series, but I guess in these days of Iran/North Korea/Libya headlines, "Uranium Wars" stands out better. Its starts with the discoveries of Becquerel and the Curies, and most of us know the rest (if you don't then this book is very appropriate). There are too many worn out anecdotes of anti-semitic and sexist policies in the ivory towers of science in the early era, and corny over-used quotations to dramatize the story, such as "The Italian navigator has landed..." and "Now I am become death..." What, no "It was as if I had fired a cannonball at tissue paper..."? Thank goodness. Not just in this book, but sad to say, many of these narratives are repeated ad nauseaum in all the popular physics books. What did stand out is the exposure of Lize Meitner's often discounted role and her tragic tale, as well as the particulars of the Heisenberg/Bohr Copenhagen meeting, on which the moralistic reputations of both giants of physics lie.

The atomic bomb, and the doctrine of "mutually assured destruction",
has cast its dark shadow over the foreign policy of the second half of
the twentieth century, and, sadly, continues into the present century.
What this book does is tell the story of the element that made it
possible. The author does this by exploring the lives and careers of
the men and women, from many different countries of Europe and the US,
who had a hand in turning this element into something that can both
bring great benefit and great destruction to mankind.

I've read a number of Amir Aczel's books, and what I enjoy about them
the most is how he tells a scientific story by telling us about what
motivates the people who are involved in doing that science. Why does
Enrico Fermi decide to come to the US when he does? What events cause
Lise Meitner to fail to get the recognition that she deserves for her
discoveries. Why does Heisenberg stay in Germany and why does that
country fail to produce an atomic bomb during the Second World War?

The book also explores the decision of the Truman administration to
deploy the two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Citing recently declassified documents Aczel takes a new
look at the justifications that we have heard for decades. How would
the Japanese war have ended had the bombs not been used? Could the
four decades of cold war have been avoided? Give this book a read and
form your own opinion.