title: The First War of Physics: The Secret History of the Atomic Bomb, 1939-1949
author:  Jim Baggott 
description: Science journalist Baggott addresses a subject he describes as both personal and intellectual. How did the nuclear bomb, this dreadful instrument of fear, come to be created? Specifically, how did some of the world's great physicists contribute to a process that would recalibrate what it means to be inhuman? His answers combine published sources and recently declassified British, American, and Soviet archival material. He seeks the answers in the period from the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939, through the efforts by the combatants to develop nuclear weapons, to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the early cold war arms race. Through these years, the author follows the great physicists, from Otto Frisch to Werner Heisenberg and Edward Teller. They realized early on the terrible power they could unleash, and FDR was warned of German efforts to develop a nuclear weapon. Baggott concludes that the confluence of the discovery of nuclear fission with the leadup to war made the atom bomb inevitable, and the scientists were drawn inexorably into its development. Baggott's assertion that events confronted scientists with [d]ecisions for which they were poorly prepared is anticlimactic but all too accurate. <i>(Apr.)</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: Men at War 1 
   
  The Last Heroes 
   
   
  PROLOGUE 
   
  In January 1939, Professor Niels Bohr, a German physicist who had fled 
  Germany and was then living in Copenhagen, traveled to the United 
  States and visited with Professor Albert Einstein, a German 
  mathematician who had also fled Germany and was then living in 
  Princeton, New Jersey. 
   
  Among other things, they discussed an interesting phenomenon 
  observed when uranium, a natural element, was bombarded with 
  neutrons: barium and krypton were formed, indicating that the 
  uranium atom had been split into two nearly equal fragments. 
   
  Professor Bohr further discussed this phenomenon, which he called 
  fission, with a number of other eminent scientists. Among these was 
  Professor Enrico Fermi (then of the University of Chicago). At a 
  conference in Washington, D.C., on January 26, 1939, Fermi suggested 
  that neutrons might be released during fission, and if this were the 
  case, a continuous disintegration--a "chain reaction"--might be 
  pos