But it took a long time to light a fire under the American authorities, and it wasn't until the absolutely critical replacement of his name is a footnote in history with Groves that things really got rolling, on the industrial scale needed, and the scientists and engineers sufficiently focused on the design and execution of the bombs themselves (which for various reasons didn't end up being the afterthought some expected). And he of course picked Oppenheimer to lead that effort, which was opposed by most, albeit he was one of the few uncommitted physicists capable at that level.
These two men organized more than 100,000 people for the industrial production of the required fissionables (90% of the work per Wikipedia), and Grove's drive got those ready in time to forestall Operation Downfall. Heck, they went from the first real test to putting metal on target in 21 and 24 days....
And the design and fabrication of "the bomb" turned out to be massively harder than they expected due to weapons grade plutonium not being suitable for a gun assembly bomb (which is also grossly wasteful of fissionable, if the Little Boy is any guide, as I recall it had 3x critical mass, and a fair amount if it wasn't as pure U-235 as they'd have wanted). Making the implosion concept work was hard, and they got it right the first time....
Read Rhode's book, especially the latter half after the nuclear physics discoveries take a back seat (https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-25th-Anniversary/d...) and Grove's autobiography (https://www.amazon.com/Now-Can-Be-Told-Manhattan/dp/03068018...) to learn the organization and management details, they're amazing.
And had much wider effects on the world at large, that we could indeed do such things led to the Apollo program, and of course to too much conceit that "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we [do something very different and a lot more intractable, probably without even a clearly defined goal]?"
Next book for the management of the project, although there's a lot more, e.g. Groves was responsible for US intelligence actions WRT to Germany and Japan's nuclear projects, one of the last chapters it titled something like "Destruction of the Japanese Cyclotron", is his Now It Can Be Told: The Story Of The Manhattan Project (http://www.amazon.com/Now-It-Can-Told-Manhattan/dp/030680189...).
Earlier publication date, so less could "be told", but lots of good stuff. E.g. when he first got an estimate of something major from the Chicago "Metallurgical Lab", he asked for the uncertainty factor, expecting something like 25%, and got a factor of 10. After explaining that in a neat "to feed somewhere between 10 and 1,000 people" metaphor, he then relates how they discussed it for a while, he realized there would be no firmer figure for some time, and then they all forged ahead. A truly remarkable man.
There's also a lot that's been published on Oppenheimer, but I'm not studying Los Alamos too much now, and e.g. the above book is very interesting for lots more details in how Groves picked him, and reexamined it in late 1944 or so because of Oppenheimer's relatively poor health and still couldn't find a replacement (as noted by Rhodes, if Oppenheimer had lived just a bit longer he ought to have gotten a Nobel for his earlier and way ahead of it's times late '30s theoretical astronomy on topics like neutron stars and black holes).
I'm in the middle of the Manhattan Project section in this much more specialized book, which has a political science analysis focus that's not going to be of interest to most of us, but it's quite promising, the railway story is neat and feeds right into Germany's physics establishment story; check back with me in a few weeks to see if it's worth your while: Technology and International Transformation: The Railroad, the Atom Bomb, and the Politics of Technological Change (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0791468682) the cheapest copy is now $19 (plus shipping), vs. the $3 I got it for, so it's very possibly not worth it.
I've also got these books on order: The General and the Bomb: A Biography of General Leslie R. Groves, Director of the Manhattan Project (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0396087612) and suggested from the previous book The Atomic Scientists: A Biographical History (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0471504556) which might be interesting if you really like the first 300 pages of Rhodes' book.
His book, Carrying The Fire, https://www.amazon.com/Carrying-Fire-Astronauts-Michael-Coll... is one of the reasons why I've decided to go into aerospace and take my shot at becoming an astronaut as an adult. He wrote parts of this book in orbit around the moon, and the rest when he came back to Earth. It is hard to describe the degree of tender self awareness that he possessed and the insight with which he wrote.
His book is one of the few books where the forwards are just as important as the book itself. Here's one he recently wrote,
> Could I be one of twelve of eighteen thousand? No way in hell.
It is rare for someone to acknowledge the locus at which the sum of their perspiration and preparation collided with the vagaries of fate. It is rarer still for them to say that had they been born later, or had the circumstances been any different, they might not have been the same. And it is far rarer for someone to talk about the mistakes of youth with this level of humor and care,
> Never mind the excuses, I was a mediocre student, more interested in athletics than academics. I was captain of the wrestling team, but even that was a bit tainted, as I was also a secret smoker. Stupid.
He had, as he admits in the forward, ADHD that went undiagnosed at the time. His teachers thought he was lazy, and he struggled in school. His grades were subpar, and at some point he woke up and he was thirty, writing,
> How had I managed to take so long to get so little done — no advanced degree, a piddling two thousand hours’ flying time, thirty years old, and nothing special in my record to offset these deficiencies?
A lot of books by people who have experienced what it is like to have history's eye upon them don't go into such details. And if they do, they tend to be written by others or they suffer from terminal self-aggrandizement. Collins' account doesn't suffer from this. It feels so raw and real, an inner exploration just as much an outer one.
It's as if we sent on Apollo 11 not just a preternaturally calm man with oodles of the Right Stuff (Neil Armstrong) and a brilliant aerospace engineer (Buzz Aldrin), but also a self-aware artist who recorded some of the most beautiful images of the trip and tried to capture the beauty of what he saw in front of him in verse. A man who can recite passages from Paradise Lost from heart and talks about the importance of bringing art and joy into the sciences. https://twitter.com/AstroMCollins/status/1313882376225734656
NASA chose well.
Here's one final quote from Carrying The Fire,
> Of course, Apollo was the god who carried the fiery sun across the sky in a chariot. But beyond that, how would you carry fire? Carefully, that's how, with lots of planning and at considerable risk. It is a delicate cargo, as valuable as moon rocks, and the carrier must always be on his toes lest it spill.
> I carried the fire for six years, and now I would like to tell you about it, simply and directly as a test pilot must, for the trip deserves the telling.
.
On a related note (apologies for the shameless plug), I'm making my first side project, I want to build a place where I collect books like Carrying The Fire. I want to collect books that answer the question, "if you are an expert in field X, what book do you think someone should read by/about your field?" (at basic, intermediate, and advanced levels)
The idea is to make the kind of resource I wish existed. For example, Carrying The Fire was written in 1974 and is a first hand account of humanity's greatest adventure, and yet few have read it. Why? Simply because most folks never hear of it. You have to be obsessed with space to come across it, and yet reading his account should benefit everyone. It explores how someone with flaws can do something extraordinary, and all the ups and downs in between.
Another example is General Leslie Groves' Now It Can Be Told. https://www.amazon.com/Now-Can-Be-Told-Manhattan/dp/03068018... Groves was the manager behind the Manhattan Project and his book covers how he made The Bomb happen, organisationally. How do you create an organisation that can achieve the impossible? He lays out his lessons in project management, how he selected personnel etc, in digestable chunks. It should be on every founder's desk, and yet it's not, because it's arcane and you only really know about it if you are into military history and this very arcane form of atomic history.
I want to build a resource that helps cross-pollinate across fields. And I'm hoping that some of you would be kind enough to sign up to be our guinea pigs here, http://www.projectkarl.com