Discoveries leading up to the atomic bomb by Lawrence Auster

Given the recent discussion about the necessity and morality of dropping the atomic bomb on Japan, this may be a good time to publish my notes on Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb. After I finished reading the book in 2001, I realized it contained such a wealth of fascinating and important information that I needed to have my own summary of it for quick reference. So I went through the book a second time taking extensive notes. The result is below. (Note: If you are seeing odd coding symbols in this document, go to your browser's View menu, Encoding, and select Unicode UTF-8.).

Discoveries in Twentieth Century Nuclear Physics
Leading up to Atomic Bomb
Auster's notes on The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes

This is basically a chronology and description of the basic discoveries, cumula-tively leading, step by step, to the possibility of making an atomic bomb. The number and types of different things that had to be true for the bomb to be possible--things that no one could have imagined beforehand and yet that all turned out to be true over the course of the 1930s--is astounding. It's one of the most interesting books I ever read, though marred by the author's periodic intrusions of liberal globaloney derived from Neils Bohr--a giant in physics but a fuzzy thinker in politics.

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