__________________Critique of The Day the Sun Rose Twice

______Ferenc Morton Szasz’s treatment of the Trinity nuclear explosion is a

comprehensive account of the test itself, while the author provides a rather cursory

overview of the Manhattan Project that produced it. As Szasz develops a thesis that the

Trinity test changed the world and spawned the most crucial issue of the twentieth

century, more elaboration upon the project’s history would have benefited this relatively

thin volume.

______The thesis is well supported by the enumeration of important events and programs

that instigated Trinity, such as the German nuclear program, or were introduced by the

test, including the decision to use the atomic bomb in combat and the initiation of the

arms race with Russia. The author relies on the self-evident nature of the relationship of

Trinity to these conflicts while embellishing the bonds with convincing arguments for

and against certain historical perspectives.

______Szasz criticizes Day of Trinity, written in 1955 by Time magazine reporter

Lansing Lamont as being sullied by fact errors. While he does not qualify this

accusation, Lamont’s book was based on over one hundred interviews with personnel

involved with the Trinity test. Szasz benefited from the declassification of materials on

the Manhattan Engineer District in 1983, nearly three decades later, and his work is a

compilation of a diverse array of primary and secondary sources. The primary accounts

include interviews conducted by the author or others such as Lamont, personal

communications between scientists, Los Alamos documents, contemporary newspaper

_______________________________________________________________________1

______

______

______

articles, Leslie Groves’ Now It Can Be Told, and more. Szasz acknowledges his

particular debt to Jack M. Hubbard, the meteorologist responsible for test day weather

prediction, who granted the author full disclosure of his diary and film record of Trinity.

The myriad secondary sources include early books on Trinity such as Lamont’s work and

New York Times science correspondent William L. Laurence’s 1946 Dawn Over Zero in

addition to magazine articles on the development of physics.

The Day the Sun Rose Twice is an adequate introduction to the development of

the atomic bomb. While the thesis is persuasive, in most respects the author does not

promote unorthodox views concerning the role of the Trinity explosion in world history.

_______________________________________________________________________2

______

______