BOMB Epilogue

The Hydrogen Bomb

The Super would be a bomb that got its energy from fusion, the joining of atoms, rather than fission. The power of such a bomb would have almost no limit. 

Robert Oppenheimer tried to argue that the Super should never be produced. Another Los Alamos leader, Hans Bethe, added, "I believe the most important question is the moral one. Can we, who have always insisted on the morality of human decency between nations as well as inside our own country, introduce this weapon of total annihilation into the world?"

And yet, on November 1, 1952, the U.S. tested the world's first hydrogen bomb. It exploded with incredible force: 500 times the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. And, less than a year later, the Soviet Union tested their first hydrogen bomb.

The arms race was off and running.

Then, in 1954, the United States tested a massive 15-megaton hydrogen bomb on the tiny Pacific island of Bikini Atoll. To this day, the radioactive soil of Bikini Atoll makes the island uninhabitable. Still, this was followed by a 50-megaton bomb explosion by the Soviets.

Internationally, of course, other countries wanted a bomb. Great Britain got theirs in 1952. France followed in 1960, then China in 1964 and India in 1974. Finally, Pakistan in 1998 and North Korea in 2006.

If you only ever watch one video regarding nuclear explosions, make sure it's this one: Nuclear Detonation Timeline 1945 - 1998. The 2053 nuclear tests and explosions that took place between 1945 and 1998 - visually and audibly plotted on a world map.

The big question is: Will any of these bombs ever be used? By who and against whom? What do you think? 

Now that we know this story, this bit of history, what's our responsibility?

I loved how the book ends:

In the end, this is a difficult story to sum up. The making of the atomic bomb is one of history's most amazing examples of teamwork and genius and poise under pressure. But it's also the story of how humans created a weapon capable of wiping our species off the planet, It's a story with no end in sight.

And, like it or not, you're in it.

Remember how we started this story... as "story detectives"? By looking at this event from multiple, international perspectives what did you learn? What do you still want to know?

And, like it or not, where do we go from here?

BOMB Part 4: Final Assembly

Where you able to finish Part 4 ?

That was difficult to read. I felt so anxious and sad for everyone involved. 

Did you?

Colonel Paul Tibbets hand picks the 509th Composite Group. And, at age 29, is entrusted with the successful delivery of the most frightful weapon ever devised. Have I mentioned that he was only twenty-nine?!

Then, Carl Eifler is replaced by former baseball player Moe Berg to render Heisenberg hors de combat - "out of battle". Werner Heisenberg was in Zurich, Switzerland to give a lecture, Moe Berg walks into the lecture hall ... in one pocket he has a pistol and in the other was a cyanide tablet, just in case he needed to kill himself before being captured.

I'm thinking history is crazier than fiction.

Secret messages are being sent through Walt Whitman's book Leaves of Grass; milk is used as invisible ink on news papers; and the plans for the atomic bomb are stuffed into the bottom of a tissue box. Amazing!

President Franklin Roosevelt dies, leaving vice president Harry Truman in charge, and as Germany begins to fall... American troops are grabbing all the German scientists before the Soviet troops are able to do the same. And, on April 30th 1945, Adolf Hitler commits suicide... the war in Europe is over. 

The United States and the Soviet Union will soon be the only world powers left standing.

On the morning of July16, the U.S. was ready to test the first atomic bomb. Would it work?

Zero minus fifteen minutes. Zero minus ten minutes. Zero minus two minutes. Zero minus one minute. Zero minus ten seconds, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one... zero.

"Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart."

And then, without a sound the sun was shining. Or so it looked. Then, about thirty seconds after the blast of light, came the sound. 

"It worked."

The bomb had exploded with the almost unbelievable force of eighteen thousand tons of TNT.

"Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

President Truman decided that the atomic bomb could shock Japan into surrendering and end the war in the Pacific. He later explained that, "I couldn't worry about what history would say about my personal morality. I made the only decision I ever knew how to make. I did what I thought was right."

On August 6, 1945 a uranium bomb nickname Little Boy was loaded onto Colonel Tibbet's plane, the Enola Gay. The bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima. The blast heated the ground to over 5,000 degrees. After witnessing the explosion, a feeling of shock and horror swept over the crew piloting the Enola Gay.

"My God, what have we done?"

On the morning of August 9, 1945 a second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki.

And... the book isn't over yet. I am exhausted and don't think I can go on... but what of Robert Oppenheimer and his staff and their bomb making secrets...

The U.S. Army wanted more bombs. The President wanted Oppenheimer back in the lab. "Mr. President," said Mr. Oppenheimer, "I feel I have blood on my hands." He refused to build any more bombs. He knew his creation was completely - and forever - beyond his control.

