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Before The Fallout

From Marie Curie to Hiroshima

Walker & Company, April 2005
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1445-9, ISBN10: 0-8027-1445-5,
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches, 416 pages, 50 Black and White Illustrations,
Hardcover, $27.00

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Biography

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See All Categories History World: General

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology

On December 26, 1898, Marie Curie announced the discovery of radium and observed that "radioactivity seems to be an atomic property." Forty-seven years later, her startling insight was on full and horrific display as "Little Boy" exploded over Hiroshima. Before the Fallout is the epic story of the half century between these two world-changing events.

Weaving history, science, and biography, Diana Preston chronicles a fascinating human chain reaction of scientists, leaders, and ordinary citizens whose discoveries and decisions forever changed our lives. The early decades of the twentieth century brought breathtaking revelations—Einstein's relativity theory, Rutherford's discovery of the atomic nucleus, Heisenberg's quantum mechanics. Scientists of many nations worked together to tease out the secrets of the atom with little idea of where their findings would one day lead. Only twelve years before Hiroshima, the great Ernest Rutherford dismissed the idea of harnessing energy from atoms as "moonshine." Then, on the eve of World War II, the power of atomic fission was revealed, alliances were broken, friendships were sundered, and science was co-opted by world events.

Preston deftly counterpoints the changing daily lives of people in Hiroshima before the blast, and evolving attitudes about the conduct of warfare and the targeting of civilians, with the dramatic race to build the first atomic bomb. She interviewed the surviving scientists, including the last living person to have worked with Marie Curie, and offers intriguing new insights—based on recently available papers—into the fateful wartime meeting between Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr. Her fascinating conclusion examines what might have happened had any number of events occurred differently.

Before the Fallout is a tour de force of narrative history, deeply researched and beautifully written. As the sixtieth anniversary of Hiroshima approaches, it compels us to consider the threats and moral dilemmas we all face in our ever-dangerous world.

Praise

"The great, enthralling story of the race to build the bomb is often as complicated and full of twists as nuclear physics itself, but Diana Preston has told it clearly and vividly."—Joseph Kanon, author of Los Alamos

"Preston artfully distills the key moments of the pre-atomic-bomb era, both scientific and biographic, and weaves them into an absorbing narrative. The result is a concise and very readable overview of the human chain reaction that began in 1896 with the innocent observation that uranium salts could fog a photographic plate and culminated half a century later in the most potent weapon the world had ever seen."—The Washington Post Book World

"Nuclear weapons have been an immutable aspect of the world for the past 60 years. The story of how they came to be, and the race between the Allied and Axis nations to be the first to harness the destructive power of the atom, is wonderfully told by British historian Preston. She weaves together history, physics, politics and military strategies to convey both the monumental scientific achievement the bomb represented and, at the same time, the ethical and humanitarian implications of creating such a wild power. Preston is an impeccable researcher with a gift for choosing small details that illuminate and humanize the bomb's world-changing effects . . . This is a story with a reservoir of events heroic and horrible and a fabulous cast of characters that includes scientists Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller and Hans Bethe, and world leaders Roosevelt, Churchill, Truman, Stalin, Emperor Hirohito and Hitler. Preston presents each with rare insight and expertise. But her rarer achievement is to capture not only the work of making the bomb with its myriad ramifications for humankind, but also the ineffably human qualities—curiosity, ambition, fear, patriotism—that animated the participants in the great drama."—Publishers Weekly

About the Author(s)

Diana Preston

Diana Preston is an acclaimed historian and author of A First Tragedy, The Boxer Rebellion, Lusitania, and (with her husband, Michael) A Pirate of Exquisite Mind. She lives in London, England.