109 East Palace

109 East Palace by Jennet Connant. With the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima coming up next month, there's been a rash of books about atomic bombs and their development. I think there were three published this spring that focus on Los Alamos in general and Robert Oppenheimer, its director. I decided to try this with having read Connant's previous book, Tuxedo Park.

This is "personal" history at its best. Too often (here comes a rant you've already seen once if anybody's actually out there!), our kids are taught events and dates instead of people. With most high school kids, there's probably a period of at least a few weeks where they can tell that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in August, 1945. A few might even be able to tell you that the bomb was developed, in part, at Los Alamos, near Santa Fe. Boring, boring, boring!

The reality is that, whatever you think of nuclear weapons, this was probably the most intense, most successful crash scientific program ever undertaken. You might say that the race to the moon in the 60s took its place, but I'd argue that the was largely an engineering project. We had a high degree of confidence that we could get to the moon. The science was pretty well understood, it just had to be applied. With the Manhattan Project, there was no really strong evidence that a so-called "atomic" bomb could even be produced. It was only known that Nazi scientest were pursuing it with all speed and that, if they got there first, the Germans would, in all likelihood, win the war.

Don't be intimidated, however, by the intense scientific and engineering work that make up the project itself. This book is not about science, or even bombs, its about people. At its high point, Los Alamos had thousands of people on staff in a community that, a few months before, had been a small boy's school. There wasn't enough housing, food or water. The scientists, used to the free-wheeling academic world, were confronted by an ultra-secure military operation. Many of them, over a two year period, would only occasionaly get as far as Santa Fe. They weren't allowed to contact their families. Their mail was censored. Their weren't allowed to indulge in off-base entertainment. And yet, they pulled off one of the most amazing scientific feats of all time.

Connant is a terrific writer and manages to get across both the deprivations and exhiliration of these times. Her insight is helped by the her father, James B Connant, was one of the foremost scientific and science policy figures of the day, giving her personal access to countless people who were careful, even decades later, about what they said to whom. To make the story accessible, she homes in on two people, the charismatic physicist, Robert Oppenheimer and the "earth mother" type who takes care of everybody, Dorothy McKibbin.

There are a lot of interesting facts buried in the book. For example, did you know that there were two different designs for the bomb reflected in the two bombs that were actually dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, there was so little uranium and plutonium manufactured at the time that one of the two was never tested before it was dropped and the second was tested exactly once, since, whether the test succeeded or failed, there wasn't enough material to try again!

The book follows the project from its inception and, obviously, includes the very intense chapter on the one test that was tried at the Trinity Site near Los Alamos. It then follows the lives of the principals until their death, including the pretty tragic way Oppenheimer was treated in the 50s. The combination of professional dispute with Teller, the red-scare tactics of McCarthy and the personal animosity of Lewis Strauss who served on the initial Atomic Energy Commission, eventually cost Oppenheimer the humiliating loss of his security clearance.

Connant's style makes for an easy, novel-like read. This is the way history was meant to be taught.