How did all of this make you feel?

Proud? Sad? Angry? Frustrated? Relieved?

As for the writing of the book, I absolutely loved how it came full circle: "He had a few more minutes to destroy seventeen years of evidence." (pg. 1 and pg. 225)

Next, read the Epilogue (if you haven't already). We will discuss it tomorrow.

For now, I need to think about what the dropping of the atomic bomb means, some 68 years later.

video: Hiroshima Atomic Bomb 1945

video: The Manhattan Project and related videos on the History Channel (Einstein and the Atomic Bomb, Atomic Bomb Ends WWII, and Coroners Report: Atomic Bomb which is quite graphic. 

Also, check out this post on ENDPAPER, where Einstein confesses his "one great mistake".

Finally, you can listen to President Truman's radio address to the American people on August 9, 1945 about the bombing of Hiroshima.

Check out this interactive website on The Manhattan Project.

If you're interested in a great historical fiction book to read next, try Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages. This book is a work of historical fiction about the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb and their families. It is told from the point of view of the children, who were not given many details of the highly classified project. The bomb is a looming presence in the story, though, because now you have knowledge that the characters do not. 

BOMB Part 3: How to Build an Atomic Bomb

So much to cover in part 3...

Scientists continued arriving... the office was a madhouse. Famous physicists were given code names: Enrico Fermi was 'Henry Farmer'. 

Like Fermi, much of Oppenheimer's scientific dream team was European, many of them Jews who had escaped from Hitler. This gave America a huge advantage in its race with Germany, but it also presented a security problem. The people of Santa Fe, a city of just twenty thousand, began to wonder why so many men with European accents were suddenly walking the streets.

Would you notice if your town had a sudden influx of European men arrive?

If you were given a code name, what would it be?

With so many construction workers working on Los Alamos, Robert Serber had to come up with a code name for the bomb. He called it 'the gadget' and the name stuck. The physics of how to get the gadget to work was to spark a fast chain reaction in uranium that would release so much energy that it would cause a massive explosion. The trick was, it had to be light and travel by plane.

Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) agents didn't trust Robert Oppenheimer. They hid microphones in his office, listened in on his phone calls, and read his mail. How would you feel if you knew you were being watched? 

Spying was ever present. Harry Gold was wearing a pair of gloves and holding a second pair in his hand; this was a signal. Klaus Fuchs was walking the streets of New York with a tennis ball... recognition that he was the spy to meet.

If you were a spy, what signals and passwords would you use? What basic rules would you follow?

The railway ferry Hydro was sunk, the Germans lost their supply of heavy water, and now Colonel Carl Eifler was tasked with the dirty work of kidnapping German physicist, Werner Heisenberg. Things were definitely taking on a strictly need-to-know basis.

Back in the U.S., Theodore Hall began making plans of his own. Do you think, like Hall did, that an American monopoly on atomic weapons would have been dangerous?

Let's get some vocabulary words out of the way, just in case they have been confusing:


physicist (pg.12), radioactive (13), particles (13), electrons (13), nucleus (13), neutrons (13), protons (13), theoretical physics (13), uranium (pg.15), atom (15), fission (pg.20), blitzkrieg (20), tradecraft (pg.22), Communist (pg.23), AlliedPowers (pg.33), Axis Powers (33), agent cultivation (pg.39), Manhattan Project (pg.48), KGB (pg.60), intelligence (pg.61), mesa (pg.67), chain reaction (pg.71), comrades (pg.78), demolition (pg.79), saboteurs (pg.87), heavy water (pg.89) ‘the gadget’ (pg.98), tamper (pg.99), Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (pg.101), censors (pg.121), U-238 and U-235 (pg.123) plutonium (pg.133), monopoly (pg.135)

The History Channel has a great short video on World War II Spy Strategy... watch double cross and double agent strategy.

Want to learn to be a spy? Check out this WikiHow: 5 Ways to be a Spy Kid.

Next... Read Part 4: Final Assembly by July 26th. It's the final push, 13 short chapters that include Trinity, Little Boy, and the Enola Gay. 

BOMB Part 2: Chain Reactions

Part 2 was quite a bit to read, but the intrigue and fast-paced chapters kept my eyes glued to the page. 

Would Jens Poulsson and the Gunnerside Team be successful at Vemork? Would Enrico Fermi and The Chicago Pile Team create the first nuclear chain reaction? Can Robert Oppenheimer be trusted? And, who is Klaus Fuchs (that's one unfortunate last name) and is he a traitor? 

Each chapter ended in suspense, propelling me on with the thought, "I have to know what happens next!"

