Pandora's Keepers

Starred review from April 21, 2003
As the subtitle suggests, this is a biography of a scientific generation, treating the nine men who built the atom bomb and how each of them grappled with the implications of their awesome creation. The story of the Manhattan Project is famous, and so are the complicated, remarkable men behind it, whom VanDeMark, a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy and coauthor of Robert S. McNamara's bestseller, In Retrospect,
brings engrossingly to life: men like Oppenheimer, Bethe, Bohr, Teller, Fermi and Szilard. But VanDeMark says he is interested in the human rather than the scientific story: a tale of moral ambiguity in "an imperfect world that sometimes forges good from evil and evil from good." The author tackles his subject in two parts. The first treats the "frenzy of creation" that took on a life of its own, and how, when their work was done, the scientists involved "came to fear the very thing they had built to end fear." The book's second part addresses the rude awakening of the atomic scientists, who had previously lived in the detached, rarefied world of academia, to the moral implications of their contribution for world politics. VanDeMark does not overlook its implications in today's world, questioning the viability of deterrence when "fanatics, driven by zealotry that knows no ethical constraints" may gain access to nuclear weapons. He concludes that "there is hope," but not all readers will find hope in his statement that we must rely on good sense to avoid disaster. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW.

Starred review from June 1, 2003
So thorough is the popular literature about the creation of the fission and fusion bombs--anchored by Richard Rhodes' standards, " The Making of the Atomic Bomb" (1986) and " Dark Star" (1995)--that an entirely novel presentation is hardly possible. However, a synthesis such as this one offers an incisive map to the principal roads to the dawn and early morning of the nuclear age. VanDeMark depicts the friendships forged among the fascinating and sometimes perturbing scientists as they struggled to come to grips with the implications of making the annihilating weapon. The author also emphasizes personality traits, such as Oppenheimer's intolerance of fools or Teller's sensitivity, which shaped such signal events as Oppenheimer's loyalty hearing in 1954. They, plus Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr, Leo Szilard, Hans Bethe, Ernest Lawrence, I. I. Rabi, and Arthur Compton, interlocked closely in brilliant-brained curiosity about how to build an atom bomb, and then argued intensely about what to do with it. VanDeMark's tracing of their wrestling with this tree-of-knowledge dilemma works to humanize the story of the first atom bomb and is also a superb gateway to discovering its myriad technical and moral aspects.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)