Keith Parsons: Review of The Devil . . .

Friday--31 October 2025

An all-Keith-Parsons week!

REVIEW OF GARRETT M. GRAFF’S THE DEVIL REACHED TOWARD THE SKY (2025)

Keith Parsons

I have been fascinated by nuclear weapons since childhood, probably because we Boomers grew up in the shadow of the bomb. If we ever forgot, duck and cover drills reminded us and public service announcements told us to get busy building our fallout shelters. Being bookish, I read a number of novels about nuclear war and its aftermath. Philip Wylie’s Tomorrow! (1954) and Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959) were two notable ones. My favorite was Daybreak 2250 A.D. (1952), also called Starman’s Son, by Andre Norton, which was set in a post-apocalyptic North America over two centuries after a nuclear war had destroyed civilization, putting everyone back into a tribal, pre-technological existence. A young man, Lars, and his giant killer cat Lura (the best thing in the book) set off on a journey of discovery to a ruined city, the City on the Lake, which I surmised was Chicago. They faced many dangers, especially the beast things, hideous evil mutants who infested the old cities. I read it over and over.

As an adult, my interest persisted to the extent that I coauthored a book with my nuclear physicist nephew, Robert Zaballa, on the nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands—Bombing the Marshall Islands: A Cold War Tragedy (2017). Of course, I have read many books on nuclear weapons, their development, and use. No story is more fascinating than the development of the atomic bomb by the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. That story has been told, as well as it can be told, by Richard Rhodes in The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), perhaps the greatest work that I have read by a modern historian.

What Could Another Book Add?

What could another book add that Rhodes had not included?

Quite a bit, it turns out. Garrett M. Graff does not offer another narrative, but an oral history, history in the words of the people who lived it. Of course he includes the major figures such as J. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves, but he also quotes many of the people who labored on aspects of the massive project, all without knowing what they were working on. That the expected result was an atomic weapon was a very closely guarded secret, known only to those who had to know. Unfortunately, one of those deemed essential was physicist Klaus Fuchs, who supplied much detailed information to the Soviets. I have seen it estimated that the stolen information saved the Soviets a year or two in the development of their bomb.

One thing that comes through clearly in Graff’s telling was the sheer chutzpah of the Manhattan Project. In 1942, the scientific, engineering, and construction challenges were immense. Even the known unknowns were formidable. Problems had to be solved on the fly with no time for the usual deliberate processes of science. Even more challenging was the sheer physical size of the project. Enormous facilities had to be erected at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington. The construction task was stupendous. Inhabitants had to be evicted, land cleared, buildings erected, housing for workers constructed, and scientific equipment had to be assembled with tolerances of thousandths of an inch. Yet the whole massive undertaking was done in an amazingly short time, a tribute to the enormous power of American industry and the dedication of tens of thousands of workers of both sexes and all races. In fact, some of the most delicate tasks were done better by young women workers than by the scientists!

Oak Ridge had the task of producing fissionable uranium, U-235. Unfortunately, nature had made U-235 only 0.7% of natural uranium, the vast majority, 99.3%, being U-238 which could not be used in a bomb. Since isotopes of the same element share the same chemical properties, separating the fissionable material was a difficult task. It was not known which of several proposed separation methods would be best, so all were tried on a massive scale. Hanford was to house the nuclear reactors which would produce the artificial element plutonium. The mighty Columbia River supplied the huge quantities of water needed to cool the reactors.

In addition to these giant plants, a whole city was built on top of a mesa in New Mexico—Los Alamos. Here was gathered the greatest concentration of scientific brainpower in all of history. Oppenheimer was the scientific director of the project, but other luminaries included Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, and Glenn Seaborg. An important contributor was John von Neumann—probably the smartest human that ever lived. All were focused with laser intensity upon the development of an atomic weapon. What drove them was a terrible fear, the fear that Hitler would be the first to possess nuclear weapons. Germany had some of the world’s most brilliant physicists including most notably Werner Heisenberg. The idea of nuclear weapons in the hands of a madman was beyond terrifying. No one knew at the time that Germany never came close to developing a nuclear weapon.

Two Different Bomb Designs

We usually speak of “the” atomic bomb, but really two entirely different bomb designs were being simultaneously developed. The uranium bomb would be a fairly simple gun design. A subcritical mass of enriched uranium would be the bullet of the gun and another subcritical mass would be the target. The bomb would detonate when the bullet was fired into the target creating a hypercritical mass that would explode in a nuclear chain reaction. The problem was that so little of the fissionable material could be produced.

The other design, the plutonium bomb, had plenty of plutonium, but the simple gun design would not work with plutonium and would only produce a messy fizzle. To compress a sphere of plutonium to hypercriticality required an array of lensed high explosive charges that would create a precisely symmetrical shock wave imploding the plutonium. An initiator at the core would release neutrons which would begin the exponentially increasing release of neutrons and massive energy, going through eighty generations in microseconds. The trickiest task was designing the lensed explosive to produce the precisely symmetrical shock wave.

