Atomic Energy for Military Purposes: The Official Report on the Development of the Atomic Bomb Under the Auspices of the United States Government, 1940-1945.

SMYTH, Henry DeWolf. [J. Robert Oppenheimer; Enrico Fermi].

Item Number: 143078

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945.

First edition of the full text of Smyth’s official report on the development of the atomic bomb by the U.S. Government. Octavo, original cloth, illustrated. Boldly signed by top Manhattan Project scientists on the front free endpaper, Enrico Fermi, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Samuel K. Allison, George B. Kistiakowsky, Kenneth T. Bainbridge, and William S. “Deak” Parsons. From the library of Manhattan Project colleague and missiles expert Laurence Cherry. Theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and is among those who are credited with being the “father of the atomic bomb” for their role in the Manhattan Project, the World War II undertaking that developed the first nuclear weapons. In August 1945, the weapons were used in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war ended, Oppenheimer became chairman of the influential General Advisory Committee of the newly created United States Atomic Energy Commission. He used that position to lobby for international control of nuclear power to avert nuclear proliferation and a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. He opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb during a 1949–1950 governmental debate on the question and subsequently took stances on defense-related issues that provoked the ire of some factions in the U.S. government and military. Very good in a very good supplied dust jacket. The Smyth Report offered the public the first account of the development of the atomic bomb, “carried out between 1940 and 1945 by the American-directed by internationally-recruited team of physicists under the code name of ‘Manhattan District’…Compiled by Professor Henry Dewolf Smyth of Princeton, a consultant to the ‘Manhattan District’ project at Los Alamos, whose commandant General Leslie R. Groves provided the foreword” (Printing and the Mind of Man, 422e). Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box made by the Harcourt Bindery. Rare and desirable.

Written as a "report to the nation" by Henry D. Smyth, chairman of the Princeton physics department, at the direction of Major General Groves, in charge of the Atomic Bomb Project, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes begins with a brief survey of the advances in nuclear physics made between 1896 and 1940, and then proceeds to tell the incredible story of the scientific and engineering teamwork that culminated in the manufacturing of the atomic bomb.