"Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man" fills an important niche in the literature about the development of nuclear weapons. There is no shortage of books on the Manhattan Project, including such classics as "Now It Can Be Told," "Brighter Than A Thousand Suns" and "The Making of the Atomic Bomb." Biographies of scientists who worked on the project, including Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, also abound. One would think that there would not be much fresh material to write about a project that, after all, took place more than 60 years ago. But new books on the subject continue to crop up. One of the latest, "Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima," released in 2005, details the last couple of weeks before the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II. In reading "Shockwave," I found that virtually all of the passages that referred to the technical details of the "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" bombs footnoted John Coster-Mullens' "Atom Bombs." So I had to buy it. It was an excellent decision.
According to a review in "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists," Coster-Mullen has not yet found a publisher willing to print his book, which is unfortunate--it deserves to be issued in bound hardcover form. Hopefully someday it will be. Now, what you get is a spiral-bound 8-1/2x11-inch, 402-page book with nice thick card-stock covers. Although it is printed on a laser printer, the printing quality is very good, and the photos and drawings are clear, sharp and crisp. My order, shipped directly from the author in Wisconsin, showed up very quickly and in perfect condition in a large padded envelope.
Enough about the appearance--what about the content? Quite simply, there is NO better source of information on the technical details of the world's first two nuclear weapons. In the first 88 pages, after touching on the history of the Manhattan Project and the "Silverplate" Boeing B-29 "Superfortress" bombers that were specially modified to carry the weapons, Coster-Mullen describes the design, configuration, materials and assembly procedures of "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" to an unprecedented level of detail. But wait, there's more! The bulk of "Atom Bombs" is made up of appendices containing hundreds of pages of photos, drawings, sketches, patent applications and declassified source documents that reveal nearly every detail about the design, development, construction and testing of "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" that you could ever want to know. This is really "nuts and bolts" stuff, literally. Finally, there are over 30 pages of endnotes, which themselves constitute a unique and valuable resource. You'll know more when you finish reading "Atom Bombs" than you can learn from all of the other books on the subject combined. It gets my highest possible recommendation.
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fission/fusion weapons 1-3; picture below - dad ALSOS CO OSS, standing behind Stettinius, Molotov on route to Yalta
excellent technical pictures, diagrams, site shots or heretofore unseen materialauthor views himself as a world expert though his narrow view closes out many other unseen factshis ring bound presentation is excellent in everyday as he does not let provinciality smear the factual accounts presented
