1. The translation is from Schiller's Historical Dramas (New York: John D. Williams, n.d.). [BACK]

2. Leslie R. Groves, Now It Can Be Told (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). See also K. D. Nichols, The Road to Trinity: A Personal Account of How America's Nuclear Policies Were Made (New York: Morrow, 1987). [BACK]

3. On wartime Los Alamos, see Reminiscences of Los Alamos, 1943-1945 , ed. Lawrence Badash, Joseph O. Hirschfelder, and Herbert P. Broida (Boston: Reidel, 1980), and Laura Fermi, Atoms in the Family . For a bibliography, see Richard Rhodes The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), a well-written and accurately researched and documented work. [BACK]

5. Robert Serber, "The Los Alamos Primer" (Los Alamos, N. Mex.: University of California, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, photocopied typescript, 1973). Notes by E. U. Condon based on five introductory lectures given by Robert Serber in April 1943 in connection with the Manhattan Project. Declassified "secret limited," February 25, 1963. The titles

of the sections are: 1. Object; 2. Energy of fission process; 3. Fast neutron chain reaction; 4. Fission cross-sections; 5. Neutron spectrum; 6. Neutron number; 7. Neutron capture; 8. Why ordinary U is safe; 9. Material 49 (Pu ²³⁹ ); 10. Simplest estimate of minimum size of bomb; 11. Effect of tamper; 12. Damage; 13. Efficiency; 14. Effect of tamper on efficiency; 15. Detonation; 16. Probability of predetonation; 17. Fizzles; 18. Detonating source; 19. Neutron background; 20. Shooting; 21. Autocatalytic methods; 22. Conclusion. [BACK]

6. See A. O. Nier, "J. H. Williams," in Nat. Ac. of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs, vol. 42 (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1971), p. 339. [BACK]

7. Josef Rotblat subsequently devoted himself to the Pugwash Movement and to the search for solutions to the immense problems created by atomic arms. [BACK]

8. The first modest table of isotopes was published by a student in our group in Rome in the 1930s; see G. Fea, "Tabelle riassuntive e bibliografia delle trasmutazioni artificiali" (Comprehensive tables and bibliography of artificial transmutations), Nuovo cimento 12 (1935): 368-407. A similar compilation edited by C. M. Lederer and V. Shirley, Table of Isotopes (New York: Wiley, 1978), required 1,523 pages. [BACK]

9. On G. I. Taylor, see Biog. Mem. Fell. R. Soc. vol. 22 (1976), p. 565. [BACK]

10. E. Segrè, "Spontaneous Fission," Phys. Rev. 86 (1952): 21. [BACK]

11. See Richard P. Feynman, Surely You Are Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character (New York: Norton, 1985), pp. 120-21. A letter by Teller reported in Stanley A. Blumberg and Gwinn Owens, Energy and Conflict: The Life and Times of Edward Teller (New York: Putnam, 1976), p. 457, refers to the same episode. I do not remember having had exchanges with Teller on this subject at the time. [BACK]

12. On the Trinity test, see W. L. Laurence, Dawn over Zero: The Story of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Knopf, 1946). [BACK]