Thank you, Cambridge University Press, for providing this book for review consideration in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
Mr. Book just finished Hitler’s Atomic Bomb: History, Legend, and the Twin Legacies of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, by Mark Walker.
The book sets out to answer four questions: (1) did the Germans how to build an atomic bomb, (2) could they have done it, (3) did they try to do it and (4) were the scientists involved members of the Nazi party.
Within a year, in either direction, of the start of WW II, German scientists did discover that it might be be possible to split atomic nuclei, thus creating nuclear fission chain reactions in order to create an atomic bomb. The Germans did try to get started on building a bomb. By the summer of 1942, their scientists had concluded that nuclear bombs were possible, in principle, but it wouldn’t be possible to get it done by the end of the war. But, the German government, as well as the scientists themselves, wanted the research to continue. Meanwhile, some of the scientists were members of the Nazi party willingly, others just joined to serve their careers and some weren’t interested.
Fortunately, for the world, the Germans did not get far in their efforts to build a bomb and there really wasn’t the US-German race to the bomb as our scientists thought. Having this be a much less interesting, as well as far less terrifying, book is a small cost to pay for that.
The beginning of the book was strong, but that then, once the author reached the point where it was obvious that the Germans were not going to be able to build a bomb during the war, it quickly lost all steam. Most of the remainder of the book was just not that interesting to me. It was hard to care about what ended up happening after the war to a group of scientists who I was not interested in and, as far as I could tell from the book, didn’t end up doing anything of importance that would them significant figures.
I give this book a C. Goodreads requires grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, a C equates to 2 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).
This review has been posted at Goodreads and my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews
Mr. Book finished reading this on September 3, 2024.