Simultaneously with the work of the Manhattan Project was the development of another technological marvel—the B-29 Superfortress bomber. My dad was on the test crew that flew each new B-29 as soon as it came off the assembly line. He said when he first saw the B-29 he felt sure that no bomber would ever surpass it. The B-29 was by far the most advanced bomber in the world, wholly outclassing the B-17 and B-24. A special bomb group, the 509^th, was created to train on B-29s to prepare for the atomic missions. The head of the 509^th was Colonel Paul Tibbets, a superb bomber pilot and a man with outstanding leadership qualities. They trained hard in the barren desert of the Utah and Nevada borderland, and as the day for delivery of the bomb neared, they moved to Tinian Island in the Pacific, only 1500 miles from Japan, easily within the B-29’s range.

The Los Alamos scientists were confident that the gun-design uranium bomb would work, and there really was not enough fissionable material to spare for a test. The plutonium implosion design, however, had to be tested. A 100-foot steel tower was constructed in a section of the desert of southern New Mexico with the evocative name Jornada del Muerto—Journey of the Dead Man. On top of the tower was placed the “gadget,” the test plutonium bomb. In the early morning of July 16, 1945, the scientists who had worked so intensely for two years gathered to see if their efforts had succeeded. Some feared only a fizzle.

It did not fizzle. In the dark predawn at 5:29 the countdown reached zero and there erupted from the desert a light never before seen on earth. Far brighter than the sun, it illuminated the desert and the surrounding mountains brighter than noonday. After a few seconds the light, still stunningly brilliant, could bear the gaze of a human eye. What they saw was a roiling fireball that shot up into a column of fire that shone with many different colors. Soon the shock wave hit. Enrico Fermi, with the preternatural calm of the true scientist, dropped small pieces of paper into the air shock to see how far they would be displaced at his location twenty miles from the hypocenter. From this simple experiment he made a remarkably accurate calculation of the force of the blast. The energy of 20,000 tons of conventional high explosive was released in that instant.

Using the Bombs

At this point the only thing left to do was to use the bombs to try to force Japan to surrender. So on August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m. local time, the Enola Gay piloted by Colonel Tibbets released the “Little Boy” uranium bomb over the city of Hiroshima. It detonated at 1800 feet with a force of 12.5 thousand tons of TNT. Everything and everyone within a kilometer of the hypocenter was instantly obliterated. Graff’s oral history offers no moralizing but gives the testimony of the survivors, a record horrible beyond description. Those who were outside when the bomb detonated suffered severe flash burns. The survivors all tell of people wandering helplessly, often blinded, with their clothing burned off and their skin hanging from their bodies. Those who were indoors were even worse off. Their houses collapsed on them, trapping them so that they were burned alive when flames consumed the rubble. The Hiroshima train station was still operable, and a visitor who had survived the bombing was able to catch a train home—to Nagasaki.

Nagasaki was bombed on August 9 with the “Fat Man” plutonium bomb with a yield of 20,000 tons, a much more powerful bomb than the Hiroshima one. President Truman warned that if Japan did not immediately surrender, a “rain of ruin” would destroy it. On August 15, the Emperor Hirohito addressed his subjects by radio. This was the first time they had heard his voice. Citing the Americans’ employment of a “most cruel bomb,” he said that the nation must endure the unendurable and surrender. Fanatics within the military had tried to prevent the broadcast, wanting to continue the war even after the atomic bombings.

Oral Record

Graff’s oral record, presenting the events in the words of those who lived them, is a compelling history that makes the reader feel like a contemporary. This is how I would have experienced it. We know what it was like to develop the bomb, to drop the bomb, and to experience its dreadful effects. We hear all the voices and in hearing those voices we can recognize our own voices. We are at Los Alamos. We are on the Enola Gay. We are in Hiroshima.

Relevant Now?

Do you think that these events of eighty years ago are no longer relevant? You could not be more wrong. I just saw the film House of Dynamite (2025) just released on Netflix. The setting is now. A missile has been fired from somewhere in the Pacific. Its trajectory is plotted and the target is Chicago. A thermonuclear weapon hitting Chicago would produce ten million casualties. Missiles fired to intercept it fail and it continues on its path. Chicago is doomed. What does the president do? Who had fired the missile was unknown. Do we strike back with massive retaliation against all enemies? Do we accept the damage without retaliation, thereby seemingly inviting further attacks? They go to Defcon 1—war. B-2 bombers are in the air. ICBMs are ready to launch. Nuclear subs are authorized to launch on command. You are the president. What do you do?

Eighty years ago, the most brilliant minds on earth released the genie. The most brilliant minds now cannot think of a way to put the genie back in the bottle.

Prometheus stole the fire of the gods and was condemned to live in torment. We know that torment.

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