The Manhattan Project and other stuff to read

The Reading List for 28 Jul 23

Jul 28, 2023

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Manhattan Project Locations — The Manhattan Project was about more than Los Alamos. It encompassed sites across the United States and two in Canada. (Image via atomicarchive.com)

Lots of smart people have written and are writing about the development of the atomic bomb during the Second World War.

In addition to the Atomic Archive (link above), you’ll find a very good example at Matthew Yglesias’ Slow Boring. His opening is brilliant because the fictional version of the Manhattan Project story is, as he notes, something that Oppenheimer makes clear “is more or less the narrative the Manhattan Project protagonists thought they were living out.”

But it isn’t the full story.

Matthew delves into some background to the war itself, engages in a little alternative history about a world where we didn’t have the war and the Nazis didn’t take power in Germany, and how nuclear power might have developed without the military emphasis. This is well-written stuff that gets its bang not from the alternative history but from the value of seeing the modern world with slightly different assumptions or background. The alternative helps you better understand the world as it turned out.

As for Oppenheimer, you’ll have to wait for the proper Bond review of Christopher Nolan’s new film but to give you some things to chew over in the meantime, here’s Matthew’s Substack column.

Slow Boring

The tragedy of the Manhattan Project

If you were writing a Manhattan Project movie as a work of fiction, you would tell a different story than any of the contested versions of reality. The fictional version might go something like this: the United States starts way behind in nuclear physics, with fission having been first demonstrated in Berlin in December of 1938 and the world’s premier quantum scientist, Werner Heisenberg, leading the German effort. But Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, two Jewish refugees from Hitler’s dictatorship, write to FDR that the United States needs to explore the creation of a fission bomb. Robert Oppenheimer, from a wealthy assimilated Jewish family, leads a team that features critical contributions at every level from exiles and emigres. They beat Heisenberg to the bomb — in part because Niels Bohr refuses to help the Nazis and in part because Hitler thinks quantum mechanics is “Jewish science” — and, because of this nuclear breakthrough, win the war…

2 years ago · 47 likes · 53 comments · Matthew Yglesias

Carry on past the subscription prompt and paying subscribers will find the rest of the week’s suggested curiosities for the brain: Barbie, polling, national security, the cabinet shuffle, and something a outside the normal range of what you see around here.

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Have a great weekend. There’s some good turmoil in the Scribbler world this month but we’ll be carrying on with publication as usual. Not sure what Monday will bring - there are lots of potential targets … but it will be worth mulling over whatever it is.

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