One of the advantages authors of fiction have over writers of non-fiction is that the burdens of research are greatly reduced. How much they are lessened depends on what type of fiction the author chooses to write. For genres like science fiction and fantasy, the need can arguably vanish entirely, especially if the author is already sufficiently well read in her genre to carry around in her head all the necessary reference points needed to provide the reader with a familiar and satisfying narrative experience.
In my chosen genre, the burden falls somewhere in the middle. Most of what I rely on thematically I’ve witnessed and remembered, and to the extent I need supporting details they can be found at Wikipedia, through Google street view, and so on, in real time, as I write. But as long-time readers will know, each of my books, after the first one, has focused on a specific technology or industry – electronic voting, data centers, artificial intelligence and blockchain. Typically, my knowledge in these areas is general (or, in the case of blockchain, sketchy at best). I usually need to read a half dozen books or so, as well as consult other sources, before I feel ready to get down to business.
Each book also incorporates contemporary and/or historical events and trends – political themes, the rise of the Islamic State, global warming, the fall of the Soviet Union and the resurgence of Russia, to name a few. Added research is often needed in this area. Fleshing out the character of Dirk Magnus, for example, required a refresher course on the workings of the Stasi in East Germany and the collapse of its Soviet-supported government.
One of the threads I’m still on the fence about including in book six is a resonance with the development of the atomic bomb. If things tip in that direction, president Yazzi will have in mind the commissioning and operation of the Manhattan Project, culminating with the successful explosion of the first atomic bomb near Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1945. If I really commit to that theme, I may also include characters reminiscent of Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant physicist and research manager who led the design team at Los Alamos that crafted the bombs, and General Leslie Groves, the equally gifted Army Corps of Engineers bureaucrat who successfully managed the building and operation of millions of square feet of manufacturing facilities, manned by tens of thousands of employees, housing incredibly complex systems and processes, all conceived and executed on the fly.
At the start of the effort, the amount of fissionable material in existence was measured in micrograms, and nothing but farms and fields lay around Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Hanford, Washington, the sites of the vast facilities dedicated to turning thousands of tons of ore into atomic fuel. Less than two years later, vast facilities sprawled where forests had stood, and enough uranium 235 and polonium had been separated to fuel the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Wherever one comes out on the necessity of the decision to drop those bombs considering the horrors that followed, the effort that led to their creation is remarkable. If you’re interested in learning more about how that came about, you may wish to read two of the books that I consulted while deciding whether to incorporate this angle into my next book.
The first, and shorter of the two, is titled Now it Can be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project and was written by General Groves himself. It weighs in at a hefty 496 pages but is in fact a very fast read. Written in 1962, it is remarkable in several respects. First, Groves was known as not only a highly skilled manager, but as an extremely blunt one as well. So much so that President Dwight Eisenhower later denied him the top spot at the Army Corps of Engineers, telling him to his face that his attitude was unacceptable. No trace of that abruptness shows through in Now it Can be Told. Throughout, Groves is always gracious, modest and complimentary to all concerned.
Second, this is a manager’s book about managing. Groves and his workers were dealing with the unglamorous side of the business: wangling scarce war time resources, buying land, throwing up enormous buildings in record time, and fending off the interference of Congressmen and others. Groves does an able job of describing the basic elements of how the techniques were devised to create the fuel and design the bombs, but he tells the story from the perspective of the person at the top who made it possible to do what needed to be done, rather than to it himself. It’s a remarkable tale, told with surprising objectivity by someone who doubtless had many axes to grind, but decided to leave all of them alone.
The second book is The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes. It’s a long one, too, running to a somewhat intimidating 896 pages. Like Groves, Rhodes has his own slant, which is less about the Manhattan Project than the lengthy evolution of the science that made the bomb possible, beginning decades prior to the devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He tells that tale through the life and times of the dozens of remarkable physicists and chemists who collaboratively and progressively moved the ball forward using ingenious tools they devised along the way. Today, these instruments seem astonishingly primitive and crude – using materials like blocks of paraffin and thin pieces of aluminum foil to filter strange emanations to discover hitherto unknown subatomic particles. Nobel prizes rested on observations as seemingly random as the differences between test results obtained when an instrument was placed on a marble rather than a wooden tabletop.
