Atomic Spaces: LIVING ON THE MANHATTAN PROJECT (ISBN 0252068319)

The single best book on the Manhattan Project:
I have read literally a dozen or more books about the atomic projects both in the United States and Germany. Unlike most books on the subject, Atomic Spaces, glorifies no one. It tells the story like it really was. It goes into the social, economic, racial, and moral cost of the project. It puts into perspective the relationship between the military, the government, big buisness, and the American people for this last half of the twentieth century. In no uncertain terms it demonstrates the true cost of entering the atomic age. Although the outcome was "successful," I wonder if the true price of the atomic age was worth it? It certainly came with a high price tag, much, much more than money. This book is a must read in order to see the real Manhattan Project and not the glorified picture presented by so many other authors. This is a really great book, about a really great endeavour, done by the average man with his usual weakness.

a powerful and deeply researched history of the bomb:
Beautifully written and by turns restrained and emotionally charged, this moral history of the Manhattan Project takes on what the others never mention-- all the smaller worlds created, destroyed or utterly changed as we entered the atomic age. Engrossing, packed with information spirited out of classified archives or found in the bottom of boxes, this book deserves the prizes it has won. Even the pictures are striking and remain on my mind long after I have closed the book.

Loaded With Information:
We are constantly researching the Manhattan Project in an effort to locate surviving veterans. Mr. Hales' account of war-time life at Los Alamos, NM, Oak Ridge, TN, and Hanford, WA is first rate. I recommend it highly to anyone yearning for a full understanding of the circumstances surrounding the development of the atomic bomb. Michael Vickio, Exec. Dir. .............

At times tedious:
I found some sections of this book fascinating, and others quite slow and tedious, hence the three star rating. Be prepared: this is not quick reading! I like how this book glorifies no one. It also talks about many "forgotten" victims of the Manhattan PRoject; those who were evicted from their property, the "underclass" workers, those who lived near Alamogordo and sufferred from nuclear fallout. I learned information about Gen. Groves and how he oversaw the project. It spoke also about the scientists, but not just about the scientists. This isn't a book about the making of the bomb; it's a book about the culture. At times it was slow---I skimmed about 100 pages at the beginning, which I very rarely do--- but there should be something for you in this book if you're interested enough in the topic to read this review! I found especially interesting the medical testing (or lack thereof), the radiation safety protoocols (or lack thereof) and the fallout (literal and sociological) of the Alamogordo test. These areas were fascinating to me. Also, while I already knew about Feynman's battle with the censors, it's fun to read again!

