 | |
| Author | Robert Jungk |
|---|---|
| Subject | Manhattan Project |
| Publisher | Harcourt, Brace |
Publication date | 1956 |
Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists, [1] by Austrian Robert Jungk, is the first published account of the Manhattan Project and the German atomic bomb project.
The book studied the making and dropping of the atomic bomb from the viewpoints of the atomic scientists. The book is largely based on personal interviews with persons who played leading parts in the construction and deployment of the bombs.
In 1956 the book was published in German by Alfred Scherz Verlag with the title Heller als tausend Sonnen. James Cleugh translated it into English, and it was published in 1958 by Harcourt, Brace and Company.
The book's title is based on the verse from the Bhagavad Gita that J. Robert Oppenheimer is said to have recalled at the Trinity nuclear test. [2]
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Later in life Robert Jungk no longer stood behind some portions of his book. In a foreword published in a 1990 book on Germany's wartime atomic research [3] he appeared to accuse Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker and Werner Heisenberg, both of whom he consulted during the writing, of misleading him about the intentions of German physicists during World War II. [4]
In The New World, 1939–1946, a history commissioned by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and published in 1962, historians Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson describe the book as "hopelessly inaccurate". [5]
In a 1967 interview, the military head of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves, said:
I wouldn't place any reliance on anything in that book Brighter than the Suns. For example, he gave quotes attributed to me that were the direct opposite of what I had given him. He did that with everybody he talked to. I'd say that he was thoroughly discredited in the eyes of everybody who knew him. [6]
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The Manhattan Project was a research and development program undertaken during World War II to produce the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States in collaboration with the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project was directed by Major General Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that designed the bombs. The Army program was designated the Manhattan District, as its first headquarters were in Manhattan; the name gradually superseded the official codename, Development of Substitute Materials, for the entire project. The project absorbed its earlier British counterpart, Tube Alloys, and subsumed the program from the American civilian Office of Scientific Research and Development. The Manhattan Project employed nearly 130,000 people at its peak and cost nearly US$2 billion, over 80 percent of which was for building and operating the plants that produced the fissile material. Research and production took place at more than 30 sites across the US, the UK, and Canada.
Werner Karl Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist, one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics, and a principal scientist in the Nazi nuclear weapons program during World War II. He published his Umdeutung paper in 1925, a major reinterpretation of old quantum theory. In the subsequent series of papers with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, during the same year, his matrix formulation of quantum mechanics was substantially elaborated. He is known for the uncertainty principle, which he published in 1927. Heisenberg was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the creation of quantum mechanics".
Friedrich Georg "Fritz" Houtermans was a Dutch-Austrian-German atomic and nuclear physicist and Communist born in Zoppot near Danzig, West Prussia to a Dutch father, who was a wealthy banker. He was brought up in Vienna, where he was educated, and moved to Göttingen when he was 18 to study. It was in Göttingen where he obtained his Ph.D. under James Franck.
Robert Jungk was an Austrian writer, journalist, historian and peace campaigner. He wrote mostly on matters relating to nuclear weapons.
Carl Friedrich Freiherr von Weizsäcker was a German physicist and philosopher. He was the longest-living member of the team which performed nuclear research in Nazi Germany during the Second World War, under Werner Heisenberg's leadership. There is ongoing debate as to whether or not he and the other members of the team actively and willingly pursued the development of a nuclear bomb for Germany during this time.
Copenhagen is a play by Michael Frayn, based on an event that occurred in Copenhagen in 1941, a meeting between the physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, who had been Bohr's student. It premiered in London in 1998, at the National Theatre, running for more than 300 performances, starring David Burke, Sara Kestelman, and Matthew Marsh.
Nazi Germany undertook several research programs relating to nuclear technology, including nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors, before and during World War II. These were variously called Uranverein or Uranprojekt. The first effort started in April 1939, just months after the discovery of nuclear fission in Berlin in December 1938, but ended only a few months later, shortly ahead of the September 1939 German invasion of Poland, for which many notable German physicists were drafted into the Wehrmacht. A second effort under the administrative purview of the Wehrmacht's Heereswaffenamt began on September 1, 1939, the day of the invasion of Poland. The program eventually expanded into three main efforts: Uranmaschine development, uranium and heavy water production, and uranium isotope separation. Eventually, the German military determined that nuclear fission would not contribute significantly to the war, and in January 1942 the Heereswaffenamt turned the program over to the Reich Research Council while continuing to fund the activity.
