| HIROSHIMA The World's Bomb Andrew J. Rotter Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-19-280437-2 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-19-280437-5 | 371p. | HC | $29.95 | |
| Page 6: | "Yet in an age of stateless terrorism and great power arrogance, where international norms and institutions appear helpless..." | |
| Missing hyphen: S/B "great-power arrogance". |
| Page 9: | "He found that atoms, far from stable, might change themselves into another form of the same element they comprised (called an isotope) or another element altogether." | |
| Missing word: S/B "far from being stable". |
| Page 9: | "Rutherford seems not too have known of Nagaoka's vision, despite the two men having met in Manchester." | |
| Typo: S/B "to". |
| Page 158: | "There remained difficulties with the implosion mechanism, the series of detonators that needed to fire simultaneously, 'within a fraction of a millionth of a second', if the bomb's plutonium was to chain react properly." | |
| Missing hyphen: S/B "to chain-react". |
| Page 159: | "Enrico Fermi, oddly, tore a piece of paper into scraps." | |
| I submit that this should not seem odd in retrospect. |
| Page 160: | "The Trinity shot produced a light brighter than any seen previously in the world, bright enough to have been seen from space." | |
| Like the city of Canberra, whose citizens turned on all its lights to salute John Glenn on his pioneer orbital flight? I submit this is a bad comparison. |
| Page 166: | "Marshall Fields department stores in Chicago bought a two-page newspaper ad..." | |
| Missing apostrophe: S/B "Marshall Field's". (According to Wikipedia, Marshall Field & Company (Marshall Field's) was a Chicago institution dating from the 19th century. It grew to become a major chain before being acquired by Macy's Inc. on August 30, 2005.) |
| Page 191: | "They would take off at 2.30 the next morning, 6 August." | |
| Not an error, just an example of how Rotter expresses time of day: the separator is a period, not a colon. |
| Page 198: | "Soon colleagues appeared and hoisted him onto a stretcher, on which they bore him, to the Communications Building adjacent to the hospital, which was already too crowded to admit more patients." | |
| Extra comma: S/B "they bore him to the Communications Building". |
| Page 256: | "In theory, Fermi calculated, 12 kilograms of plutonium would produce a blast equivalent to a million tons of TNT. A cubic meter of deuterium ought to make an explosion worth ten million tons." | |
| This is an odd shift from units of mass to volume. I don't think it can be justified. How much mass of deuterium is in that cubic meter? |
| Page 291: | "The Y-Plant at Valindaba1 began enriching weapons-grade uranium, though the process was plagued by inefficiencies, and the refined Ur emerged only slowly." | |
| Wrong chemical symbol for uranium: S/B "U". |
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