THE "SMYTH REPORT" ON THE ATOM BOMB, AN EXCEPTIONAL ASSOCIATION COPY SIGNED BY EDWARD TELLER, WHO "HELPED FOUND THE NUCLEAR ERA WITH HIS WORK ON THE ATOM BOMB"
(TELLER, Edward) SMYTH, Henry DeWolf. Atomic Energy for Military Purposes. The Official Report on the Development of the Atomic Bomb under the Auspices of the United States Government 1940-1945. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945. Octavo, original brick-red cloth, original dust jacket.
First trade edition of Smyth's account of development work under the code name "Manhattan District," an especially memorable association copy signed on the title page by Edward Teller, "a towering figure of science" whose work at Los Alamos laboratory was vital in developing and "detonating a test devise in the New Mexican desert and helping fashion" the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This is the first edition in book form of "the Smyth Report," as it was known: a "remarkably full and candid account of the development work carried out between 1940 and 1945 by the American-directed but internationally recruited team of physicists, under the code name 'Manhattan District,' which culminated in the production of the first atomic bomb" (PMM, 254). This association copy possesses an specially memorable provenance in containing the signature of Edward Teller. A "towering figure of science," the Hungarian-born physicist "helped found the nuclear era with his work on the atom bomb" at Los Alamos. Teller also had a "dominant role in inventing the hydrogen bomb (though he often protested being called its father), battled for decades on behalf of nuclear power and lobbied fervently for the building of antimissile defenses." In 1932, when the government established the secret laboratory at Los Alamos to develop an atomic bomb, Teller agreed to join the project.
"His hope, to design a hydrogen bomb, or 'super,' led to early friction with J. Robert Oppenheimer, the laboratory's director, who insisted that they concentrate on the atomic bomb, which, in any case, would be needed to ignite the hydrogen bomb. The scientists succeeded in 1945, detonating a test device in the New Mexican desert and helping fashion two bombs that were soon dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki… Teller regretted the decision to drop the atom bomb on Japanese cities, arguing afterward that doing so had been a mistake. Far better, he said, would have been firing a bomb in the evening high enough above Tokyo to spare the city but flood it with blinding light. 'If we could have ended the war by showing the power of science without killing a single person,'' he said, ''all of us would now be happier, more reasonable and much more safe'" (New York Times). Preceded only by preliminary typewritten stencil versions produced in the Adjutant General's Office by mimeograph, ditto and lithoprint for the Army's internal distribution. Once the Smyth Report was declassified (six days after the destruction of Hiroshima and three days before the declaration of the end of the war), it was immediately printed by the both the Government Printing Office (staple-bound in paper wrappers, pp. 182) and Princeton University Press, bound in cloth with dust jacket, pp. 264. Historically, the GPO edition has been sold as the first published edition, while the Princeton edition has been sold as the first trade edition. However, "there is some uncertainty as to the exact date of issue. Coleman, page 209, notes that the GPO edition was 'probably published September 20 plus or minus 5 days" (Laudamus & Krishnamurthy 0426). This Princeton University edition, on the other hand, "was advertised as 'just published' in the New York Times Book Review September 16, 1945" (ibid). Thus, it is impossible to determine priority and both editions should rightly be regarded as the "first published." With eight pages of black-and-white photographic illustrations. See Coleman, Princeton University Chronicle, 37:3; PMM 422; Norman 1962. Separate owner signature to front pastedown.
Book fine; mere trace of edge-wear to bright about-fine price-clipped dust jacket.