They’re Building A Bomb

I’ve read a lot about the Manhattan Project, Soviet spying during the era, and on Allied successes and failures in derailing Germany’s atomic bomb project.

But I have yet to read a book like Steven Sheinkin’s “Bomb: The Race to Build – and Steal – the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon.”

In this compact book, Sheinkin pulls a lot of stuff together, including some things I had not been aware of, and tells a tale worthy of the best spy novels. For anyone looking for an introductory book to the battle for the bomb, look no further.

Yes, Sheinkin’s book lacks a lot of the technical aspects of most of the other books written on the subject, but that’s beside the point – his audience is clearly different, his aims more focused on telling a complex tale as succinctly as possible. It’s a fantastic book to hand any curious individual of any age wanting to get a taste for Manhattan Project literature.

He shows considerable skill in focusing in on the critical events, knowing how to provide just enough knowledge to keep the story going without bogging it down in technicalities, nor leaving any of the principal events out. Such concise packaging is enviable, especially in the era where it’s felt leaving anything out is a sin.

And his writing style portrays the same tension filmmakers have used on the same subject:



Any student of the Manhattan project ought to have this book on the shelf, if only to help someone else pique an interest in the topic.

Mine Mine Mine!

Richard Rhodes, in his “How to Write” challenges would-be writers.

He challenges us to put the ass to the chair, as one of his acquaintances advised, to sit in the cobbler’s wax, as Anthony Trollope said, and to find our “bottom” and stay with it.

He challenges us to write, not to dream about being a writer.

So all told, stuff I’m coming to know on my own. It’s good to hear it reconfirmed by someone with the writing caliber as Rhodes, however. Blessed be those who read and find they are already walking down that familiar road, perhaps not at the pace they’d prefer but walking forward still.

Rhodes’ book is a succotash. There is much for the beginning writer – he discusses scheduling, levels of edit, offers many examples of the tricks he preaches, from writing profiles of individual characters to collecting and surrounding oneself with cues to burnish the senses as one writes (this is something I do already and regard it as a critical trick in getting writing that is more vivid; I imagine Edgar Allan Poe with some kind of skull-embossed bug in his possession inspiring him to write “The Gold-Bug”). But there is much as well for the more advanced writer who struggles with taking one’s writing from good to better to best. My favorite tidbit:

[I]f you don’t say what you mean, your reader will say it for you, willy-nilly. When I see an incoherent film I usually complain about its incoherence. That surprises my friends, who proceed to explain to me what isn’t in the script. They write their own stories to fill in what’s missing. Hollywood, with its contempt for the people who make it rich, expects no less of us: ya got spectacle, ya got stars, ya want coherence? Filling in gaps is the way our facile brains work. There’s a blind spot in the eye, but you’ll never see it unless you make special arrangements to look – the brain fills it in. Give people random sequences of numbers or other symbols and they’ll usually find a pattern that isn’t there. But you don’t want people to write their stories into your work, to find patterns that aren’t there. You want people to find your stories, to find the patterns you designed.

These are my stories I’m writing. Mine. Mine. Mine. Writers are egomaniacs, Rhodes insists, and I tend to believe him. We want to tell our stories and have people enjoy them, but we want them to be our stories. Our own. To do that, he says, and to get away with it through editors and other makers of filters and tinkerers of words, we have to concentrate on filling in those gaps so that at every turn, the story is ours, not the readers. Paul Theroux and JRR Tolkien, I believe, embody this writing religion – they leave no gaps in their stories. Reading Theroux’s “The Mosquito Coast” leaves the reader with no room for wiggling – as does Peter Weir’s film treatment of the book. Watch Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films and you see how Jackson and company leave things too open. Tolkien does not. The stories are his, and his alone. He maintained they were undramatizable to his death, for that very reason.

That’s not to say the films Weir and Jackson made of these stories aren’t enjoyable. I enjoy them very much. They encapsulate the kernel of the stories they tell. But that’s it. There’s no time in the medium of film to tell every little bit, so they will always be a pale imitation of the original material.

