Lot 236
  • 236

Smyth, Henry DeWolf

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Description

Atomic Energy for the Military Purposes: the Official Report on the Development of the Atomic Bomb under the Auspices of the United States Government, 1940–1945. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945



In 8s (7 3/4 x 5 3/8 in.; 196 x 137 mm). Photographic plates. Publisher's salmon cloth. Publisher's yellow and black printed dust-jacket; frayed, with losses to the upper wrapper and to ownership inscription on top margin, several cellophane tape repairs.

Provenance

Ownership inscription on dust-jacket of Marian Konopinski Hansen, sister of Emil Konopinski — Purchased by the present consignor as a lot of books from the Hansen estate, Los Alamos, New Mexico

Literature

cf. Norman 1962; Printing and the Mind of Man 422

Catalogue Note

First published book edition, being a slightly modified version of the official report issued by the "Manhattan District," U. S. Corps of Engineers on the Atomic Bomb Project and popularly known as the "Smyth Report."

Signed by the "Father of the Bomb," J. Robert Oppenheimer, and by 46  other Manhattan Project scientists and associates assigned to Los Alamos, New Mexico, including Hans A. Bethe, Richard Feynman, Otto Robert Frisch, Emil John Konopinski, Nicholas Constantine Metropolis, Philip Morrison, Louis Slotin,  Edward Teller, and Stanislaw Marcin Ulam. Others who signed the book are Paul C. Aebersold,  H. S. Allen, Harold Virgil Argo, Mary Langs Argo, Julius Ashkin, R. F. Bacher, Charles Parker Baker, Jim Bushman, Jack Calkin, Geoffrey F. Chew, Charles Louis Critchfield, Richard Ehrlich, John G. Fox, Stanley Frankel, Darol Kenneth Froman, Alvin Cushman Graves, David Rollo Hawkins, Lawrence H. Hempleman, Harold Seller Hirsch, Marshall Gleckler Holloway, W. Blanton Krohn, Leo Silvio Lavatelli, Gustave Aaron Linenberger, Earl Albert Long, Edward MacLean Lowry, Alexander V. Nedzel, Eldred Carlyle Nelson, Lyman George Parratt, Robert D. Richtmyer, Raemer Edgar Schreiber, James Tychon Serduke, Jack Carlton Smith, Hans H. Staub, Leroy Thompson, Jr., Anthony Leonid Turkevich, James Leslie Tuck, and Victor Weisskopf. 

J. Robert Oppenheimer, whose early work dealt with quantum theory and nuclear physics at the University of California and Princeton, was appointed director of the atomic energy research program at Los Alamos from 1942 to 1945. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed, Oppenheimer became an ardent proponent of international control of atomic energy. He chaired the atomic advisory committee of the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission from 1946 to 1952 but was suspended in 1953 as an alleged security risk, owing chiefly to his objection to the development of the hydrogen bomb.

Of Jewish and Hungarian descent, Edward Teller emigrated to the United States in the 1930s. An early member of the Manhattan Project, he made valuable contributions to bomb research, especially with regard to the implosion mechanism. Teller also advocated development of a fusion weapon (i.e., the hydrogen bomb); Teller's early model of the H-bomb was proven inadequate by his Manhattan Project colleague, the Polish mathematician Stanslaw Marcin Ulam. Ulam theorized that if all the components of the H-bomb could be placed in one casing, with a fission bomb at one end and thermonuclear material at the other, X-ray radiation from the fission bomb could be used to compress and detonate fusion fuel.  Teller then suggested the use of a plutonium "spark plug" at the center of the fusion fuel to generate and augment the fusion reaction. This staged radiation implosion, also known as the "Teller-Ulam design," has been the standard method of creating H-bombs ever since.  Teller and Ulam jointly applied for a patent on the hydrogen bomb. However, Ulam considered his greatest achievement to be the invention of nuclear pulse propulsion. He took a position at the University of Colorado in 1965  while remaining a consultant at Los Alamos. He later held a position at the University of Florida. He died in 1984 at Santa Fe.

