CRITICAL MASS: AMERICA’S RACE TO BUILD THE ATOMIC BOMB
(Corbis, $40.00). The drama leading up to the dropping of the first atomic bomb unfolds in this CD-ROM for Macintosh and Windows, which focuses on the people and events behind the U.S. effort to build this ultimate weapon of destruction. Biographies of the four principal scientists involved–J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-67), Niels Bohr (1885-1962), Richard Feynman (1918-88), and Enrico Fermi (1901-54)–are also included, as are details of their work on what was known as the Manhattan Project. A timeline section traces the beginning of atomic science and its eventual impact on the world, as well as the research and development of the bomb at the weapons laboratory on an isolated mesa at Los Alamos, New Mexico. A series of compelling photographs vividly conveys the destruction wrought by the first two bombs dropped by U.S. air crews on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945, bringing World War II to its conclusion.