Some of my favorite cliffhanger quotes:

"Oppenheimer wasn't fit to be a soldier, Groves acknowledged that. But he just might be able to win the war."

"The dispatcher shouted, 'Number one, go!'"

"He told them: 'Stand by for a particularly dangerous enterprise.'"  

And my absolute favorite cliffhanger:

"It was a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life." 

I love reading the extensive dialogue drawn from primary sources (check the back of the book for quotation notes and primary source notes). The men and women from the 1930's and 1940's seem to 'come alive' and I feel like I'm sharing this extraordinary moment in history with them.

In the chapter entitled Operation Gunnerside, the team was told that they had a fifty-fifty chance of doing the job and only a fair chance of escaping. Why did Colonel John Wilson think that the Germans would not take any prisoners? What must it be like to go on a mission where you are issued a 'death pill'?

Map of Norway

Hardanger Plateau and Vemork

If you want to read more about the Vemork Action, you can read about it on the CIA's website. The reports are now unclassified.

Hardanger Plateau in winter.

What did you think about the U.S. government acquiring the Los Alamos Ranch School? What would your school director do if he/she opened a letter from the Secretary of War (note that back then it wasn't called the Secretary of Defense) and read: "You are advised that it has been determined necessary to the interests of the United States in the prosecution of the war that the property of your school be acquired for military purposes."?

Part 2 ends with the sentence:

"Not a single one of the Norwegians was ever caught."

I think that's a good place to leave it for now. 

Interactive Website -
Check out PBS's NOVA articles on Military & Espionage:

Read World War II Spy Messages

Nazis and the Bomb: How close were the Nazis to developing an atomic bomb?

Have Part 3: How To Build An Atomic Bomb read by July 12th. The plot thickens as the race to build - and steal - the world's most dangerous weapon continues.

BOMB : Prologue and Part I

"There is a great deal more to this story. It goes way back," he said. "I would like to tell it all."

Right from the Prologue, Steve Sheinkin throws us into the tension filled moment when Harry Gold, an American spy for the Soviet Union, is frantically destroying evidence and then fielding questions from FBI agents. With such an awesome hook, how could you not keep reading?! I couldn't stop turning pages to find out what events had lead up to this final moment. I forgot that I was reading narrative nonfiction because I was so taken in by the exciting story line.

On the jacket flap, Steve Sheinkin refers to himself as a “story detective.” Doing research often feels like detective work, which is one way to think about engaging in real world explorations and research. 

Within Bomb, Mr. Sheinkin specifically balances three narratives: America’s efforts to build the bomb, America’s efforts to impede the German’s attempts to build the bomb, and the Soviet’s efforts to steal the bomb research from the Americans or the Germans. Often times, we consider events only from one point-of-view... typically the point-of-view of the United States. Maybe we can become "story detectives" like Mr. Sheinkin, and the next time we are researching a single event we can use a variety of perspectives to examine that event from an international, interconnected context. Think about a current or historical event. How does your understanding of the issue change when you look at it from multiple, international perspectives? 

What do you think of the book so far? Leave your thoughts in 'comments'.

Next, read... Part 2 : Chain Reaction by June 28th.

ready!

My copy of BOMB by Steve Sheinkin is ready for our summer read! Grab a copy from the Library! and join in on the fun. This book does not disappoint.

If you're interested in World War II, be sure to watch one of my favorite authors, John Green, in his Crash Course World History video #38 ... It's possibly the best 13 minutes on World War II you'll ever watch.

let's read!

Reading is a skill like anything else. Students who continue to read continue to grow their skills. 

If not, like during the summer break, skills come to a standstill, or worse... begin to slide.

Evidence suggests three months of learning is lost for the average student who doesn't read during the summer. 

The bad news is that the summer slide is virtually inevitable unless steps are taken to prevent it. The good news is that your child doesn't have to read mountains of books to keep his or her skills sharp. Younger readers (third grade and below) should aim for 15 minutes of reading a day during the summer. Older students should read five or more books during summer vacation to keep from losing ground.

This summer, I have a great idea... 
Let's all read BOMB by Steve Sheinkin. It will help us all beat the Summer Slide and have fun in the process.  

We'll read a few chapters each week, discuss what we read in 'comments', watch a few cool videos (posted on the blog), learn some new vocabulary, and read some related articles on spies, the Manhattan Project, and atomic chemistry.

If you're game for this, enter your email address in the 'Follow by Email' box on this blog... this way you'll know what we're up to and you won't miss a thing. Then, read the Prologue and Part I by June 14th.

Good Luck! And, have a great - slide free - summer.