Churchill's Bomb

January 6, 2014
Science historian Farmelo (The Strangest Man) ends each chapter with a cliffhanger that will keep readers paging through this thoroughly researched, detailed history of Britain's involvement with nuclear energy in the WWII era and beyond. Farmelo presents the key personalitiesâChurchill, "at heart a politician and a man of letters, not an academic and certainly not a scientist;" Lindemann, an admired experimentalist and theoretician who was Churchill's science adviser for decades; an array of scientists, from Bohr to Oppenheimer; and several U.S. presidentsâF.D.R., Truman, and Eisenhowerâand follows them from pre-war developments through the war to the Manhattan Project and to the Cold War. Readers will gain a new perspective on nuclear weapons and energy in which the usual playersâEinstein, Szilard, and the other scientistsâare secondary to the British prime minister, his advisor, and scientists who took refuge in England during the war. Farmelo's prose moves quickly with much action; he evokes a sense of place and time with details of daily life, such as Lindemann's truffled egg whites and F.D.R.'s daily routine. Highly recommended for those with an interest in weaponry, the WWII era, and British history.

July 15, 2013
A scholarly filling-in of the chronological record shows how Churchill dropped the ball on nuclear weapons leadership in World War II. Farmelo (The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom, 2009) constructs a nicely detailed and balanced record of the British ambivalence toward building an atom bomb in favor of the American effort, since Churchill's infatuation with H.G. Wells and early acquaintance with scientist Frederick Lindemann in 1921. The author tracks the working friendship between Churchill and Lindemann, the Oxford professor who directed the Clarendon Laboratory (as counterpoint to Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, run by Ernest Rutherford, "the Christopher Columbus of the atomic nucleus") and largely helped cultivate Churchill's education in quantum theory, however faulty. While the 1930s-era Cambridge physics department had been instrumental in discovering the neutron and in artificially splitting atomic nuclei, Lindemann also helped entice many refugee scientists from Nazi Germany--e.g., Hungarian Leo Szilard, who developed the harnessing of nuclear energy, among others. As adviser to Churchill, Lindemann helped guide Churchill's theories of creating a weapon of mass destruction to counter what he saw early on as a terrifying Nazi menace. Although many refugee scientists were developing feasible theories about the making of an actual bomb, Churchill got distracted with waging the Battle of Britain, and Lindemann's ideas were often questioned by his scientific colleagues. Meanwhile, other refugees, such as Neils Bohr and Enrico Fermi, discoverers of nuclear fission, had migrated to American universities and were working hard on a weapon. Merging the two efforts would prove prickly and problematic, as delineated step by step by the author. A tremendously useful soup-to-nuts study of how Britain and the U.S. embraced a frightening atomic age.

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September 1, 2013

Winston Churchill was fascinated by the prospect of nuclear weapons as far back as World War I, when he read H.G. Wells's The World Set Free. As prime minister during World War II, he supported British scientists in the development of the bomb. Farmelo (senior research fellow, Science Museum, London; physics, Northeastern Univ.; The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom) presents a well-written and deeply researched account of Britain's engagement in atomic research. Although British scientists were at the forefront of this research, the development of a workable bomb was dauntingly expensive, so Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt worked out an arrangement by which the two allies would cooperate on the project. By 1943, however, the Americans were able to devote greater financial resources to the Manhattan Project and the British were excluded from much of the final work. The United States established complete control over use of the bomb during the war and maintained this control in the early postwar years. VERDICT Farmelo's study provides an excellent assessment of Churchill's role in the British effort and complements Richard Rhodes's classic The Making of the Atomic Bomb. A fine addition to the existing literature on the subject.--Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames

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