Alsos

by Goudsmit, Samuel A., (Samuel Abraham)

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Title Statements

Full title :Alsos / Samuel A. Goudsmit ; with an introduction by David Cassidy.

Summary

During the final weeks of World War II in Europe, as Allied armies swept across a chaotic, battle-torn Germany, two teams of the world's leading nuclear scientists were desperately at work. One team, sequestered in the New Mexican desert, hastened to assemble the atomic bombs that would shake the world later that summer. The other team, a group of Nazi-sponsored physicists and technicians in southern Germany, struggled to do something that, unbeknownst to them, the Allies had done two years earlier: build a critical, self-sustaining nuclear reactor. Meanwhile, a different kind of team was running its own race against time. Convinced (erroneously) that the Germans were close to creating their own superweapon, the Allies sent an American unit of scientists, soldiers, and secret agents established by Lieutenant General Leslie R. Groves into Nazi Germany. Their orders: find the German scientific team before they could provide Hitler with atomic power. The scientific head of the mission: a Dutch-American physicist named Samuel A. Goudsmit. The mission code name: Alsos.

As his small entourage moved closer to the German research camp, Goudsmit revisited familiar people and places now changed forever by the war. The first Allied scientist to interrogate the captured physicists, Goudsmit heard first hand about life in a Nazi Germany in which they had lived and worked for over a decade. Most importantly, as the last person to review German nuclear research papers before military classification barred them from the public eye, Goudsmit was uniquely qualified to answer the most puzzling question: why, after their spectacular early successes, did German nuclear research efforts fall so miserably? Goudsmit's insights into the errors and hindrances that frustrated the German scientists, as well as his penetrating character analyses, remain uncannily accurate, as proven a half-century later by the now de-classified documents.

Edition Statements

Publication Date:©1996.

Publication Statements

Publisher(s):AIP Press
Place of Publication:Woodbury, N.Y
Language:eng
Publication Date:©1996.

Notes

The Physical Object

Description:xxxviii, 259 pages ; : 23 cm.

Edition Identifiers

ISBN:1563964155, 9781563964152
oclc:ocm33333939
LC Classification:D810.S2
Dewey Decimal:355.8/25119/094309044

Foreword: The beginning of the Alsos Mission and the failure of German physics -- I. The Fear of a German Atom Bomb -- II. We Prepare to Investigate German Science -- III. The Need for Secrecy -- IV. Operation Cellastic -- V. Operation Toothpaste -- VI. Operation Jackpot -- VII. We Meet Some German Colleagues -- VIII. The Breakthrough -- IX. Operation Humbug -- X. Hiroshima and the German Scientists -- XI. The Misorganization of German Science -- XII. The Uranium Club -- XIII. The Gestapo in Science -- XIV. The Efficiency of German Industry -- XV. It Can't Happen Here -- Appendix. An Outline of the Uranium Problem.

Subjects

Atomic bomb Atomic bomb -- Germany Bombe atomique -- Allemagne Germany Geschichte Guerre mondiale, 1939-1945 -- Sciences History nuclear physics Nuclear physics -- Research Nuclear physics -- Research -- Germany Physique nucléaire -- Recherche -- Alle… Science Science -- History -- 20th century. -- … United States United States // War Department // Also… United States., War Department World War, 1939-1945 World War, 1939-1945 -- Science