This month's book describes the most defining event in human history. While our
previous books covered such events as the catastrophic effects of European microbes on the pre-Columbian civilizations of the New World and the conquests of Genghis Kahn as well as the rise and fall of colonialism; none compare with the explosion of Little Boy over Hiroshima. While it's death toll, however horrific, was less than the casualties from Allied fire bombings, twentieth-century science however innocently begun, threatened the destruction of the world itself.
Diana Preston's book, "After the Fallout" describes the surrounding history of the half-century following Marie Curie's announcement on December 26 th of the discovery of a new element, Radium, observing that radioactivity might have atomic properties. The author describes how an international community of less than a thousand physicists cooperatively sought to tease out the nature of the material world "just for the joy of knowledge", sharing knowledge and welcoming each other into their laboratories, but never realizing what destructive power they were releasing.
As late as 1933, only twelve years before Little Boy, Rutherford was saying that the release of the power of the atom was moonshine. As it would happen, at the same time that impending World War II split this collegial community, the possibility of a chain reaction appeared leading to a race for and eventual development of the Atomic Bomb Preston Draws fascinating pictures of major scientists such as how Marie Curies risked prison or Siberia to obtain a college education in the secret basements and attics of the Taliban-like, Russian occupied Warsaw, how Niels Bohr was flown to England out of German clutches in the Bombay of a Mosquito Bomber from which he could be conveniently dropped into the sea if capture were threatened by German planes. She also describes how the courageous Norwegian resistance risked not only their lives, but German reprisals on their neighbors to destroy the heavy water facilities in occupied Norway. Preston explains how lax British vetting allowed the insertion of Russian spies particularly Klaus Fuchs into Los Alamos providing Russia with the head start which enabled it to develop their own postwar Atomic Bomb as the number two nuclear power ahead of the British themselves.
Diana Preston provides all this against the backdrop of the growing threat of war, persecution of Jews, Russian spying, the change in both Allied and Axis attitudes towards the bombing of civilian cities--how the war hawk, Winston Churchill was brought to tears when shown the firebombing of Hamburg--. It is a fascinating review of the events which have unalterably changed the rest of the twentieth century if not human and world History.
Don't worry about the science, the author doesn't get into modern concepts of string theory, leptons or the like.
Before the Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima DB61800 Preston, Diana. Read by Jake Williams. Reading time 15 hours 46 minutes.
Download Before the Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima, DB61800:
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.nls/db.61800
Also available on cassette, RC61800 and on Bookshare.
facilitated by Don Queen, Email: queens@pacbell.net