Home > News > Bomb: A Thrilling and Tragic Tale
June 1, 2013 in Library Corner
Wander any beach this summer and you will notice two types of readers. Some ambitious souls appear to have saved their densest, heaviest, most significant reading for the lazy, languid days of summer. In the opposite camp are the weary folk who rest their brains in light, frothy fare sure to be long forgotten by the time autumn comes. Yet unbeknownst to many, there is a covert third camp of readers seeking a middle ground – these adults want books that are both worthwhile and easy to read. That is why they turn (sometimes furtively) to kids’ books.
Some of the books I enjoy most and learn the most from are non-fiction books written for 12–16-year-olds. A stunning new entry in this category is Bomb: The Race to Build – and Steal – the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin, a 2012 National Book Award Finalist for Young People’s Literature. When I left Bomb lying on a table at home, my teenage daughters seized it and later, at their urging, my husband read it too. Our whole family recommends this historical, scientific page-turner.
Bomb reads like a screenplay for a Hollywood thriller. The narrative shifts rapidly from scene to scene – from the Soviet spies trying to steal the secrets of the atomic bomb, to the scientists developing the bomb in Los Alamos, to the Allied saboteurs who destroy a key Nazi power plant, to the final, tragic anguish of Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the bomb” who failed to convince President Truman to halt the arms race after World War II.
On the eve of World War II, German chemist Otto Hahn momentously discovered nuclear fission, finding a means to split uranium atoms and release immense energy. Physicists around the world understood the implications of this discovery for bomb-making, including an alarmed Albert Einstein who wrote to President Roosevelt warning him of how dangerous Hitler would become with an atomic bomb in his arsenal. Roosevelt formed a committee of military leaders and scientists that morphed into the Manhattan Project, the code name for the effort to develop an American atomic bomb.
One of the fascinating figures in Bomb is Robert Oppenheimer, a brilliant Jewish physicist who was the scientific director of the Manhattan Project. As a young professor, Oppenheimer was famously absent-minded, so lost in his abstract world of theories and formulas that he didn’t hear about the stock market crash that launched the Great Depression for six months.
Beginning in 1936, however, Oppenheimer began to pay increasing attention to the Nazi takeover of Germany, where he had earned his doctorate. When he learned that Hitler was threatening Jewish physicists, he dedicated a portion of his salary to help them escape Germany.
Obsessively focused on building an atomic bomb before Germany did, Oppenheimer began to reflect on the moral implications of atomic weaponry only after a test bomb successfully exploded in the New Mexico desert. With rising dread, Oppenheimer, an erudite scholar who spoke eight languages, recalled a verse from the sacred Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
After the war, Oppenheimer urged the U.S. government to stop its bomb-building program and opposed the development of the more powerful hydrogen bomb. Angry political officials accused him of communist sympathies and revoked his security clearance. Disgraced and humiliated, Oppenheimer returned to teaching, haunted by the realization that the weapon he had created to save the world had provoked an arms race that potentially could destroy it.
