Item #829 A General Account of the Development of Methods of Using Atomic Energy for Military Purposes. Henry Smyth.

A General Account of the Development of Methods of Using Atomic Energy for Military Purposes

Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1945. First Edition. Wrappers. 1st edition, about 1,000 copies lithoprinted (7 1/2” X 10”), and issued Aug. 12th, 1945 (Hiroshima was Aug. 6th, Nagasaki Aug. 9th), and then reprinted in an altered form. The U. S. Military’s first official report on the atom bomb, an appallingly full, unnecessarily early, overly candid, and excessively detailed, account of the Manhattan Project (Foreword by General Leslie Groves). Paper covers gone, neatly rebacked (secured by a small wedge of marbled paper), else very good and fairly priced, but more important, it is complete, and most copies are not complete, as there was an impetuous rush to collate and assemble them. Ours is the correct 1st state (serial no. 12867), intact with 3 leaves in chapter 9 on different paper (rectos only), and the confidential page, VI–12, listing plutonium production details intended only for the military, their contractors, engineers, and scientists. This page was excised from the press copies and replaced with a blank page, or no page, but the Soviet Union got a copy that had it, and it led them to an insight that saved them time in figuring out that their reactor bred plutonium was unusable in the gun–type trigger they were designing. The printing was small and the book ephemeral but it is not rare, questioning the linguistic gyrations used to claim it is so by sellers not realizing they are making themselves appear as desperate as cannibals during a shortage of missionaries. Our copy is also an excellent association, one of 2 sent to the U. S. Navy and parked by them in their Naval Ordinance Laboratory Library (before deaccession as a duplicate) with Naval Library stamps. Ref: Printing and the Mind of Man number 422e, an unavoidable inclusion, even with PMM’s goofy, Eurocentric bias against American books. Very good. Item #829

Price: $1,000.00

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