Before The Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "ON 6 AUGUST 1945, the Christian Feast of the Transfiguration, the Festival of Light, a young mother, Futaba Kitayama, looked up to see "an airplane..." (more)
Key Phrases: elongated trash, heavy water cells, profound psychological impression, United States, Los Alamos, Marie Curie (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Nuclear weapons have been an immutable aspect of the world for the past 60 years. The story of how they came to be, and the race between the Allied and Axis nations to be the first to harness the destructive power of the atom, is wonderfully told by British historian Preston (A First Rate Tragedy; Lusitania; etc.). She weaves together history, physics, politics and military strategies to convey both the monumental scientific achievement the bomb represented and, at the same time, the ethical and humanitarian implications of creating such a wild power. Preston is an impeccable researcher with a gift for choosing small details that illuminate and humanize the bomb's world-changing effects. She quotes a doctor in Hiroshima saying the mass of burned flesh around him smelled like "dried squid when it is grilled--the squid we like so much to eat"; elsewhere, Preston relates that the potential explosive effect of a chain-reaction atomic bomb was first calculated on the back of a napkin. This is a story with a reservoir of events heroic and horrible and a fabulous cast of characters that includes scientists Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller and Hans Bethe, and world leaders Roosevelt, Churchill, Truman, Stalin, Emperor Hirohito and Hitler. Preston presents each with rare insight and expertise. But her rarer achievement is to capture not only the work of making the bomb with its myriad ramifications for humankind, but also the ineffably human qualities--curiosity, ambition, fear, patriotism--that animated the participants in the great drama. 50 b&w illus.
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From The Washington Post

On a sunny August morning 60 years ago, a young Japanese mother named Futaba Kitayama looked up to see "an airplane as pretty as a silver treasure flying from East to West in the cloudless pure blue sky." As she watched, the plane released an object from its bomb bay that soon exploded into "an indescribable light." It was the device dubbed "Little Boy" -- the first deadly and fearsome display of the true power of the atom. Kitayama saw her own flesh peel off her body. Some 140,000 men, women and children in the city of Hiroshima were killed, either by the immediate blast or, within months, from radiation. It would have taken 3,000 B-29s carrying conventional bombs to equal the might of that single atomic explosion.

Given the enormity of that event -- military, political and historical -- it is not surprising that the quest to unravel the secrets of the atom has been the subject of dozens of books over the years. In Before the Fallout, the British historian Diana Preston draws on many of those works but also adds her own archival research and interviews. While her book provides no startling revelations, Preston artfully distills the key moments of the pre-atomic-bomb era, both scientific and biographic, and weaves them into an absorbing narrative. The result is a concise and very readable overview of the human chain reaction that began in 1896 with the innocent observation that uranium salts could fog a photographic plate and culminated half a century later in the most potent weapon the world had ever seen.

Preston opens her tale in a rundown Parisian courtyard, where the Polish-born scientist Marie Curie spent many months huddled over her cauldrons, processing mounds of pitchblende (a heavy, black ore rich in compounds of uranium) in search of the yet unknown elements that she was sure it contained. It took her more than three years to crystallize a mere tenth of a gram of radium, but after that 1902 achievement, progress came quickly. The purity of her samples, with their high levels of radioactivity, enabled scientists in Europe and America to probe various materials with the penetrating rays and begin dissecting the atom. In 1911, physicists came up with the now familiar model: a tiny nucleus of protons and neutrons, surrounded by orbiting electrons. This newly discovered atomic world soon took on an Alice-in-Wonderland quality, where matter turned out to be frozen energy (as quantified in Einstein's equation E = mc{+2}) and elements that were once considered immutable could disintegrate into a hail of elementary particles.

By 1933, scientists were already speculating about whether nuclear transformations could be explosive, but notable physicists such as Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr called such talk "moonshine" and "beyond the reach of experiments." At the time they were right, but Preston lucidly describes how swiftly the situation changed. Just six years later, the Austrian theorist Lise Meitner figured out that a heavy nucleus could split apart like an amoeba dividing into two. It didn't take long for many in the field, such as J. Robert Oppenheimer, to realize that this fission "could make bombs": A single neutron splits a uranium nucleus, which releases more neutrons, which in turn hit other uranium nuclei, triggering a self-sustaining reaction of lethal potential. In 1940, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls gave the British government their secret and influential three-page document, "On the Construction of a 'Superbomb,' " which outlined its feasibility.

Was building the bomb inevitable? Probably. Various pieces of the puzzle were being discerned by scientists in a number of countries around the same time. And wartime pressures forced them to pursue it, if only to create a nuclear deterrent that put fear into their enemies. In the United States, the pursuit was quite aggressive; in Nazi Germany, it was more desultory. In Preston's account, Werner Heisenberg, a leading member of the German team, appears as capricious in the Nazi quest for nuclear weapons as the uncertainty principle he had earlier established in quantum physics. Preston provides just enough scientific details to make us appreciate the complexity of the task, and her portraits of the major players help us understand their motivations, concerns and misgivings.

