Plutonium: A History of the World's Most Dangerous Element

194 pages | Publisher: Cornell University Press (March 2009) | English | ISBN-10: 0801475171 | PDF
In his new history of this complex and dangerous element, noted physicist Bernstein describes the steps that were taken to transform plutonium from a laboratory novelty into the nuclear weapon that destroyed Nagasaki.

Physicist Bernstein has written books about Einstein, Oppenheimer, and the German nuclear program. Here he tells the complicated story of plutonium, a chemical that appears in minute amounts in nature but which scientists working feverishly during World War II learned to manufacture in quantity. Plutonium's physics and chemistry are exceptionally complex, inspiring Glenn Seaborg, the nuclear chemist who "finally identified" the elusive element in 1941, to observe, "Plutonium is so unusual as to approach the unbelievable." It is also "fiendishly toxic." Bernstein, an intern at Los Alamos in 1957, analyzes plutonium via a mix of science and biography, the former tough going for nonscientists, the latter, in the form of thumbnail portraits of nuclear scientists from Marie Curie to Enrico Fermi and beyond, vivid and affecting. Irony and drama shape Bernstein's accounts of amazing feats of scientific deduction and world-endangering secrets, which give way to a sobering overview of the environmental damage caused by plutonium-producing reactors and the enormous threats embodied in today's global plutonium inventory. Although convoluted, Bernstein's unique history of the diabolical element is invaluable. Donna Seaman.


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