The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb

The Devil Reached Towards the Sky is the book and it's an "Oral History" of the American Atomic Bomb Project and the use of the bomb against Japan.

Looking back you might think it was a straight triumphant march from E=MC2 to Hiroshima. It wasn't that al all.

So we see Fermi and his men covered with graphite dust creating the first "pile" under the bleachers at Stagg Field in Chicago. Was it going to work? Go "Critical"? Well, spoiler alert, it did.

And then the US Government built two different million dollar plants - at Oak Ridge and Hanford, Washington - to invent on the fly means to generate fuel for a bomb that the boys out in New Mexico MAYBE had some idea of how to build. (If they had some fuel). Incredible!

(And the people living in show more Oak Ridge and Los Alamos needed schools and cafes and movie theaters and grocery stores too. And bathtubs. And today!)

Graff's The Only Plane in the Sky made you feel like you were right there in the smoke and the darkness of the stairwell at Tower Two on 9/11. This book is like that. Details here that were new to me and eye opening. It's an amazing story.

America was united like never before in the War Effort, and people believed in American Know-how and engineering as a way to win the war. It was a different time.

Not just for historians. Recommended. show less

The Devil Reached Toward The Sky by Garrett M. Graff. a very long book with photos, about the development of the atomic bomb. It is a detailed history through quotes. A tremendous amount of money was spent on this program, people lost farms that had been in their families for generations and it was done in extreme secrecy. many people not knowing what they were working but that it was for the war effort. Many decisions including whether or to use it had to made made. Then there was a detail description of missions to drop it and what the bombers and pilots saw from above and and many first hand descriptions of those below.

And there were accounts from school children searching for their parents, finding their homes demolished. Prisoners show more of War from Australia, Korea, England, Scotland, United States, Wales, New Zealand,

And the horrible effects of radiation sickness, and United States trying to keep it secret. I have read John Hershey's Hiroshima all in that book was in this one and more. I learned that the Japanese did not want to marry people from Hiroshima and Nagasaki because of the horrible radiation sickness. So it was very difficult for women from those cities to find husbands who who would accept them.

This book is extremely comprehensive, I know about the Thin Man which was dropped on Hiroshima and the Fat Boy dropped on Nagasaki and the importance of good weather so the target could be seen. I learned about the long hours people worked on this project and the many hardships that they endured. I had already known that there must never be another nuclear war but how to get the information across to politicians who do not realize the complete destruction that it causes.

This book must be read by everyone, especially those in government. show less