But I digress from Rhodes’ book. An excellent read for writers at all levels of engagement, one that launches challenges I’m loath to take on because they’re hard. (Perhaps a sign I’ll never be a writer). Those challenges? Thinking and re-thinking a story before it’s written down so you come out with a first draft that doesn’t need as much editing as a raw draft would; throwing caution – and finances – to the wind in order to pursue research to make your writing more vivid. Challenging yourself to ensure you have picked the perfect word to convey your thought, and not settling for the first word your dog of memory brings back to you. And many others.

But I can see reading this book as reading a palimpsest, a metaphor he uses quite often in the book. I can pick up stuff now and, through painful practice and apprenticeship, learn to recognize the wisdom he speaks in the things I am loath to try once I am further along and have a few published novels under my belt.

This book’s a keeper, so to say.

Extreme Watchfulness

As I read the concluding chapters to Richard Rhodes' "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb," the discussion of the internal and external struggles between atomic weapons researchers, the Atomic Energy Commission, and Strategic Air Command started sounding vaguely familiar. I thought for a while it was merely because I work in the nuclear industry (on the cleanup side) and have just heard this kind of discussion and language over and over again. That didn't seem quite right. Then I figured it was because of the other books I've read on the subject, and my interest in general in this time period between the end of World War II and the 1980s.

Then I realized that, too, was wrong. It all sounded familiar because of this:

Rhodes quotes Gen. Thomas Power, second head of SAC, as saying the following over open communication lines as SAC ratcheted itself up from DefCon 3 to DefCon 2 as the Cuban Missie Crisis unfolded:

This is General Power speaking. I am addressing you for the purpose of reemphasizing the seriousness for the situation the nation faces. We are in an advanced state of readiness to meet any emergencies and I feel that we are well prepared. I expect each of you to maintain strict security and use calm judgment during this tense period. Our plans are well prepared and are being executed smoothly . . .  Review your plans for further action to insure that there will be no mistakes or confusion . . .

Yeah, that's Gen. Jack D. Ripper speaking.

Reading this book -- particularly its concluding chapters -- helped me to understand better the paranoia of the 1950s and on into the 60s, as the United States and Russia faced off in the tensest period of the Cold War. Any student of Dr. Strangelove, then, would be well-served to read this book in order to gain that understanding as well. Hearing all of this firsthand, knowing it's not Hollywood embellishment or from the mind of the likes of Terry Southern or Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler help to bring the gravity of the situation home.

It amazed me to think how pell-mell humanity rushes into things as complicated as nuclear weaponry without really thinking things through. There for a whole, for example, the AEC had control of nuclear weapons and would only release them to the military when the president ordered. Military minds eventually wore down on that logic to the point the military had the weapons but could not fire them without direct order from the president or without special codes to release the weapons. Soon it evolved past that, where only the trust of the officers in charge kept missiles from being launched on accident or against orders. An instance at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana showed, as the installers worked to get the first weaponized thermonuclear bombs prepped for readiness, that corners were cut past safety systems so that anyone with just one of the four required keys could launch the missiles.

All that puts Gen. Ripper and Attack Wing Plan R in perspective, and not in a funny way that ends with a deleted pie fight, either.

Making Connections to Connectivism

The more I read Richard Rhodes’ “Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb,” the more I realize the education al philosophy of connectivism plays a critical role in how we advance our individual knowledge by connecting it to the interests, vocations, and knowledge resident in others.