The S-1 Executive Committee laid the groundwork for the Manhattan Project by initiating and coordinating the early research efforts in the United States, and liaising with the Tube Alloys Project in Britain.
Erich Schumann was a German physicist who specialized in acoustics and explosives, and had a penchant for music. He was a general officer in the army and a professor at the University of Berlin and the Technische Hochschule Berlin. When Adolf Hitler came to power he joined the Nazi Party. During World War II, his positions in the Army Ordnance Office and the Army High Command made him one of the most powerful and influential physicists in Germany. He ran the German nuclear energy program from 1939 to 1942, when the army relinquished control to the Reich Research Council. His role in the project was obfuscated after the war by the German physics community's defense of its conduct during the war. The publication of his book on the military's role in the project was not allowed by the British occupation authorities. He was director of the Helmholtz Institute of Sound Psychology and Medical Acoustics.
Operation Epsilon was the codename of a program in which Allied forces near the end of World War II detained ten German scientists who were thought to have worked on Nazi Germany's nuclear program. The scientists were captured between May 1 and June 30, 1945, as part of the Allied Alsos Mission, mainly as part of its Operation Big sweep through southwestern Germany.
Alexander Sachs was an American economist and banker. In October 1939 he delivered the Einstein–Szilard letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, suggesting that nuclear-fission research ought to be pursued with a view to possibly constructing nuclear weapons, should they prove feasible, in view of the likelihood that Nazi Germany would do so. This led to the initiation of the United States' Manhattan Project.
The Beginning or the End is a 1947 American docudrama film about the development of the atomic bomb in World War II, directed by Norman Taurog, starring Brian Donlevy, Robert Walker, and Tom Drake, and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The film dramatizes the creation of the atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project and the bombing of Hiroshima.
James Cleugh was an English writer and translator.
Kernphysikalische Forschungsberichte was an internal publication of the German Uranverein, which was initiated under the Heereswaffenamt in 1939; in 1942, supervision of the Uranverein was turned over to the Reichsforschungsrat under the Reichserziehungsministerium. Reports in this publication were classified Top Secret, they had very limited distribution, and the authors were not allowed to keep copies. The reports were confiscated under the Allied Operation Alsos and sent to the United States Atomic Energy Commission for evaluation. In 1971, the reports were declassified and returned to Germany. Many of the reports are available at the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center and the Niels Bohr Library of the American Institute of Physics. Many of them are reprinted and transcribed in the book "Collected Works / Gesammelte Werke" listed below which is available in most libraries. There are reports numbered G-1 to G-395.
Georg Robert Döpel was a German experimental nuclear physicist. He was a participant in a group known as the "first Uranverein", which was spawned by a meeting conducted by the Reichserziehungsministerium, in April 1939, to discuss the potential of a sustained nuclear reaction. He worked under Werner Heisenberg at the University of Leipzig, and he conducted experiments on spherical layers of uranium oxide surrounded by heavy water. He was a contributor to the German nuclear weapon project (Uranprojekt). In 1945, he was sent to Russia to work on the Soviet atomic bomb project. He returned to Germany in 1957, and he became professor of applied physics and director of the Institut für Angewandte Physik at the Hochschule für Elektrotechnik, now Technische Universität, in Ilmenau (Thuringia).
Paul O. Müller was an Austrian theoretical nuclear physicist who worked in the German Uranverein. He was drafted into the German armed forces and died on the Russian Front in World War II.
The Leipzig L-IV experiment accident was the first nuclear accident in history. It occurred on 23 June 1942 in a laboratory at the Physical Institute of the Leipzig University in Leipzig, Germany. There was a steam explosion and a reactor fire in the "uranium machine", a primitive form of research reactor.
Uncertainty: the Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg is a biography by David C. Cassidy documenting the life and science of Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. The book was published in 1992 by W. H. Freeman and Company while an updated and popularized version was published in 2009 under the title Beyond Uncertainty: Heisenberg, Quantum Physics, and The Bomb. The book is named after the quantum mechanics concept known as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. It has been reviewed many times and was generally well received.
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