Before the war, physicist Hans A. Bethe collaborated with his friend Edward Teller to demonstrate that a projectile passing through gas creates shock waves, a theory which was later used to explore missile reentry. At Oppenheimer's invitation Bethe participated in a symposium at the University of California which outlined the incipient designs for the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer subsequently appointed him director of the theoretical division, overlooking Teller, who had coveted the job for himself. At Los Alamos, Bethe calculated the critical mass of uranium-235 and the multiplication of nuclear fission in an exploding atomic bomb. After the lab was redirected to solve the implosion problem of plutonium in 1943, Bethe concentrated on the hydrodynamic aspects of implosion. He continued nuclear weapon design in 1945 with work on the neutron initiator and on radiation propagation from an exploding atomic bomb. Witnessing the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert on 16 July 1945, Bethe focused on its efficiency rather its moral implications. Unlike Oppenheimer's grave utterance from the Bhagavad Gita ("I am become death, the shatterer of worlds."), Bethe is reported to have flatly remarked "I am not a philosopher."  Bethe won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1967 for determining isolating the type of nuclear reaction that take place in brilliant stars versus that whcih occurs in the sun and fainter stars.

Austrian-English physicist Otto Robert Frisch was naturalized as a British citizen and permitted to work on the Manhattan Project as the head of the critical assembly group. He advanced the theory that uranium, when bombarded by neutrons, breaks into smaller atoms.  He coined the term "fission" for this volatile chain reaction. U-235 could therefore be used to develop an extremely destructive weapon.

As a junior physicist on staff, Richard Feynman's work on the project consisted mostly of administering the computation group of human computers in the theoretical division. His other work at Los Alamos included calculating neutron equations for the facility's "water boiler" —a small nuclear reactor at the lab—in order to measure degrees of criticiality for assemblies of  fissile material. After being transferred to the Oak Ridge facility he assisted engineers in calculating safety procedures in order to avoid criticality accidents when storing material.  

Philip Morrison received his doctorate in theoretical physics from the University of California in 1940; Oppenheimer was his thesis advisor there. Morrison witnessed the Trinity test and then went to Tinian Island where he helped assemble the two bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. At the request of the War Department he later visited Hiroshima to view firsthand the impact of the atomic bomb, which solidified his opposition to nuclear arms proliferation.

Nicholas Constantine Metropolis earned his doctorate in experiment physics from the University of Chicago where he collaborated with Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller on the earliest nuclear reactions. In 1943 Oppenheimer recruited Metropolis to Los Alamos, where he was assigned to develop equations for the state of materials at high temperatures, pressures, and densities. "He sometimes joked that he spent much of his time repairing electro-magnetic calculators with Richard Feynman, a physicist who later shared a Nobel Prize for research in quantum electrodynamics" (obituary, New York Times, 23 October 1999). According to John C. Browne, director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Dr. Metropolis's work in mathematics and the beginnings of computer science were the cornerstone of the lab's accomplishments in computing and simulation science.  

Physicist-chemist Louis Slotin got involved with the Manhattan project through Professor William D. Harkins of the University of Chicago in 1942. Slotin was chiefly responsible for criticality testing at the lab, first with Otto Frisch's uranium experiments and then with plutonium cores.

"Tickling the dragon's tail." Returning to research at the University of Chicago in 1946, Slotin experimented with initiating a fission reaction by bringing two half spheres of beryllium-coated plutonium near each other. Richard Feynman had nicknamed the experiment "tickling the dragon's tail" due to its flirtations with nuclear chain reaction. Distrustful of automatic safety mechanisms, Slotin kept the half spheres separated by means of a screwdriver. On 21 May, the screwdriver slipped, the two spheres touched, creating a burst of radiation. There was a blue glow of air ionization followed by a heat wave. Slotin separated the spheres by hand, thus successfully ending the critical reation and shielding seven observers, but he had exposed himself to a lethal dose of neutron and gamma radiation. He died nine days later.

Emil John Konopinksi completed his Ph. D. in 1936 at the University of Michigan. He was a National Research Fellow at Cornell between 1936 and 1938, when he became an assistant professor of physics at Indiana University. At Los Alamos he made the calculations which proved that an explosion of a hydrogen bomb would not ignite the atmosphere or oceans and completely destroy the earth. Konopinski co-patented with Edward Teller the device that triggered the first hydrogen bomb. He also ambitiously sought out the signatures of his Los Alamos colleagues as evidenced by the present copy of Smyth's Report, which he apparently gave to his sister Marian as a gift (see provenance).

Information on other Manhattan Project staff members is available on request from the Book Department.