Selected Readings
by Daniel Traister '63

Manhattan Project
Anyone interested in the Manhattan Project and its aftermath should start with Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986) and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). Both available in paperback, they are long books but they're immensely readable, and they are about as good as introductory histories get.

The Cold War
Basic for the cultural background of Cold War America, viewed from a "nuclear" perspective, is Paul S. Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (1985; reprinted Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1994, paperback). Related books by Allan M. Winkler, Life Under a Cloud: American Anxiety about the Atom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), Margot A. Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove's America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), and–a literary study–Peter Schwenger's Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) are also worthwhile.

Cold War Memoirs
Memoirs are plentiful and important. Generals Leslie R.. Groves, Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), and Kenneth D. Nichols, The Road to Trinity (New York: William Morrow, 1987), offer a military perspective.

Books by Physicists
The recollections of physicists differ in many respects from those of the military. Laura Fermi's Atoms in the Family: My Life with Enrico Fermi (1954; reprinted Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, paperback), offers a view almost domestic; it should be read with Emilio Segrave's Enrico Fermi: Physicist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970, paperback). Nuel Pharr Davis (an English professor), in Lawrence and Oppenheimer (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), deals very well with these two major (and very different) players.

Other Memoirs and Biographies
Other memoirs or biographies in addition to those by or about Oppenheimer, Lawrence and Fermi–about, e.g., Hans Bethe, Arthur Holly Compton, James Bryant Conant, Otto Frisch, Rudolph Peierls, I. I. Rabi, Emilio Segre, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf, Eugene Wigner–and, of course, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the transcript of the 1954 security hearings that stripped Oppenheimer of access to the nuclear secrets he'd helped create–are all worth a long gander.

In a separate category, Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character (New York: Norton, 1985) and James Gleick's Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (New York: Pantheon, 1992) both discuss young Feynman at Los Alamos. Brilliant, eccentric and faced with the personal tragedy of a dying wife, Feynman was not yet the Richard Feynman he would later become when he grew up. But these accounts are worth reading simply because they are so engaging.

The Physics of WWII
The basic study of mobilization of the physics community for World War II is Daniel Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (1977; reprinted Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995, paperback). Indispensable on the organization of the wartime effort of which the Manhattan Project is one major part.

Nuclear Plays, Poetry, Film, and Fiction
"Nuclear plays" are well represented at the moment by Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, in production on Broadway (where it won this year's Tony) (New York: Doubleday, 2000–expected in print this August). Friedrich Durrenmatt's The Physicists (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 1981) and Heinar Kipphardt's In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968)–both in paper–are very different from Frayn and from each other. Both are terrific reads.

"Nuclear poetry" is not always easy to find. Hanford is important in a recent collection by Debora Greger, Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters (New York: Penguin, 1996), and just this year Nicholas Christopher published Atomic Field: Two Poems (New York: Harcourt, 2000), poems that play out against the cultural landscape described by Boyer and others. But many poems appear in books that are not entirely devoted to such themes. These are most easily found in such anthologies as Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age, ed. John Bradley (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1995).

"Nuclear fictions" is where I started, specifically with Thomas McMahon, Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970). A wonderful melodrama about Los Alamos seen from an adolescent boy's perspective, it's now out of print. Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters (1990; reprinted Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 2000– is a strange and difficult book, well worth its difficulties. Masuji Ibuse's Black Rain (New York: Kodansha, 1969) and Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, ed. Richard Minear (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990–three witnesses in three forms, fiction, poetry and memoir) both in paperback, offer views of what it was like to be not above the bomb but underneath it.

That is not the point of view in John Hersey's Hiroshima, one of those books that "everyone has read"–and which, if you haven't, you should. The single most famous American work about the Hiroshima bombing– perhaps the most famous work of American journalism produced during World War II–Hersey's book is wonderfully written. But his perspective is astonishingly Olympian. Paul Fussell's Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (New York: Summit, 1988).

A "comic book"–well, that's what it is–by Raymond Briggs, When the Wind Blows (New York: Schocken, 1982), offers another view of what it might be like to be beneath the bomb. Unfortunately out of print, it is a completely astonishing book.

A great deal of literature emerged from the Smithsonian Institution's ill-advised effort to create an Enola Gay exhibition that reflected the complicated views of modern scholars rather than the often rather simpler–and, as Fussell reminds us, not therefore wrong–views of veterans. History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past, ed. Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 1996) is a good introduction to this recent controversy.

Paul Brian'sNuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, 1895-1984 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1987) is a bibliography of nuclear warfare in fiction. The author has produced a supplement available at http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/nuclear/nh-supplement.html.

The majority of "nuclear fictions" fall into this category. It is worth noticing that examples of the genre go back to a time way before there was any such animal as an "atomic bomb." Peter Bryant's Red Alert (NewYork: Ace Books, 1958) and Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler's, Fail-Safe (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962) are typical of the genre at the height of the Cold War. Even more grotesque are Philip Wylie's Tomorrow (New York: Rinehart, 1954) and Triumph (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963), really paranoid and scary books. An excellent recent example of the genre is Meg Files's Meridian 144 (New York: Soho, 1991).

Anyone who samples the wealth of film must begin with Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. Simply put, it is one of the greatest American "comedies" ever filmed. (It's based–loosely!–on Peter Bryant's novel, above.) Follow it with a movie that plays the same story "straight," Sidney Lumet's Fail-Safe. On the Beach, based on Nevil Shute's 1957 novel, also holds up very well. Alain Resnais's film, Hiroshima, mon amour, based on a screenplay by Marguerite Duras (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 1961; paperback), is one of the triumphs of postwar French cinema.

Altogether different are movies that, like Fat Man and Little Boy, turn the Manhattan Project into historical costume drama. A movie that cannot be saved even by Paul Newman is in deep trouble. This is such a movie.