I just read this passage, detailing how mathematicians Stanislav Ulam and John von Neumann connected their varied knowledge of the problems of thermonuclear physics and the development of the first electronic computer to solve certain problems:

The Hungarian-born mathematician embraced [ENIAC] and the concept of the machine, and soon abstracted from its crude vacuum-tube technology a logical system for manipulating and processing information, mathematical or otherwise. [Mathematician and computer designer Herman] Goldstine believes von Neumann’s 101-page draft report, written that final winter and spring of the war, was “the most important document ever written on computing and computers.” The ENIAC as the Moore School group had designed it had to be prepared for each new problem by physically rearranging its circuit wires, plugging and unplugging what looked like old-fashioned telephone switchboards. In his draft report, von Neumann formulated for the first time the idea of a store operating program – and defined in the process the basic organization of the digital computer.

Von Neumann and Ulam knew scientists at Los Alamos had a problem on their hands in that current mechanical computers could make the computations necessary to design a thermonuclear weapon (and, potentially, hot-fusion electricity generation) but only at a slow rate that would take years. But when von Neumann and Ulam met Goldstine and heard about ENIAC, the connections they made brought them a leap forward in completing their computations.

Connectivism – when the connections are done properly – results in a sum that is greater than the sum of its parts. Two plus two can equal four, or twenty, or ten thousand. As a teacher, I can facilitate the making of connections, be they connections to people, to authors, to concepts. But then it’s up to the student to recognize the value of the connection and to implement it – we have to be programmed to connect, just like the whie cells in our brains have to be programmed to connect, in order to take advantage of the knowledge or information possessed by the other.

Global Energy Miracles

The more I hear about and read Bill Gates’ speech at this year’s TED, the more I have to ask – how come we haven’t done this a long time ago?

Lack of money, lack of political will. That’s what it always comes down to.

Critics of nuclear power always bring up two bugaboos – waste and the initial cost of building the power plants – as reasons to avoid the technology altogether. If the technology can be developed to burn depleted uranium in a slow process – Gates is investing in a company researching a fourth-generation nuclear plant capable of doing so – and if there were enough political will in this country to allow nuclear fuel reprocessing, the waste bugaboo, while not disappearing entirely, would be a much simpler task to accomplish. It’s hard to come up with another power source that lets you re-use 99 percent of your fuel and produce electricity for the baseload.

The cost thing has always boggled my mind as well, because it seems to me that there’s a lot of cost involved in putting together large enough solar and wind power plants in order to provide electricity on the mass scale needed to get this country off electricity through coal. Why cost is always brought up as a no against nuclear power but glossed over for other alternative, carbon-friendly power sources kind of bugs me.

I’m as big an advocate for wind and solar as I am nuclear. One of my goals is to have solar or wind power personally installed at the house I live in, in order to help get me off the grid as much as possible. I think these technologies are reliable and inexpensive enough on the small scale like this to help individual families achieve electricity independence.

But we can’t ignore Gates’ (and others’) calls to action for clean electricity on a massive scale:

The world's energy portfolio should not include coal or natural gas, he said, and must include carbon capture and storage technology as well as nuclear, wind and both solar photovoltaics and solar thermal power.

"We're going to have to work on each of these five [areas] and we can't give up on any of them because they look daunting," he said. "They all have significant challenges."

Gates spent a significant portion of his speech highlighting nuclear technology that would turn spent uranium -- the 99 percent of uranium rods that aren't burned in current nuclear power plants -- into electricity.

Just talking about this makes me want to re-read my Richard Rhodes books. There’s a time when the science, the need, and the money all came together. The Manhattan project, the Apollo Missions – we need a similar push for the energy miracles Gates talked about.

Postscript: It's a shame the TED organizers are so slow at releasing text and videos of the speeches for the mass audience -- but then again, maybe they're not tyring to communicate with the masses. Elitist pigs . . .

Update: Just watched President Obama's talk in Maryland, announcing $8 billion in loan guarantees to Southern Co. for their planned nuclear power plant in Georgia. Maybe some of that political will is coming back, along with the cash necessary to make things happen. Encouraging signs. And a reminder that this single plant alone is the equivalent of removing 16 million tons of carbon out of the atmosphere -- compared to building a comparable coal-fired plant.