|
by: McAllister Hull
Amazon.com's Price: $14.95 Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 530.092
EAN: 9780826335531
ISBN: 0826335535
Label: University of New Mexico Press
Manufacturer: University of New Mexico Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 170
Publication Date: August 08, 2005
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Sales Rank: 1004473
Studio: University of New Mexico Press
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
A scientist’s recollection of his life as a junior member of the Manhattan Project, Rider of the Pale Horse recounts McAllister Hull’s involvement in various nuclear-related enterprises during and after World War II. Fresh from a summer job working with explosives in the chemistry department of an ordnance plant, Hull was drafted in 1943, after his freshman year in college. Unlike other accounts written by scientists and historians of that era, Hull’s narrative offers a realistic picture of the dangerous and messy job that GIs and civilian powder men were asked to do. Life in the workshops where bomb components were constructed was very different from life in the offices where they were designed.
Hull’s description of his postwar work supporting the Bikini Atoll tests in the Pacific and the early concerns about the effects of a hydrogen bomb explosion illuminate the Dark Age of nuclear weaponry. John Hull’s handsome illustrations show technicians and scientists at work and bring the story to life.
“Rider of the Pale Horse adds valuably to the total record of the most important technological development of the twentieth century.”—Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atom Bomb
“Hull gives a bottom-up view as seen by a foot-soldier. His account of the grubby details of the project is illuminated by his later view of its historical repercussions and bears new witness to a turning-point of history.”—Freeman Dyson, author of Disturbing the Universe
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - Memoir of a Technician at Los Alamos
McAllister Hull had a distinguished career as a nuclear physicist and university administrator but in the fall of 1944 he arrived at Los Alamos to work as an explosives technician. His story of how that happened gives a view of the Manhattan project different from the well told histories of the eminent scientists and military leaders. Hull knew who Oppenheimer and Groves were but his role was a niche producing critical chemical explosive components at the more isolated S-site. For that matter ... Read More
|
