The Real Lesson From <em>The Making of the Atomic Bomb</em>

Doom lurks in every nook and cranny of Richard Rhodes’s home office. A framed photograph of three men in military fatigues hangs above his desk. They’re tightening straps on what first appear to be two water heaters but are, in fact, thermonuclear weapons. Resting against a nearby wall is a black-and-white print depicting the moments after the detonation of an atomic bomb: a thousand-foot-tall ghostly amoeba. And above us, dangling from the ceiling like the sword of Damocles, is a plastic model of the Hindenburg.

Depending on how you choose to look at it, Rhodes’s office is either a shrine to awe-inspiring technological progress or a harsh reminder of its power to incinerate us all in the blink of an eye. Today, it feels like the nexus of our cultural and technological universes. Rhodes is the 86-year-old author of , a Pulitzer Prize–winning book that has become a kind of holy text for a certain type of AI researcher—namely, the, Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster about the Manhattan Project. (The film is not based on his book, though he suspects his text served as a research aid; he’s excited to see it anyway.)