Rhodes is by far and away the more gifted writer. His prose flows quickly and easily, often ending with an elegant flourish that ties together wonderfully what has come before. Scene after scene comes alive beautifully and vividly. Take, for example, his depiction of the first controlled nuclear reaction, which occurred in mid-winter under the bleachers of disused, un-heated squash courts at the University of Chicago. After describing the challenges of how hundreds of tons of graphite were refined and milled into bricks, inserted with uranium 235 pellets, and stacked into a vast globe of inert and fissionable elements, he describes Enrico Fermi, standing atop the “pile,” working his slide rule and predicting the neutron output as the last control rod is withdrawn inch by inch. It’s just one of many memorable scenes that ushered in the nuclear age. James Kunet, the author of The General and the Genius (which focuses on the interaction of Groves and Oppenheimer, which I am reading now), dispenses with the same scene in a few bland sentences.
In doing so, Rhodes relies extensively relies on, and generously quotes from, letters, diaries and interviews that bring alive the individuals who made the discoveries, many of whom were Jewish and retreated across Europe to Britain and the United States in the course of their work. He also provides a running narrative of the deteriorating political situation in Europe, the rise of Hitler, the outbreak of war, and the hideous impact of traditional weaponry in the course of that conflict. More may have died in Hiroshima than in other cities after radiation was taken into effect, but as many or more died directly from the fire bombing of Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo, where many tens of thousands in each case died hideously from incendiary carpet bombing, sometimes from waves of over 1,000 aircraft, leading to horrific firestorms that destroyed buildings and human beings almost as completely as the atomic bombs that were later deployed.
Those interested only in the Manhattan Project may want to start the book two thirds of the way through. Others may find themselves skipping through places where Rhodes takes a deeper dive, as he often does, on some historical, scientific or personal aspect of the tale as he has chosen to tell it. But if you have the time, read it cover to cover. Rhodes is an elegant and sensitive writer and the road from Madame Curie’s discoveries to Oppenheimer’s Trinity test is perhaps the greatest scientific saga of our time, wrapping in as it does uncommon brilliance, societal upheaval, elements of Greek tragedy, and the long following shadow of the Cold War. To his credit, after glorifying the work of scores of scientists, he ends the book by describing in horrifying detail what those on the ground were subjected to in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Although I have not read it yet, the third book readers interested in the human drama that surrounded the Manhattan Project might wish to consider is American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Rhodes introduces the ample complexities and contradictions of “Oppie” and describes his more than able management of the ultimately thousands of scientists, workers and family members that spent most of the war perched on an isolated mesa in the American southwest. Rhodes does not address the sadly thwarted remainder of his career, betrayed (some would have it) by Edward Teller during the hysteria of McCarthyism, leading to the withdrawal of his security clearance. Oppenheimer’s death, at 63, led to his being deprived of the honor of joining the ranks of the many Nobel laureates whose work he supervised. Only after he died was his own astrophysical work regarding black holes and other phenomena validated by observations made possible by advanced instrumentation.
A final observation: there is something about the birth of the nuclear age that seems to crave interpretation rather than simple historical narrative. To Groves, meeting the almost absurdly daunting bureaucratic and engineering challenges of nuclear fuel production was the story deserving to be told. To Rhodes, it was Oppenheimer’s observation that, “It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.” To other authors, it has been the drama of scientists torn between the excitement of discovery and the horror of the possible result of those labors.
If I decide to echo this saga in book six, president Yazzi will be comparing the potential for a modern arms race involving lethal autonomous weapons systems, and contemplating what FDR and Truman might have done differently in 1945 and later that might have headed off the nuclear arms race that followed.
Stay tuned.
Follow Us!