The Neutron's Children: Nuclear Engineers and the Shaping of Identity

摘要

The Neutron's Children: Nuclear Engineering and the Shaping of Identity takes on far more than the title would suggest. Sean Johnston's book describes the development of nuclear engineering in three different countries from World War II to the present. The book aims to uncover entire groups of nuclear engineers, researchers, and workers, starting with World War II. While social history has revolutionized almost every field of the human past, the history of the Manhattan Project is one of the great exceptions, with books churned out about top scientists (for example, J. Robert Op-penheimer) each year, and far less attention to the hundreds of thousands of engineers, technicians, and workers who made the effort's success possible. In the tradition of Thomas Hughes, Johnston examines nuclear efforts as a massive, complex human system, and not a series of disconnected scientific discoveries.