As she chronicles this race for the bomb, Preston never lets us forget the ultimate tragedy to come. She returns to Hiroshima several times over the course of her book, presenting vignettes of its ongoing life. In the 1920s, the city flourished as both an academic and a manufacturing center. By 1944, she writes, "Bramble shoots were stripped of their prickles and chewed. Reeds from the city's rivers were boiled and eaten." We come to see that the city's inhabitants were deprived and defeated even before the blast.

In the end she asks, "What if?" What if certain scientists had died prematurely? What if the bomb's construction had taken a year longer? What if the bomb had been invented but never used? Such speculations are fascinating, but what lingers are the personal stories: British physicist James Chadwick, imprisoned by the Germans during World War I, using toothpaste containing thorium to carry out jailhouse experiments on radioactivity; Bohr, fleeing Nazi-ruled Denmark, dissolving in acid some gold Nobel medals left to him for safekeeping; the rear gunner of the Enola Gay comparing the plane's steep turn to safety after the Hiroshima bomb drop to "the cyclone rollercoaster ride at the Coney Island amusement park."

"History," writes Preston, " . . . is inherently about people, how they thought, what they did with their thoughts, and how they interacted with the individuals immediately around them." With Before the Fallout, she conveys that history with both style and compassion.

Reviewed by Marcia Bartusiak
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Walker & Company (April 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802714455
• ISBN-13: 978-0802714459
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,080,124 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fifty Years that Transformed Physics, May 21, 2005

By	John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In 1895, I've heard, the director of the patent office resigned saying that there was nothing new to invent.

Also in 1895 Rontgen discovered X-Rays.

In 1905 a young man no one had heard of published three articles in one issue of the most promient journal of Physics. The first would have gained him an honorable mention in the chemistry texts of today. The second would get him a Nobel prize, and become the foundation of what we now know of as television. The third article was the theory of relativity.

Forty years later Paul Tibbets, piloting the 'Enola Gay' dropped the 'Little Boy' atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

This book is the story of those fifty years. It's a fascinating story of people with genius level minds making new breakthroughs in physics nearly every year. It is also a story of people, of Lise Meitner making a magnificant discovery but having it ignored because she was female.

Those fifty years transformed the world of physics from a backwater of levers and pulleys into the queen of all the sciences.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Phenomenal Leap in Physics, August 5, 2005

By	W. S. McKenzie (Albuquerque, NM USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Physicists made phenomenal progress in understanding the workings of the atom in the first half of the twentieth century from the discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Röntgen in 1895 through the unlocking of awesome power demonstrated in the New Mexico desert in 1945. Diana Preston's history gives us some understanding of the events and people who contributed to the leap in scientific understanding. She concentrates on individuals who achieved so much including Rutherford, the Curies, Bohr, Chadwick, and Fermi. She traces the evolution of nuclear physics in different parts of the world from Japan, England, Germany, France, and America. Of particular historical interest is how the efforts initiated by Leo Szilard eventually led to the successful Manhattan project as opposed to the failure of any nuclear program in the Axis countries in spite of having very capable scientists such as Heisenberg and Nishina.

Preston is adept at describing the technical issues so that even a casual reader can understand how the different experiments and theories contributed to advances. And she is adept at describing personality issues: ". . . Groves had also alienated Ernest Lawrence . . . he warned the Nobel prize winner that he had better do a good job since his reputation depended on it. Lawrence replied, "My reputation is already made. It is yours that depends on the outcome of the Manhattan project." "

The artwork by van der Goes, The Fall, hints at the origin of the title and is used to create an intriguing dust jacket for the hardcover edition.

"Before the Fallout" is well worth reading for anyone interested in the question of how we went from a world of gun powder and swords to nuclear weapons in a mere half-century.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars History....even the history of science... is inherently about people, August 18, 2006

By	Bobby D. (Cerritos, CA) - See all my reviews

Diana Preston combines the exciting story of the individuals responsible for the scientific discoveries of Atomic Energy with the race for the Atomic Bomb. She traces the fifty year journey of discoveries which culminated in Hiroshima's destruction. The book is one of biography, science (well told and easy to understand), and the history of this unique quest for knowledge. The book is a broad overview of the subject which along the way presents material that surely could be expanded into many different books and even a few movies. For example the story of the two attempts to destroy the Nazi's Norwegian source of Heavy Water reads like the film "The Guns of Navarone".
I have had the pleasure to meet Diana Preston and hear her speak at the Los Angeles Times Book Fair. She is a regular attendee. I have read all but her first book and have felt her "Lusitania" her greatest achievement but this, her newest, is just as wonderful.
The book is well organized and has many characters that you find easy to follow via each mini biography throughout the narrative. The book ends with really two epilogues. (I do like a good epilog too.) The first tells what happened to each participant after WWII and the last is a "what if" analysis this is most interesting as it puts many of the events in the book into a broad context and points out the individual difference each scientist made. I just loved Preston's comment at the end of the book... "History....even the history of science... is inherently about people, how they thought, what they did with their thoughts, and how they interacted with the individuals immediately around them and then with society and the greater world order. All involved in this story....regardless of race, sex. creed, age, or intellectual ability... had the potential to act individually. In thinking about history but, above all, about the future, we should not depersonalize situations but remember our individual responsibility for them and the consequences fro others." I know you will find this book amazing even if you feel the subject might be dry and to scientific. (High Schools please add this one to your required reading list.)