From desert to devastation

The past few years have witnessed a boom in physics-themed graphic novels, with the lives of Marie Curie, Richard Feynman and Yuri Gagarin all getting the high-concept cartoon treatment. The latest example in this genre is Trinity: a Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb. The book begins with J Robert Oppenheimer explaining the Greek myth of Prometheus to a young soldier at the Trinity test site in the New Mexico desert, and ends with American schoolchildren learning how to “duck and cover” in the event of a nuclear attack. In-between, the book’s New York-based author and artist, Jonathan Fetter-Vorm, mixes physics and history to create an eye-catching account of how the atomic bomb was transformed from a theoretical possibility into a very real – and very world-threatening – device. The text has a spare, elegiac quality that suits its subject matter, and despite its brevity, it manages to cover the most important aspects of the bomb’s scientific, political and moral implications. As for the illustrations, they are done in stark greyscale, and they do not shy away from depicting the horrors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While Trinity may look like a comic book on the outside, it is certainly not written for children.

• 2012 Hill and Wang £15.99/$22.00hb 160pp

War and peace

The life of the physicist Joseph Rotblat was long and eventful. Born in Poland to Jewish parents in 1908, he escaped the Holocaust thanks to a timely appointment at the University of Liverpool, and during the Second World War, he joined hundreds of other émigré scientists in contributing to the Anglo-American atomic bomb projects. Unusually, however, Rotblat recognized the peculiar horrors of nuclear warfare even before the first bombs were dropped, and after leaving the US-led Manhattan Project early in 1945, he dedicated the remaining six decades of his life to advocating the elimination of nuclear weapons. Andrew Brown’s new biography of Rotblat, Keeper of the Nuclear Conscience, covers the entire span of its subject’s life, with a special focus on Rotblat’s work with the anti-nuclear Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs – an organization he founded, and with which he shared the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize. The book’s early chapters are full of perceptive details about Rotblat’s character and the forces that shaped it. One particularly good example is Brown’s observation that Rotblat, in his later life, refused to eat potatoes; apparently, they reminded him of the bitter-tasting tubers that he and his family consumed in Poland during the First World War, under near-starvation conditions. It is also interesting to see familiar stories of physics in the 1930s refracted through a Polish lens. As Brown makes clear, during the lean inter-war years, the level of physics talent in this newly reborn country far outstripped the available research funds. As a result, Rotblat and his Warsaw-based colleagues did their nuclear research on a shoestring: while the likes of Enrico Fermi could afford radioactive samples weighing whole grams, Rotblat had to make do with a few tens of milligrams. The chapters on Rotblat’s participation in (and eventual departure from) the Manhattan Project are similarly insightful, and much enhanced by an account of the early atom-bomb work done by Britain’s Maud Committee and Tube Alloys programme. Somewhere in the middle, though, the book loses focus. The back-and-forth politico-scientific discussions on nuclear test bans that took place during the 1950s and 1960s make slow reading, and long passages contain little, if any, mention of Rotblat himself. Things do, however, liven up a little towards the end, as Brown describes how Rotblat became “an old man in a hurry”, anxious to keep the spirit of Pugwash alive into the new millennium and as unconcerned as ever about irritating government officials.

• 2012 Oxford University Press £18.99/$29.95hb 368pp