A terribly distorted version:
On my scale of 10, I gave this book a rating as high as one (1) for the author's effort in searching for material and referencing it in extensive notes. As a history of the times, it rates a zero (0). The author might have written the objectives of his book as: "America did an abomination by building the atom bomb and killing brutally without compassion thousands of totally innocent Japanese. The instigator of this horror, American General Leslie Groves,had only one objective: to gain power over the most people he could, control them and maintain that control regardless of laws or ethics or safety. He recklessly endangered the entire planet and all of American culture solely for his own greed for power." Then the author wrote the book in propagandese with distorting adjectives and selection of events to convince a reader that the author's view of "history" was The Truth . The depiction of Groves as a monster begins early in the book. "Groves's ascendance, his early success at forging a cooperative venture among government, military, and corporate entities, signaled a broader campaign of expansion and control, into labor relations, into social relations, even into language. This last area is perhaps the most surprising and significant example of the District's imperial tendencies. One of its earliest manifestations was the naming of the program." A full page is then devoted to explaining that the choice of "Manhattan" for the organization was not simply to avoid hinting at its purpose. "For him (Groves), the single most important concern lay with "security" (Groves's term subsuming secrecy and control of information), and he envisioned language as a potent weapon for duplicity." The portrayal of Groves as the supreme tyrant continues throughout the book. General Groves as a hard driving decision maker who forced the accomplishment of an almost impossible job does not appear. And the reasons such a drive was felt necessary by all of us, the dread of Germany's building a nuclear bomb before we could and then the horror of the continuing slaughters of both US and Japanese forces in the jungles of the South Pacific and the prospect of worse to come with invasion, was ignored totally. Two examples of the writer's distortions represent his propagandizing technique: "New workers entering these factories found them to be confusing and sometimes terrifying warrens of piping, walls of analog dials, valves, and knobs, marked with Bakelite labels in the arcane language of the engineer." Big,yes; terrifying, no. New workers did not wander into a building without orientation and explanation of where he or she was to work, go to the bathroom, eat. What's confusing? Any new job for the first day or so. But of course walls of stuff with Bakelite labels must be dangerous, especially in arcane language with words like "open" and "closed" and "pressure" and "temperature". The second example of such writing tries to use a picture of a control room, in which I worked at one time, to show manipulation by the tyrannical Manhattan Engineer District. Here is Hales' description of the picture as he tries to show distortions created by the Manhattan District use of language: (The first sentence refers to a different picture taken for record at a trailer park at Oak Ridge.) "This particular photograph is, itself, a document that reinforces the District's grammar -- though the way this grammar is imbedded in visual form is clearer in another equally prosaic picture, also made by Du Pont's official site photographer, Ed Westcott, to illustrate the workings of the K-25 master control room (Fig. 36). (Du Pont was not one of the Oak Ridge contractors, but maybe Westcott was delegated to make pictures of Oak Ridge for the record. I won't argue the point.) "Reading the photograph as a distinct document, one can recognize the District's extension of written grammar into visual grammar. Yet the brilliance of the method manifests itself in the way the picture seems not to tell but to show . Even though, to a careful eye, it's an obviously managed, set-up picture, still the impression persists that the result is natural. The obsessional orderliness of the workplace seems incontrovertible. It seems simply to show the control desk with its banks of switches and the supervisor's desk with its paperwork, with everything lined up parallel and neatly diagonal to the walls filled with their workstation graph-paper plotters and their own cruciform arrangements of gleaming lights. The people too, are nicely symmetrical -- two men, two women; two engrossed in tasks, two awaiting orders. The desks are orderly, reassuringly so. Underneath the details is a message. Everything's under control in the control room." The following three paragraphs add more suppositions to the explanation of the evil and manipulative intent of this photograph. "... as a staff photographer following orders." "Westcott has manipulated the circumstances..." "... bland, even lighting." "Even Westcott's work isn't really his." and more and more. Then the long paragraph with the ridiculous clincher at the end: "Behind Westcott's professionalism lies the repertoire of conventions he learned as he mastered the job of staff photographer. So also with the conventions learned by the architect-engineers of the master control room and transmitted to their plans: that the control room should have even, revealing lighting, and that such lighting came best from multiple panels in the ceiling, that the plotters for each K-25 cubicle should properly be lined up in even rows where they could be easily seen ." That's nice: clear statements of the requirements for an informative photograph and a good control room. Then Hales continues in the same paragraph: "(This arrangement is orderly, but it isn't necessarily intelligent; looking at the control panel of the Hanford pile for the first time in the fall of 1991, I was struck with an immediate and palpable anxiety, for each of the control stations looked like each of the others -- in a crisis, how could the operators, assured by the law of comparmentalization that they would never know the logic that lay beneath the dials, distinguish between one dial and the next in a row of some too identical dials? Equally so with the dials and plotters in this master control room.)" Hales ascribes ignorance of their job to the operators of the Hanford works and lack of intelligence to the designers of the control rooms because he never worked in a control room, didn't know anything about it, and doesn't know what he is talking about . I worked the K-25 control room in this picture. To work there I had to know the meaning of each line on the graphs and each light; the "indistinguishable dials and plotters" were arranged in exactly the order in which material passed from one "cubicle" to the next so the process details were clear and easy to see. All this and more to pretend that the Corps of Engineers had invented a "new grammar" to control the thinking of their employees! I have a picture taken by my beloved father of my brother and me on our little wagon when we were five and three. Here is my guess at Hale's probable description of my memorial of fun on the little red wagon. "These two small children, both apparently male, are obviously terrified of the photographer. This fear is easily apparent to the careful observer from the way their mouths are partly open and their eyes are wide and staring at the camera. The photograph must have been staged in an attempt to record the likenesses of the children in case of accident. Obviously the older boy was forced on top of the younger one in the tiny wagon which must have been so small as to make injury to at least one of them likely. Such an injury may have made him amenable to the enforced duties he performed years by later making material for the atomic bomb."