(Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War was perhaps the first great work of this kind Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism is a more recent example.) The Making of the Atomic Bomb also sits on the very narrow shelf of books that, by some alchemy not easily understood, grasp the dread but notoriously human truth of the nuclear danger.
Its genre is that of the chronicle written soon enough after the events in question to convey their atmosphere and the feelings they stirred yet distant enough to permit dispassionate analysis. When Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb appeared in 1986, it was widely and rightly recognized as a masterpiece of historical writing.
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